No post yesterday - I was having too much fun on my vocal weekend away with Voxcetera, up near Milton Keynes. When we took a break from socialising at about midnight and went out for a walk, it was a change to be able to see the stars - it's easy to forget how much light pollution there is in London.
But I'm sort of back in the real word now - home to do ironing, accounts etc, before being back to work tomorrow. Oh well.
I have always found music a very strong emotional trigger. There are still tracks or albums that I associate with a specific period of my life, and I can't listen to that music without bring back all those feelings, good or bad. Picking one at random - I listened to the album "April Moon " by Sam Brown (now singer with Jool's Holland's big band) a lot while revising for my finals - and if I put it on now I know I would be back in that room.
And creating music is even more emotional. So having spent time over three days with some beautiful music (Esenvalds' "Long Road" here being an example - this version is a little recorder-heavy for my taste but the piece still stands listening), I've certainly been emotionally fragile today. How do I know? Because I started crying whilst doing the ironing. I was listening to something slightly soppy (not saying specifically - a bit too Country to own up to) and out came the tears.
Is this a normal thing? I've always done it - when I've been emotional or tired so I see it as perfectly ordinary. But you know how blokes are - we don't really discuss emotions. So do others of you do this? Or are you all now whistling and edging slowly away from me?
I'm not getting into the clichéd "men should be more in touch with their feelings rubbish". Most men I know would get emotional about the big things in life - births deaths and marriages etc. (And look how emotional some blokes at a London football match got last week when a player chose to remind them of the score.) I'm specifically talking about irrelevant stuff. When was the last time a film, or a picture, or a sunset, moved any of you to tears?
Following a weekend within earshot of your singing, there truly wasn't a dry eye in the choir.
ReplyDeleteTruthfully, I well up quite frequently, though rarely progress to the full sobbing stage. I've found that as life events have knocked a few corners off me, so my emotional fuse has got progressively shorter. Silly things that are more than likely to set me off include: Award ceremonies, family reunions on TV, Comic Relief / Children in Need videos, singing hymns in my parents' church, misspelled text messages from my mother, any movie with a happy ending no matter how naff, the last post, Away in a Manger. And 'Super Saturday' at London 2012 left me pretty much desiccated.