Lynn at the ancient Yew Tree
Well, I’ve tried four times to upload an image here and every time I try to do this I lose my text and have to start all over again! surely someone else is having problems with this software! Hey! I seem to have done it eventually. You have to write something and save it before you can add an image, it seems…..???
So, Lynn and I got to the Yew Tree and it was a lovely day and quiet quiet when we arrived. Lynn filmed inside the tree, while I went off to the rear of the churchyard and recorded a spoken text I’d written especially. I went to the rear of the little church which is really lovely and would be amazingly peaceful without the sounds of overhead planes, combine harvesters in nearby fields, traffic noise etc. However we set to work and hopefully have got some serviceable video and sound to do something with. I edited the sound files I had this morning.
At the Yew Tree, I warmed up my voice properly and tried to sing as best I could inside the tree.
Inside the Yew Tree looking upwards
However my voice felt weak and hoarse, and I was worried that I’d come all this way and practiced carefully only to deliver something sub-standard when it came to the crunch. I wondered why my voice felt so weak and creaky….I think, on reflection, that my voice is pretty quiet anyway, and I had spent an hour or so talking to Lynn on the train discussing how the editing of the Grotto piece we did before was going, and various issues Lynn wasn’t quite happy with about the editing of that piece, and we also discussed what we were going to try and do at the tree to avoid the problems we’d had during editing the Grotto material. eg. moving camera and sound that sounds static….As it turned out, we may have the same problems again….but we will discuss all this more on Friday at our next meeting. Of course you don’t know exactly what you’ve got till you go home and have a look and start to edit.
I decided at our next site visit, I wouldn’t talk very much before I did my singing at our chosen location. Lots of people don’t realise this, but everywhere we go, almost, there is sound or noise, depending on whether you welcome it or not! talking on the train means speaking over the noise of the train, announcements, other people’s conversations etc, and I find this quite tiring for my voice. Dear knows how I ever managed to be a lecturer for 35 years…or perhaps that’s why my voice weak and quiet now, as well as getting older.
Inside the tree I could also hear the combine harvester now and again! so after a few attempts at singing and recording in the tree, I went back to the rear of the churchyard and recorded my Yew Tree song there. By this time my voice really was tired, but given that the song is sung by a person who is dead, perhaps it will sound appropriate.
The Lynn suggested filming the back of my head and hair inside the tree in close-up, the patterns in the ancient wood of the tree do indeed look like tresses, and the variegated colours of my hair blended in as if in camouflage. This was a good idea, as the whole project about the Yew Tree was about how the person and the tree become linked together, and grow together – the ancient tree growing its roots through the bodies in the ground nearby. When the project is more worked on, I’ll put a sound extract in here. While I was facing the inside of the tree, I noticed initials carved inside…lovers perhaps?? the initials suggest a sense of mystery in a way that a full name would not. what’s the story behind the letters? could it be what I was referring to in my song?
initials carved inside the tree
On the way home we discussed more about what we were doing together and what might, or might not, come out of it. We felt that it would be nice to have some finished work, however short, but also the point was to develop and learn. that’s why I was rather disappointed at my singing in the tree, as I thought I’d managed to sort that. it really is different singing outside though, there’s little resonance, and the voice is “lost”, well mine is, but I thought the hollow tree interior would help. But I think not talking on a train before the performance might help next time! It will take us a while to sort out what we’ve got, but I must say I am happy with the site I chose, the wonderful presence of the tree, and the text and song I wrote, I just have to see how we can put it all together. After that, I’ll think about the next site, which I visited for the first time a week or so ago, and that is Greenham Common. This promises to be a bigger, more complex undertaking requiring plenty of research and more site visits.
