This is a preliminary note until I can make a full update:

Yes, I have a CD now! The album is a wonderful collaboration between myself and Marge Adler, a genius arranger and pianist in Cleveland. There’s a little more information about the CD here, but here’s the important part!

If you want to be notified as soon as you can buy a copy, sign up for notifications here.

My interview with the fascinating Gaabriel Becket, with whom I conversed about topics infinite and diverse after we serendipitously discovered one another in the NAFOW marketplace one lovely morning.

Gaab’s original post is here.

The Crown Plaza Hotel is the scene of this year’s North American Festival of Wales, where I’m singing at tomorrow’s concert banquet. It’s a lovely place to stay, and today I walked down to the pier. Lake Erie is stunning. People make casual jokes about Cleveland being Cleveland, grey or dreary or whatever it is — but maybe they haven’t visited the right parts. That’s what I’m thinking.

BBC Wales Interview Set by MeganElizabethMorris

I just added a third Roy Noble interview to my SoundCloud set; the first is with Alan Upshall, the second with myself in 2009, and the third was recorded live on the Maes shortly after I competed in 2010. (Marty and his kilt make a surprise appearance.) ;}

Enjoy!

I know that up until this point I enjoyed my retelling of the Wales adventures quite a bit. I love having the time to sink into a story and pull out all the little details. And I’m certain that, in part, my lapse has been about not having enough time.

But mostly, it’s about winning.

It’s not an accident that I started feeling stuck just before telling you about how I made it through preliminaries. They passed me and one other woman through to the mainstage competition. I felt relief and a number of other complex emotions — including, yes, a sense of pressure that I did my best to dissipate. What use is pressure? Pressure kills cognition.

I prepped for the mainstage like mad. I met again with the accompanist and he insisted that I be fully prepared to win the mainstage competition, along with the alternate piece that I would perform should that come to pass. I sang a lot. I video’d myself, and watched the clips. And then I sang some more.

The environment was relaxing at Park Place. The Maes was muddy. The entire experience was thrilling. And in the end, I had second; first place went to Angharad, whose performance was beautiful.

There are so many facts and opinions and emotions that go into this, I admit it: I don’t know how to sort through all of them. But I know that it was a truly relishable experience, and you can believe I relished it.

So what happens next, do you think? I haven’t kept you up-to-date, and I have much to report! I’ve been working extensively with Marge Adler, and we recently finished putting together a series of recordings. The album I’ve been trying to put together for the last six years? It’s on its way.

If you’re lucky enough to be headed to the North American Festival of Wales this week, you can even get your hands on a copy! Nice, right?

Thank you for listening, friends. :}

The church, as you can see, was beautiful.

We found West End Chapel with Kev’s help, and I don’t know how we would have done it otherwise — most of the people we asked weren’t entirely sure where it was. We did find it, though, and so did the Seattle contingent who arrived to cheer us on.

This is so difficult to describe — and you shouldn’t wonder that the break in posting happened before this one, because this part is particularly strange for me to try and put across to you. Inside my head, it’s very quiet. There’s no sense in thinking too much; it’s just a matter of keeping my body and my brain calm, soaking in my surroundings, waiting for my turn.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve noticed that my energy levels and alertness take a serious dive right before a performance. This happens much more dramatically before something important; it happens most impressively on opening night, for instance, and when there’s a lot riding on my success. It happened in 2006, and it was happening now, not long at all before Preliminaries.

Here’s what it feels like: My eyelids get very heavy. I feel like a blanket has drifted down and settled over me. I feel warm and slow, like almond butter. The world around me moves at whatever pace it likes, but I take my time. It’s an alternate reality — a somnolent, slumbering one. Barely awake, though I don’t know that anyone else can tell.

I didn’t really speculate on why this happened to me until fairly recently. It does make sense, though; if I’m expecting to expend a great deal of energy and adrenaline, maybe my body knows it — and gears up for the effort several hours in advance. It’s probably a very predictable reaction; I think it’s very possible that I could time it from the moment it began and find that it happened in about the same way over about the same period of time before any really significant performance. (And maybe I will, sooner or later!)

