La Voce Italiana According to Me

I am a female singer.  I am not a man and not a tenor.  I still sing Neapolitan songs.  Contrary to popular belief, being a tenor is not a requirement for singing Neapolitan songs.  Being able to sing is a requirement, preferably with a voice that is not painful to listeners.

There are Italians who can’t sing, but there are so many who can sing that most of the world thinks all Italians can sing.  We prefer to leave non-Italians to their illusions in this matter because this particular stereotype can be good promotional material for those of us who sing professionally or own restaurants.  There are many Italians who have done other things with their lives that have nothing to do with singing.  We are grateful to Guglielmo Marconi for inventing the radio, to Antonio Meucci for inventing a telephone about 5 years before Alexander Graham Bell got to it and to Leonardo da Vinci for inventing a bunch of things that don’t work but show what a genius he was.  I won’t mention Napoleon Bonaparte.  He started out Italian, but ended up French, which is okay with the Italians because they don’t want him, anyway.

Nobody cares if HE can sing or not.

Where was I?  Oh, yes.

I have a pretty large repertoire of Neapolitan songs and, like most singers, I love to show off.  Most of the time I do this in socially acceptable ways, such as in front of an audience that is expecting it.  On the other hand -- consider this a warning to anyone contemplating knowing me -- I might burst out into O Sole Mio or Torna a Surriento at any of the following times:

1.                   While waiting to be seated in an Italian restaurant.  I did this once.  Really.  Nobody asked me to sing.  It was not that kind of restaurant.  The people I was with wanted to kill me first, then hide.  I was singing well, too.  Some people just don’t appreciate my efforts to bring joy to their lives.

2.                   In my apartment.  This is safe, as long as I don’t have angry neighbors descending on me with torches and pitchforks.

3.                   On the street.  See No. 1, above.  If I am with people at the time, they will probably speed up and pretend they don’t know me.  In that case, I can stand there, sing and let people give me money.  I haven’t tried this yet, but there is a first time for everything.

Neapolitan songs are fun to sing.  They are Neapolitan because (1) they were composed by Neapolitans and (2) they are in Neapolitan dialect.  For those of us who studied standard Italian, this is a challenge.  Neapolitan dialect is to Italian what Jamaican Patois is to English.  If you have ever heard Jamaican Patois, you know what I mean.  Only a real Neapolitan can sing that dialect right.  The rest of us can only do the best we can with it.  We don’t care.  We sing it anyway because, as I said, those songs are great fun, even if you are embarrassing your companions in public.

I am not the first woman to sing Neapolitan songs, and I won’t be the last.  There’s no reason why male singers should have the best songs, just because most of them were written by men from a man’s viewpoint.  If anyone is looking for reality, I can’t help them, but if they are looking for someone who can sing the pants off Core N’Grato, complete with high notes and molto emozione, I’ll do it, even if there are two or three tenors present, hyperventilating because they think I have no business singing a first-person song about a man who loves a woman who can’t stand him and that one of THEM should be singing it because they are men.  To this I say, “Deal with it.”  If you want reality, watch the Kardashians on TV.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll travel to the nearest Little Italy and look for a restaurant.

Tenor Getting Attention

I'm on YouTube!

It has happened, to me, of all people!  I'm on YouTube!  I have arrived!

Actually, I put myself on YouTube, after I gave a reading and a book signing today.  I had my friend Joan, who was attending, hold my iPhone and take a video of me.  When I got home, I sent it to YouTube.

It's still a big deal.  At least I think so, and I'm the one in the video, so I get to say if it is a big deal or not.  Those are the rules.

Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdqTdLa_z6A

Holy Week Hilarity

These people understand.

I like to think that Jesus was looking down at us and laughing.

Holy Week in a Roman Catholic church is always nerve-racking for those involved in the services, including the music people.  In the best of circumstances it's easy to forget, from year to year, exactly how each service goes.  If you have a new pastor in charge, though, and that new pastor has ideas of his own, you can end up with a train wreck.

That's what happened to us on Holy Thursday evening.

As "Leader of Song" I was the soloist during the mass.  The choir was there, too, and, as usual during times like this, I was singing with them as well as handling my own music.

That's enough background.  Let's get to the story.

The whole mass went without a hitch, including the washing of the feet.  Several men from the congregation came up to the altar, sat on folding chairs, took off their shoes and socks and had water poured over their feet.  We could only hope they had all showered that day and that their socks were clean.  During this, I sang a solo.  I know that some people were able to listen to me in spite of the more interesting things happening up on the altar, because I actually got a compliment for my rendition.  The compliment was for how softly I sang it, which might not be such a compliment after all, but that's okay.

Anyway, it came time for the end of the mass, where the choir chants the Pange Lingua and everyone processes to the smaller church downstairs.  Our organist, who is very good at staying on top of things and always knows what we have to do, told us that we would sing ONE VERSE in the back of the church, then hightail it downstairs through the main entrance, take our places in one of the front pews down in the lower church, and sing the rest of it when everyone else came down.  Nobody had told him anything different.

This is just what we started to do.  The choir members, who are better at descending church stairs than I am, went first and got well ahead of me.

In the meantime, our pastor was walking toward us, hissing "We're going up the middle aisle!  We're going up the middle aisle!"  We either didn't hear him or didn't understand what he was getting at. I thought he was referring to the middle aisle downstairs.

I made it outside and down the front steps of the church, and was walking toward the lower church when our organist came out and told me that we had to get back upstairs because we had to process up the middle aisle of the MAIN CHURCH, not the downstairs church!

I shouted, "Come back!" and waved my hands around in an effort to get the choir to come back, but nobody heard me, especially the ones who had already gone inside.

I was still doing this when a guy from the church upstairs came down, sent me back up and said that he would get everyone else back in place.

At long last, we all got back up to where we were supposed to be and were led up the middle aisle, chanting the Latin verses, by the same gentleman who had fetched us.  He eventually led us through a SIDE DOOR to the downstairs church.  Because I have to take steps slowly, one at a time, the pastor accidentally bumped into me from behind.  My 1950s Catholic school upbringing makes me think of being bumped by a priest as a major catastrophe.  This time, though, I hardly gave it a thought.  I had more important things on my mind, such as singing the right verses and getting to my pew.

The last five minutes were fine.

And I got a story out of this!