la chanson d'Olympia!

Today I worked on
The Doll Song
(This is still my favorite version/rendition of this song despite the fact that she seems to be a crazy person rather than a doll. ♥ Natalie is my favorite, and if I could trade places with anyone in the entire world it would probably be her.)

Notes from today's lesson:
Okay, "Les oiseaux dans la charmille" is basically my pie-in-the-sky, someday-I'd-like-to-attempt-this-and-not-sound-totally-foolish song, despite the fact that I wouldn't consider myself much of a coloratura (ahahahaha why would a non-coloratura even look at this D:). But today I forgot my soprano aria songbook and only had my coloratura aria book. (why do I even have a coloratura aria book) And rather than go for "Poor Wand'ring One" MP decided I ought to go big or go home.

She was very sharp with me every time I made a horrible face at my horrible slip-ups. Normally I can get her to laugh at me because I'm clearly being very self-deprecating when I do it (that is basically the entire point of it; telegraphing "I don't really sing like that!" by way of facial expression). But not today! Today it was just "stop that. just sing it right and you won't need to make faces."

My biggest issue right now is dragging notes down, pitch-wise, especially if they are descending notes. I see "down!" on the page, my brain thinks "down!" and instead of aiming for the middle or coming down on top of a note I drag it down and it gets wobbly.

Contributing to this is my placement, which I need to unlearn. Unfortunately up until I started studying with MP I was self-'taught' (a.k.a. I spent a lot of time singing along to arias and Broadway cast recordings) and therefore do a lot of back-of-throat-singing for high-but-not-too-high notes (ie in my passagio; a.k.a. exactly where "Verdrai Carino" sits in my voice, hence why I hate singing it so much). She says I have good natural placement of high to very high notes, I just for some reason can't place the rest of the notes there. This is a mental thing, I imagine (as so much of singing is). There's no reason those notes can't be placed where they ought to be, I just don't do it! And I can feel it, it feels wrong when I do it that way.