Once we had arrived and settled in and looked around, there was one very pertinent question: Sing down on the floor, near the piano… or up high in the pulpit?

You can see the piano down there on the left, and my biggest concern was that from the pulpit, it would be confusing to keep time with the piano. The judges would be sitting in the balcony above the congregation, so they’d be able to see me most clearly — and probably hear me most clearly — if I stood in the pulpit. I knew I’d be more comfortable down on the floor by the piano, but I could easily imagine it either way and I hadn’t a clue how to make the decision.

But I had 3G, in Capel West End, so I could ask the internet. ;}

I shot an email off to my parents, my cousin the professor of voice, my dearest Natalie, a few others. And sitting in the wooden pew next to Marty, armed with my trusty smartphone, I started Tweetin’.

And I got responses.

This part is so exciting for me, just as exciting as performing in the Preliminaries were in the first place! I haven’t done a whole lot of crowdsourcing experiments, but this was fascinating. I was in Wales, thousands of miles away from most of the people I interact with on a daily basis. But because of my connection to the web, because of email and Twitter and my habit of chatting with those same people on a daily basis, I wasn’t isolated from the feedback I’d come to expect and appreciate. All those people were right there with me. The connection was slow, it was tiny on my phone’s touch screen, but it was there. And those same people were more than willing to help — they Tweeted me back, sent me private messages, sent me emails.

So I had an overwhelming consensus (the pulpit) — but the exciting part was that we had all deliberated together in the first place. They helped me decide. YOU helped me decide.

I have no idea if I’ve successfully put across how cool that is. How wonderful that the Preliminaries happened in the late afternoon, which was lunchtime back home. How wonderful that I have cultivated friendships with so many sharp and caring people. How wonderful that we have the internet at all — and that I had a decent signal in Blaenau Gwent! ;}

Much of the rest is a blur. I sat very quietly while the competitors sang. One by one they stood, walked to the front, and made their decision — floor or pulpit. Gareth played for them all. I was near the end, and there were at least six or seven competitors before me; one or two didn’t show up, and so instead of nine we had seven — maybe eight. Katherine Nash sang in the 2009 National and won first prize on the main stage; she was sitting in the pew in front of me, and she sang right before I did. Many of them sang “gih-dah” instead of “guh-dah”, but I was determined not to waver. I would sing both pieces as I’d rehearsed them, based on Joan’s pronunciation, and I wouldn’t change my mind at the last minute. That was an unwinnable mind game that I didn’t want to participate in.

It was hard not to listen when someone else was singing, even though I knew that listening was going to get the gears turning in my head. I wanted my gears to relax. They could turn later — they could chug all they wanted after all of this was over. Right now, I didn’t want to think. Easy in concept, but not in practice. I did my best to stem the stream of questions and judgments running through my head. I focused on the wooden pew in front of me. The hymnal. The floorboards. The toes of my shoes. The clean red edge of my iPhone case. And I occasionally, silently, checked Twitter — because having those friends hanging on, watching and waiting, was like having them sitting behind me with a hand on my shoulder. Solidarity, people.

Here’s what I think happened next.

The very kind woman in charge of organization and time said something in Welsh, and then my name. I stood up and went to the front. I started each piece with Gareth to be certain of time, and reminded him of a particular passage where I’d asked him to take a certain tempo. I took my time. I walked up the steps. I stood in the pulpit and surveyed my territory — is the chair too close? No nudging required. The front of the pulpit looked comfortable and welcoming; it was nice to have it right there, so that I could lean forward as much as I wanted. The judges were right in front of me, maybe 30 feet away. There were windows all around. I picked out the spots to focus on.

I waited until the judges were ready, and I nodded to Gareth, and we sang.

I remember that it was exciting and I remember that it felt good. I waited between pieces for them to finish writing and give me a nod; then we sang Carmen. I remember setting my hands on the edge of the pulpit and leaning forward, using it as a prop, emoting and flirting and pressing myself through the shape of the music. I remember that there were two adjudicators and that I couldn’t see their faces well, and I remember that it didn’t matter. I zoomed. Applause, smiles from the people seated in the pews. And then it was over.

I walked down the stairs, and back to my seat. You couldn’t have seen my knees trembling, but they were — just a little.

