Conservatory Bound

Une isole sapin

2009-09-07T17:37:00.002-05:00

I adore this song. Curse that I'm not a mezzo.

Janet Baker

Anne Sophie von Otter

Un sapin isolé se dresse sur une montagne
Aride du Nord. Il sommeille.
La glace et la neige l'environne
D'un manteau blanc.

Il rêve d'un palmier qui là-bas
Dans l'Orient lointain se désole,
Solitaire et taciturne,
Sur la pente de son rocher brûlant.

courtesy of the Lied and Art Song Texts Page

I just remembered...

2009-09-06T13:17:00.005-05:00

When I was a kid, my parents somehow got ahold of certain audio tapes made by a Canadian company Classical Kids.

They were basically stories about classical composers as told through imagined interactions with children. In one, a girl is reluctantly practicing the piano (a gigue by Bach), and just as she is frustrated and wants to go outside to play, who stops by but (the spirit of) dear old JS himself. In another, we hear the narration of a little boy whose mother is the landlord for Mr. Beeethoven who moves in upstairs. You get the idea.

We did a lot of driving around on weekends as I was growing up, and it was always engaging to hear these stories. My sister and I are really big on nostalgic repetition -- I guess we kept that childhood habit of wanting a favorite bedtime story read to us nightly.

For some reason, I was just thinking about them -- (well, I know the reason -- I was reading Rosand's Opera in Seventeenth Century Venice, which reminded me of one of the favorite tapes: Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery).

Also, so far as I know, this is the earliest instance in which I've been convinced that I can see the (handsome) "face" of a voice. The voice-acting on this is pretty rad. Why does Canada always get nice things?

(the CBC is rad as hell)

Re-evaluation time

2009-08-20T08:59:00.004-05:00

You know the drill. Sometimes you dismiss an artist/singer as "not your cup of tea" for many years.

Curiously, you reinvestigate and suddenly, BAM, you totally get what they're trying to do. And you can't remember why exactly you didn't like so-and-so, even when you go back to what you had previously experienced when making your first evaluation.

That's happened big-time for me with Eleanor Steber and to a lesser extent Hildegard Behrens.

As you may know, Hildegard Behrens recently passed away in Japan. Obits and retrospectives and starting to sprout, and in the manner of hagiography, more people are speaking of her refulgent and glorious voice than I think were willing to do so while she was still alive (but not actively performing).

The best description I've read of her as an artist is "a true artist adroitly handling an indifferent voice" (JJ of parterre [I believe] when comparing Behrens to a singer who indifferently handled a marvelous voice). The minor revelation came when Nick Scholl posted clips of Behrens in a 1994 outing of Elektra at the Met.

For considerable stretches of the singing, there is a new body to the sound that I hadn't associated with her voice (certainly not present in the singing of the Farberin for Solti) which I always had thought rather washed out pastel in tone color. Slightly whiny and weak-sounding, even though the voice by all accounts had impressive thrust and cut.

These Elektra clips show a more balanced voice -- an upper register that, for the most part, feels anchored in one place rather than the unstable, moorless sound I first associated with her.

Here is an impressive Isolde from Behrens (comparatively early in '81 with Bernstein conducting). The connection is in place. It's certainly more consistent than even in the Elektra.

Weh, ganz allein!

This is in marked contrast with her Kaiserin (it's more dramatic in comparison to her Farberin, but that isn't on the interwebbbbssss)

(Also, why does lesbian sex come up when I do a google video search for "hildegard behrens mozart"?)

Speaking of this very "aria" -- this is the very aria that caused me to re-evaluate Eleanor Steber. I had listened early on to a couple clips -- I think the Ballatella from Pagliacci, a Spectre de la rose (which I thought very bruising after Crespin's, which might be an unfair comparison, since it irrevocably redefined modern conceptions of the piece away from what Maggie Teyte held), but it certainly wasn't this stunning Come scoglio (English) (bonus picture in the last couple minutes of young Steber looking like Renee Fleming).

Steber was famously always fighting what she thought was Met's management underutilization of her. Terribly undiplomatic is how I think people would put it if they were kind. In any event, she arranged a Carnegie Hall recital in which she trotted out an INSANE lineup. The Kaiserin's first act Aria, her Third Act monologue, Qui la voce from Puritani, and a whole crapton of others.

Listening to the below, it brings everything back to focus. I get her singing now.

Ist mein Liebster dahin?

Pace pace

(She has some freaky eye movements though, which makes me think she might have been kind of unbelievable whilst acting. No such worries about Behrens (and OMG, Crespin's performance demeanor is stunning. You can't take your eyes off her) -- while for me, she crosses over a bit into over-the-top flaily flail that Dessay does a lot (and I like not so much in her case either), I haven't ever seen her "singing" even when the camera is shoved in her face. Steber definitely is singing, however well, in the closeups of the Ballatella.)

Why stop there?

