Serendipity
Went into Dorchester today to meet Florence. I've probably mentioned her before, she's a pianist/harpist/composer. Her parents wanted her to focus upon the first, her heart is set on the last, and at present the second is the priority, for she is sporadically appearing as a harpist in a country house somewhere in Dorset. She intends to study composition at Dartington next year, having found university life in Cardiff (studying Music) very much not to her taste. In retrospect, I could easily have been in the same boat had I gone to university in 2005, as she did.

The meeting was planned in light of how noticeable my possible depressive episode had become, and her comapny proved - not for the first time - rather cheering. I'm attributing this to how similar she is in many ways to the company I keep at Southampton, and the fact that I have good reason to trust her.

While waiting for her in our arranged meeting place, I entered the nearby music shop and stumbled across a mildly - no, more than mildly - interesting book amongst the sheet music. It was a book aimed at vocalists in various forms of contemporary music - the writer settled on calling this 'rock and pop' in the introduction. And what a fascinating introduction it was, almost a diatribe against the limitations of classical tuition, and almost certainly the first time I've ever seen anyone suggest even implicitly that the vocal range covered in opera is relatively narrow...

On one page after the introduction was a diagram of various notes, intended to show the compass of male and female voices in such music. Combined, they covered virtually the entire span of a piano keyboard. The writer was at pains to say this was not a misprint. Certainly, my own two-plus-a-bit-Gemma-ignores octaves looked rather limited in comparison.

That mention for Gemma wasn't unintentional. This part of the introduction could have been written to make me criticise Gemma. To summarise: almost all singing teachers pre-1970 asserted that females shouldn't push their range down too much, and males shouldn't push their range up too much. Many teachers (my reading: including Gemma) continue to think the same. However, there are a number of vocalists in popular music who have defied conventions of 'this is what you will/won't be able to sing' with success, and while singing teachers at the time did (and continued to) claim the inevitable result would be vocal damage, they have been proven wrong. Ergo, given the right approach, these limitations are by no means concrete.

It could have been written as a call-to-metaphorical-arms against Gemma.

In all honesty, I'm leaning towards a central tendency not far from your view, which was summarised in a previous comment to 'neither dismiss it {Gemma's perspective} out of hand nor accept it as the unvarnished truth'. More precisely, I want to tentatively step along the path of expanding my range upwards, just to see if it's a viable path to follow, and then creep along it carefully if this is practical. Florence seemed to be on similar lines, considering range expansion worthwhile but not to be done quickly.

The book in question cost twenty quid, which is barely more than I paid for one hour with Gemma, and while I didn't buy it there and then I am still sorely tempted.

Ooh, I wonder if Hels is still about?

To further the serendipity, both ourselves and another table ordered the same drinks, delivered almost simultaneously, and the two orders became confused. This was even more remarkable considering this also constituted my first ever order of coffee (latte, perhaps unsurprisingly, and while not unpalatable I would avoid it in future); the other half of each order was cappuccino.