While you’re waiting on the rest of the story… you might want to check out the booklet we put together about our trip to Wales. It gives away some of the details and should serve to properly whet your appetite! (Especially the parts about the food. Yum yum!)

Marty and I had some time to kill before the Cymru A’r Byd reception, so we settled into a nice restaurant tent, cafeteria style, and he went off to find some food. For a few minutes, I talked myself through Min y Mor as promised to Gareth, wondering if I would be able to memorize it well enough in the little time I had without messing with my other memorization. Ultimately I let it go, because it didn’t feel right to work on it too much then — I was a bit tired, a bit hungry, and I needed to do something else.

A lovely elderly couple asked (in Welsh, then in English) if the seats next to us were free, and we amiably bade them to sit down. I was by then experimenting with tethering my smartphone’s 3G connection to the tablet, and the results were mixed. We ended up in conversation — in English! — with Gerald and his wife about all manner of things; the Eisteddfod, Welsh heritage, where various groups of settlers had put down roots after going to the States. We talked about the Welsh language quite a bit and, in fact, they praised our diction. Not just mine — Marty’s, too! It was very pleasant, and we left there feeling thrilled with the friendly mojo of all the Welsh (and well-fed, too).

Indeed, I can’t remember an instance where a friendly smile was disregarded; we felt like we could start a conversation with any stranger in Ebbw Vale and thereabouts, and end up with wonderful new friends. In Wales, well… of course.

At the Cymru A’r Byd booth we found Alan Upshall, Bryan Jones and company, standing and talking, waiting for everyone to arrive. The reception, we found out, would be elsewhere — but the plan was to meet at the booth and then trek, all together, to that location. Marty and I smiled and met people and tried to memorize names, since most (including ourselves) were wearing handy-dandy name tags for reference (and probably wouldn’t be later that week).

In the end, our trek ended right back where Marty and I had begun: At the restaurant near the middle of the grounds, to one side of the tent where an area was closed off. Serendipity! I tried not to think too much about the walk we might have saved and the way my shoes were pinching, because we were surrounded by smiling faces and amicable company. Who cared if we had walked awhile? This was the last stop of the day, and it was going to be fantastic.

In fact, it was fantastic. We sat with Alan Upshall, the Baron Roberts of Llandudno and several others who happily joined in conversation. There was a bright, precise young woman playing the harp. Welsh cakes and tea were served at one end of the reception space. Marty and most of the others queue’d up to bring some back to the table, while I waited — no wheat or caffeine for me, I’m afraid, two days before competing! But Marty told me later that while he was in the queue, he had seized on the opportunity to use his hard-practiced Welsh phrase.

For Lord Roberts had walked up to him, clapped him on the shoulder, and began a perfectly normal conversation with him (in Welsh). Marty waited for him to finish the sentence, and then — delighted, I’m sure, to have the chance to give it a shot! — responded with: “Mae’n ddrwg gen i — dwy ddim yn deall.” I’m sorry — I don’t understand.

Lord Roberts responded, Ah! and launched into what must have been a sort of explanation… in Welsh!

This, we decided later, was the real flaw in our plan. We should have taught ourselves to say, “I’m sorry — I don’t speak Welsh.” Uh… right.

Live and learn.

After a moment, Marty explained (in English this time) that he actually didn’t understand Welsh. Oops, ha ha. Lord Roberts paused, perplexed: But just a moment ago, you were saying something in Welsh…? And Marty repeated the phrase. Lord Roberts has a big, friendly laugh and a brilliant sense of humor. They talked for little while after that — in English! — about what Marty did, why he was here (tagging along with me!), and so on. When Marty told me later, the story cracked me right up.

That afternoon there was much Welsh discussion, and many Welsh announcements. I kept my ears open and my brain focused to catch words I knew, which weren’t many. Cymru A’r Byd, Wales International, is an organization dedicated to connecting people of Welsh descent and friends of Wales throughout the world — so a few people spoke in English as well, and it was clear that other languages would also have been welcomed. Lord Roberts is its president, and although I’d heard about the organization fleetingly at other events in the States, this was my first opportunity to truly understand what they were up to. I daresay, it was lovely.