2009-08-18T22:26:00.002-05:00

In the bonus portion of the Glyndebourne DVD of Poppea, so and so talks about the first production of Poppea directed by Raymond Leppard. His orchestration is pretty out of current taste when dealing with this period of rep, but at the time, it was fresh, new, and because it was only the very beginning of the historically informed performance movement, it was a miracle at all it was put on.

But, there is this hangover of making certain decisions: if so and so were alive today, he (because women composers aside from Strozzi?) would have looooooved the piano/modern horns/non-gut strings that don't go out of tune at the drop of a hat/etc.

The problem is -- why stop there? I had a lesson with Katherine sensei who said (and she was addressing this to deleterious vocal practices [in her view] at the altar of HIP performances) that Beethoven would have picked a piano over a pianoforte. But I also bet he would have loved the shit out of an electric guitar. Mozart too. Like, saxophone concerti, hellllooo! And Bach? He's totally be all over this theremin and ondes martenot stuff.

Ok ok, so the issue is that there are no real ancient counterparts for all this stuff, so it's not like you can perform the Goldberg Variations on electric guitars and call that equivalent to playing it on a piano. It is, after all, written for a keyboard. (Most annoyingly, modern audiences still have gender hangups with respect to baroque operas where gender performance was more fluid -- any sort of modern benefit of having a Baritone Cesare is outweighed by the violence done to registral/timbral choices of the composer)

But here's the thing -- I bet you that almost every composer would have loved the bejeezus out of amplification. And that's a dirty word to classically-trained vocalists now. But for every argument that people make about so and so loving the piano over the harpsichord or pianoforte -- I can point to cultural reactions to the Mannheim Rocket and 17th and 18th century practice of writing for and employing on the opera stage brilliant performers with incomplete vocal techniques.

Nancy Storace, the various Venetian singers at the birth of opera, Schikaneder, the list is much longer. Modern amplification of voices would allow these works to be performed for larger audiences. Composers could pick compelling stage performers who haven't the dynamic range naturally or via training to project throughout a huge space. But somehow this is super-anathema to the modern classical music community. And I'm pretty convinced composers revered in the classical canon would have gone for it.

So.....is classical music filled with super stuffy people? Probably. Should those making adjustments to works of dead composers invoking what said composers would have done if they were alive be more careful about their justifications? Undoubtedly. Could we stand to redefine classical music in a way that doesn't come across as bizarre neo-ludditeness? YES. I want to do this.

2009-08-17T08:28:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was marked by a couple events. One, I managed to become much more proficient in hands-free bike-riding. Second, on said bike ride, I saw an aggressive roadbiker take a nasty spill (and helped him, natch). Third, homemade burgers are the booooomb. Fourth, this fresh butter from a farm in NC (which I visited this weekend) is also the bomb.

But the first one is the biggie. It's such a visceral pleasure to figure out how to do something -- how it's mainly a physical coordinative process gently led by quick analysis of what's needed.

As MRR would say: "it's soccer player intelligence"

return from hiatus

2009-08-15T18:10:00.002-05:00

Life got bumpy but it's now back on track. During the craziness, I managed to drop a couple bucks on the Jeffrey Tate recording of Berg's Lulu. I haven't made it very far, but so far, it's kind of irritating. Patricia Wise has a luxuriant sound and the range for Lulu, but the intense animal magnetism required for the plot is missing (I imagine it's harder on a recording, but even on stage, the role is complicated enough that from a sheer sound standpoint, the character has to be magnetic). Also, the pitches are kind of sloppily handled, sigh. It makes me want to take another listen to the Reck recording of Acts 1 and 2 + suite. I remember Anat Efraty being a very compelling Lulu, but it's been at least since college that I've listened to it.

In a way, I think the approach to Lulu is symptomatic of what a friend calls a basic acting mistake: basing a character around adjectives rather than nouns. A mutual friend of hers and mine was participating in a (med school) production of the Vagina Monologues and was kind of wigged out about acting/being on stage. My friend (who at the time was in the 2nd year at Tisch) told her not to think about being "sexy" or "alluring" or any adjective because then the character dissipates and there's no believability, no cohesion. Instead, think of nouns. Med school friend decided that she wanted to be a motivational speaker (she was excellent). So the trouble with characters like Lulu who compel the sexual attentions of all the other characters tend to be incredibly fractured. And the sinuousness and gorgeousness and appeal built into the music is teased even further to the point of distortion. Indeed, I think this is a huuuuge problem. It's a big feature of Fleming's singing nowadays (in which the large architectural cohesion of the piece suffers at the highlighting of every damned note, genuine desire to communicate notwithstanding), but it's also nascent in a CD recital of Jan De Gaetani's that I was listening to in the car today -- aaaaand Danielle de Niese's performance of Poppea on the Glyndebourne DVD that was the partner purchase of the Lulu.

