Mostly from the weekend
Coffee with EF on Friday morning. She's been mentioned once, she's a soprano, with a voice rather more powerful than nineteen-year-old classical soprani are meant to possess. This has earned her more plaudits than perhaps she currently deserves - I say this knowing that her voice is very clearly a work in progress. What isn't in question is that she is an extremely friendly and articulate person, and our intellectual conversation flew by.

We briefly talked politics - she expressed at least some disinterest, I suggested this was because of the lack of ideological differences between the parties and I'm not completely sure she disagreed - but the vast majority of the conversation, inevitably enough, was about singing. Weirdly, I led much of even this conversation, but that was mostly because I tended to have lots of ideas I wanted to articulate, and EF sounded interested to hear them, even if she questioned some.

Here's one I threw out to her that drew the most interesting thoughts. Classical singers, tied to a given vocal classification (referred to as a fach, mostly because the Germans pretty much invented the idea of classifying voices in this way), will... well maybe not be tied completely to it, but it acts as essentially a job description, a set of required skills. In this analogy, to change one's fach is almost tantamount to a change of career path; there'll be transferable skills but there will be other new requirements at the expense of some old ones. Inevitably, one will usually focus upon fulfilling the requirements of this 'job' to the best of one's ability, and change if it appears that is preferable.

By contrast, I argued, those in the popular domain - certainly singer-songwriters such as myself - are in a different position. Here, how their voice is classified is less relevant, and in the case of singer-songwriters totally irrelevant. Instead, the focus is upon being less constrained - allowing their voice to do more, so they have more freedom in choosing and/or writing songs. Certainly, there isn't such a point of diminishing returns as the classical singer might face.

EF isn't so sure about this, but I think I may have expressed it a bit wrongly at the time to her. Another friend of mine reckons that classical singers tend to have - and need - wider ranges than those in other styles, and that the exceptions use technique largely from classical singing - a view diametrically opposed to that of the author of this book. (Incidentally, that too was a meeting over coffee; I tried iced latte, EF thought this was a good idea, I didn't like it, and that is the end of the Coffee Experiment. Still, the caramel shortbread was good, although overpriced.)

She had no arguments, though, about the tendency for musical theatre to lack roles for soprano - in fact when thinking of examples we both got stuck after Christine, and I made an analogy between the general rightward skew of general political discourse on the Political Compass (and the resultant mischaracterisation of centrism as 'left-wing') with the general leftward skew of female musical theatre roles on the Vocal Compass (and the resultant mischaracterisation of roles in a mezzo range being treated as soprano roles - I'm thinking Glinda here in particular, and suspect there to be plenty of other good examples). EF didn't get the Political Compass when I explained it to her, but despite this she understood the Vocal Compass immediately, and from there I think she understood the Political Compass a bit too. Interesting hypothesis #2: a concept in one field is likely to be best explained by means of an analogy with another with which one is more familiar.

I am composing a piece for EF, with a possible view to it being performed with the choir I'm in (which EF has considered joining, but is nervous as to whether it suits her or whether she can devote the time and energy to it given that she has ME). Note-to-self, as I couldn't get to write it down: EF's range is A3-E6, and the strongest part of said range is A4-F5.

A 30-year-old nursing postgrad appeared to be a potential flatmate after some very promising developments over that afternoon. I had already emailed her for an enquiry after she appeared on a list of students seeking accommodation, which I had also joined (though I appear on the undergraduate list, and that's going to ensure some irrelevant emails asking me to join Quirks-unfriendly houses for the next week or more...), and ended up phoning her later on after receiving another email from her (not actually a direct reply to mine, but she was composing one as I phoned her, I gather).

Good news! As I slightly suspected (the list provides a name, date of birth and subject; a mature student in nursing with an English-language name instantly got my radar twitching, if only on the grounds that she may actually know something about people on the autistic spectrum) she does accept the possibility that actually, I can be an undergraduate with the needs and attitude of a postgraduate. Furthermore, she too had been looking at studio flats before baulking at the cost. The generic email she sent out was to look for people to join her on a search for a party of between two and four (or at least, for a house with that many bedrooms, which I presume to be nearly equivalent). This could work out very well but it's by no means certain. May have to stay over summer too, but saying not to do so was part financial decision and part fear of family warfare. Mostly, more than I'd care to admit, the latter. And if I can find a part-time job that I can actually do - which in practice means some kind of office job, even data entry or something similarly tedious. You'd think they'd have such jobs available in a city of over 200,000 people, wouldn't you? (Indeed, I know as much, a friend of mine studying engineering gained just such a job last summer if memory serves.)

She was planning to live near the newly-trendy Bedford-platz area just north of the city centre, a slight problem as a) this is a noisy area due to several nightclubs, b) the other side of the city centre you run smack into an area that is increasingly dominated by Solent Poly students, not what I want at all (and, I suspect, not what she wants either). Further on from *there* you also run into the Archers-road halls, although isolated from all of this at the western end of said road is The Dell, now a development of flats sufficiently upmarket to be safe from the above-mentioned sensory threats but still mostly cheap enough that a two-bed flat there is rather cheaper than two studio flats. And then further along is Marshall Square, on the site of what used to be Hampshire County Cricket Ground; that development is much the same as the one at The Dell.

Anyway, we met at the Southampton Kite Festival on Sunday, a good four miles away from here. Turned out she's currently living in the flat below me, having moved in just a short time ago. Oops! We seem to meet each other's standards as housemates, but she'd rather move in with more people, and I'm not prepared for that. Oh well.

To bring it back to singing, I've acquired the Christina Aguilera album Stripped from a charity shop. There are some very good songs on this album, but they're lost in a mess of melismas. I counted over 30 just in The Voice Within, and that's a song I thoroughly intend to cover in a much simpler vocal style. Or, given what was done to another song on this album, I could say I'm giving it the Alex Parks treatment. Our reader will approve heartily.