As we got ready to leave and many people were filtering out of the tent, I stopped to meet the harpist. I’d had this mad urge, ever since seeing a booth on the Maes filled with huge, beautiful harps for sale, to ask a harpist to play Dafydd y Gareg Wen with me — off the cuff, randomly, to see what might happen. This harpist’s name was Harriet if I’m remembering it right, and she grinned at me when I asked. “Sure, if you can sing it in this key!” she answered, setting fingertips to strings.

And I did.

There’s nothing like meeting another musician for the first time and making music together. It’s something Gareth had mentioned briefly when we rehearsed earlier that day, enchantedly, delightedly. Harriet’s grin and my own high-flying glee said that this was the same, regardless of how low the key was for me. Who the hell cares about the damn key? Ten or so reception-goers stayed to listen to us, and we laughed and talked and I thanked her for humoring me. Bryan Jones — I believe! — snapped the above picture for an article that sounded like it was headed for the Ninnau, or another Welsh publication. Then Marty and I talked to Alan for a few minutes, determined that we would see him the next day at the preliminary tests… and we headed out.

After all, I had Min y Mor to memorize.

The rest of that evening is a very tired blur. I was energized by my rehearsal with Gareth, but exhausted by all the walking we’d done on the Maes (in pinchy shoes, no less). It had been windy and damp, and walking on rocks is hard! Tuckered out, we decided to eat at the Vine Tree before I changed my mind and went to bed instead. And at the Vine Tree, waiting for our food, I recited Min y Mor.

Again and again and again, a tumble in my brain.

Gwelais long ar y glas li… Yn y gwyll yn ym golli… Draw yr hwyliodd drwy’r heli, a Rhywun hoff arni hi. Over and over and over, until the next table looked at me kind of funny out of the corners of their eyes. I didn’t have a word-by-word translation, but it’s love poetry — it’s beautiful. I turned it into rote mathematics for the purpose of memorization so that later it could truly be poetry. 2×1=1. 2×2=4. 2×3=6. 2×4=8…

The food was delicious, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.

I thought, I might be able to do this thing. And the part of me that was still afraid ceded some valuable territory to the part of me that had real respect for what I was attempting… and real hope for my likelihood of succeeding. Marty looked proud, I think.

We finished our food. The lamb at the Vine Tree was incomparably tasty. Enough to (finally) turn off my brain, because I would need the rest. Tomorrow was preliminaries.

We went home, and went to bed.

Ah, now we begin to catch up with ourselves! Once again it’s Wednesday, August 4th… and I have a rehearsal to get to.

We found Gareth as planned at the main entrance — aaaaaall the way at the other end of the Maes. Wrapped up in my tartan, we found him and exchanged warm and delighted pleasantries before setting off for rehearsal space. He was dignified, purposeful, very friendly and clearly well-experienced with the Eisteddfod. When we found the rehearsal space in question, I was entertained — there were two large structures sitting outside behind the Eisteddfod Office, and they looked a hell of a lot like shipping containers. Each contained an upright piano, a table or two, and chairs. Maybe they were more like the little offices that many construction companies have outside, simple and boxy and easily hitched to some vehicle and moved to the next spot. But they were essentially shipping containers, as far as I was concerned — with one or two little windows in each.

So, you know. Rehearsal containers. To contain rehearsals. ;}

Inside, echoes! Marty parked himself in one corner and Gareth and I proceeded to sing through the first song — the Mansel Thomas.

If you haven’t heard my rehearsal rendition of the Mansel Thomas yet, well, it’s really something. It’s a complex song, and it’s difficult to get right the first hundred times. At my very last rehearsal with M___, it sounded like this:

20100723 Last Pianist Reh Set (mistake, kept moving!) by MeganElizabethMorris

With Gareth’s accompaniment that first run, it was fast — but it went well.

“Well done, you,” he said, a phrase that became dear to me. I would thereafter repeat those words to myself, again and again, as a marker of pride and feeling of accomplishment. So often, in fact, that Marty started doing it too. “So,” Gareth paused curiously, thoughtfully… “Are you a singer?”

“Yep!” I chirruped. “I sing!” I was feeling it, too — like I could do this thing, like I was this thing. And then, of course, I realized what he meant:

“As a profession?”

“Well, not exactly…” So I explained to him a situation he has no doubt heard dozens of times, and he obviously understood. Ran out of money, studying intermittently, so on and so forth… seeking to lift up this project and secure it an ongoing, important part of my life and work, Ideaschema’s permanent place as my (I hate saying this) “day job”… all the bits and pieces, and that someday soon music would be a wonderfully normal part of my “day job”, too. I described to him how Joan had been assisting my Welsh by sending me diction recordings. He nodded sagely, and seemed — to my delight — quietly impressed.

“So I imagine it’s coming off okay, huh?” I ventured, because he hadn’t said anything negative about my diction — and I’d heard his Welsh patter several times that day already, as we met other performers coming and going. He spoke Welsh, and he had likely heard many singers already; he ought to know.

“It’s brilliant,” he said, and sounded like he meant it.

My heart leapt three quarters of an inch, and stayed there.

We sang the Carmen. Fiddled with tempos. I finished the end, that hopping high note, and breathed deep. It was going fairly well, I thought.

“Have you prepared for the Blue Ribbon?” he asked slowly, his tone full of gravity and purpose.

I explained that, no… I hadn’t really. I had only just realized — that day, even, talking to Jon — that it wasn’t entirely acceptable to perform one of the original two competition pieces for the David Ellis competition. The David Ellis competition awards the Rhuban Glas — the Blue Ribbon, or the Blue Riband — and it was the David Ellis in which I would (theoretically) compete if I won the mezzo-soprano mainstage competition.

Could this information have been in the Welsh competition rules? Could it have been somewhere else that I hadn’t seen? Was it just common knowledge, among Eisteddfod-goers? I didn’t know. For sure, it may well have been in that second mailing that I hadn’t known I should have received until I got to the Maes that first day. Freaking Atlantic Ocean.

The solid, knowledgeable look on Gareth’s face (and that little sliver of shocked hope I had at this point accumulated in the back of my throat) made me drag out the tablet and bring up Min y Mor, which I hadn’t looked at in… yes… I’m not kidding… a year. Not a note of it. Not since the North American Festival of Wales in Pittsburgh.

We sang through. I was maybe half memorized… ish. I was torn between the stress of adding another song and the sheer, impossible consideration that I could… theoretically… make it to the David Ellis. And I barely wanted to think about it, much less add more to my plate to prepare for it.

But I couldn’t ignore that look on his face. “You have got to be prepared to win,” he said.

And deep down, of course, I knew he was absolutely right. Deep down, I agreed with him. All it had taken was the opinion of someone who a) knew what he was talking about, and b)… seemed to think I had a seriously decent chance.

I had to at least try.

We sang through the other two pieces again. He played quickly — but there was so much personality in his accompaniment. To my ears it was patter, like his Welsh. Well-versed, familiar. Of course, he was accompanying 8 people, all singing the same 2 out of 3 pieces. He was incredibly good. The Mansel Thomas had become very pleasant to my ears — now that I knew what it was supposed to sound like after many rehearsals with M___, now that I knew it and could sing it. The last note of the Carmen rang out, right on key, right in rhythm.

I promised that I would look at Min y Mor and hoped to high heaven I had enough time to make it good before the David Ellis, should-I-be-so-lucky… but better, I could look at it tonight and tomorrow, and then just leave it alone until after the mezzo-soprano competition. That would be best, and I wouldn’t risk sabotaging my other pieces; I’d already rehearsed them near-to-death, anyway.

When we departed, I thanked him profusely, and he thanked me for coming over for the Eisteddfod — and, he added, for learning the pieces. “It’s no easy task,” he said.

Outside the rehearsal container, Marty and I settled our numerous carry-things about our shoulders, and (in a tiny corner of my brain, vibrating with hope and terror) we went on our way.

I was going to call this particular series of posts “Reception, Rehearsal, and the First Tiny Stirrings of An Unnameless and Overwhelming Desire to Make Something Wonderful Happen”.

Then I decided that would be far too long, and would be something of a cop-out in terms of taking responsibility for the real content of the posts. Because if I can’t describe this in an entire blog entry (or three), I have no business trying to cram that kind of a Twitteresque recap into my titles. And you’d end up disappointed anyway, because my whole description would be in the teaser with no substance left for the actual post. Like American Pie. The commercials gave away all the funny bits. Remember that? Man, that pissed me off.

So I won’t do that. Or, I’ll try not to do that and do a lot of laughing about how I nonetheless gave everything away before I’d barely begun. (It would help if I’d had more sleep!)

Breathe, Megan.

Wednesday.

It’s Wednesday the 4th, and this means that for all intents and purposes it’s Go Time. My first (and essentially only) rehearsal with my accompanist, the reception for Cymru A’r Byd, and a trip to the Maes required to actually bear fruit rather than simply be a relaxing reconnaissance and scouting-out. I woke at 8. I washed myself. The shower in our suite at Park Place was glorious, have I mentioned it? It’s really just a pane of glass on one side of the bathtub. It was fascinating and unfamiliar at first, but I came to adore it because it felt like my shower space was actually as big as the whole bathroom (which of course it technically wasn’t).

At any rate…

Wednesday was the day I started having huge breakfasts again. Mine had tapered down over the past handful of days, because I just wasn’t used to eating a whole lot for breakfast. An egg, a rasher of bacon, some fruit and some tea. Today, I had a full traditional breakfast again — huge and wonderful. I knew I’d need the extra fuel, because today was going to be the first of my major Eisteddfod days and I wanted to have plenty of energy to meet it head-on.

We had a lovely time talking with Jon and Caryl and Elgan and his parents. They explained a lot about the Eisteddfod that I hadn’t previously understood, mostly in the vein of a local perspective and the feeling of the event to someone to whom it is a far more familiar experience than it is for me. Marty and I didn’t linger long, though, because we were planned to meet Gareth at 12:30 and we didn’t want to run late.

It was rainy and foggy as Kev drove us over the moors toward Ebbw Vale.

Look at those hills.

When we originally arrived at the Birmingham International Airport, we collected our luggage and went straight to the nearest currency exchange booth. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew that was probably the best place to ask questions and get some local cash in case we needed it. The woman there was a darling, and although she signed me up for something I am not sure was a good idea (a sort of debit card that worked locally and could — theoretically — be refilled via internet for a conversion fee) she was otherwise quite helpful. I wasn’t sure if it was a sales technique or not when she told me that our American plastic might not work everywhere in the UK. But when we arrived at the Maes this Wednesday morning, we had our first major run-in with Swipe Fatigue.

Yes, Swipe Fatigue. Wherein the swipe doesn’t work, and I become fatigued. (And then write about it on the internet.)

It seems that in the UK, most establishments read plastic cards by way of a certain chip. This lets them (somehow) scan the chip, or just insert one end of the card into a little portable processing device that some clerks carry around, rather than a device that stays on the register where customers check out. We saw a variety of different systems while we were there but one thing trended true: The slightly uncertain or confused look we encountered easily 70% of the time when we mentioned that our cards were swipe, not chip.

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of places had no problem with this — they knew how to swipe the card and they knew how to get it to go through. Most of them hadn’t had to swipe something in ages (if ever) and weren’t entirely sure they knew how, but when they tried what they knew it worked fine and we went along our way. In this case, however, the girls selling tickets at the entrance had no clue what to do to let us pay for our tickets. I don’t blame them, but it was pretty weird after having so easily paid for tickets at the same entrance a few days earlier. Eventually (after a lot of trial and error and phone calls to other Eisteddfod workers) we got it figured out. It was ultimately no problem at all, and we met Gareth just about on time. (Well, pretty close.) But it stuck in my head, this random swipeless moment in our trip, and made me wonder if we can upgrade our cards in some way. I know some credit cards are using chips… but what about regular bank cards?

Something to ask the credit union when we switch banks, I think.

Through the entrance and onto the field, we laughed — because if we’d had Kev drop us at the north entrance, we’d already be there by now. Well, it was okay. It wasn’t raining heavily, though it was a bit windy. I wrapped my tartan around me, and we set off to find a pianist!