Poppea needs to be enormously sensuous and appealing. It's part of the plot. And Monteverdi's put it into the very bones of the music. But it's just completely overdone and isn't appealing at all -- rather like a stunning person who is just trying too damned hard and comes down on the side of looking incredibly desperate rather than tantalizing. There are people who seek out trainwrecks so as to capitalize on that desperation, but let's face it -- it's usually repellent (though maybe that's kind of a hot reading for how corrupt Nero and devastatingly disturbed Ottone are drawn to her, she who keeps no loyalties).

I have another thought arising from the musical side of the DVD and Raymond Leppard and all sorts of justifying practices/decisions encountered in classical music, but that'll be for tomorrah.

Evelyn Glennie

2009-08-06T10:27:00.001-05:00

Watch this -- you'll thank me. Unless you won't. but who knows -- this is incredible.

to do list

2009-08-03T13:02:00.002-05:00

There are a lot of thoughts I want to put down but today is probably not going to be the day. So this will be the list I cross off as I gather and put together thoughts one by one.

Shirley Pan

Sensei

Rollercoasters

NYC processing

School

Moar Reid?

2009-07-28T09:19:00.001-05:00

More Reid research to set beside this post. Reid -> John Stewart (->) Christine Armistead -> Christine Brewer:

2009-07-26T16:07:00.002-05:00

Anita Cerquetti singing Rezia's 3rd Act Prayer of Weber's opera Oberon. It's such beautiful music I really don't understand why this isn't done more often. The opera itself (based on a quick listen with a pretty, er...interesting but ultimately unideal cast) seems a bit of a hodge podge that doesn't seem particularly unified, but I'd have to look into it more.

Still, this is real good singing.

brainwave

2009-07-24T19:53:00.003-05:00

This just hit me (ironically, in the men's room) about why "breath support" as a bedrock concept for vocal technique makes no sense: the analogy to wind and brass players totally breaks down.

To be sure, wind and brass players need to work on lung capacity and ease and smoothness of breath, but never ever would such study be more important or, indeed, stand-in for figuring out what exactly the hell is going on with their embouchure.

The embouchure is the key. The breathing is so much easier to figure out and probably doesn't need the insane "and now do this" stuff that is endlessly repeated.

2009-07-24T12:55:00.002-05:00

New lesson with Sensei and some really interesting things are happening. It's kind of counter to the whole "expression within technique" if only because we're doing some very basic exploring of reflexive coordination.

In a nutshell -- Sensei says that the way I was accessing falsetto was in such a physiological position so as to prohibit the arytenoids from engaging -- i.e. chest voice. So habit (both mental and physical) was barring any sort of meaningful overlap, thereby resulting in either this driven chest sound that would split when driven high in the range or the flutey flutey flutey falsetto sound which would essentially evaporate in and below the passaggio.

Basically, a reedy sound is starting to take root here as the voice is slowly figuring out how to do both the falsetto and the chest motions at the same time. Exciting as hell.

2009-07-22T10:46:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I wonder if all of this focus on physical process is an attempt to affect psychology from the physical.

2009-07-19T16:05:00.008-05:00

I had another lesson on Thursday with Sensei (operating nickname) and had some really interesting things happen. The voice seems to be coordinating in a way that is comfortable and feels and sounds exciting. Baby steps, but I've always been a quick learner when I get into a groove.

But mainly, this post is to do some web-foo. There are some youtube videos that I really would love to hear on loop as a sort of meditative cycle. One used to be able to do this by setting up a playlist with two entries of the same clip side by side such that the software would be confused into thinking it was still playing the first one and then loop and loop and loop. But that's been changed, so now the other way to do it is to embed it and put in some lovely flashvars. Let's see if it works.

E: score!

Got a Marlboro?

2009-07-12T16:33:00.005-05:00

I was reading this New Yorker piece by Alex Ross (the complete print version) on the Marlboro Music Festival, as headed by Dame Mitsuko Uchida and Richarde Goode (Richard God, according to my theory teacher this past year) and in a beautifully-written article, two bits stand out.

First, just the lovely:

[Dame Mitsuko]: "Beethoven was the greatest altogether. Mozart was the greatest genius. And Schubert . . ." She drew in her breath, her eyes opening wide, her head tilting back. "He is the most beautiful. He is the one you will be listening to when you die." And then she spoke of a friend of hers who, on his deathbed, in a state of great pain, was offered morphine and refused it. "He knew that he would die only once. He wanted to see what it felt like. That is some sort of a person, yes? It is a great pity that you can't come back to tell the tale."

Second, efficiently lays out the discussion-lines over which I lock horns with Mrs. Allen:

[Dame Mitsuko]: As a rule, the imaginative [musicians/applicants] are lacking the technique and the ones that have good technique haven't got a clue. But there are exceptions to the rule, and we try to snap them up."

I bring up, often, that voice teachers in conservatory-settings often seem uninterested in really teaching voice. Instead, they sort of polish up already-functioning voices and then try and cram all sorts of "now sing it this way here, and then do it there"-type of advice. And speaking confidentially to someone at school, there are teachers who express dismay that students don't follow such instruction (really, advice) to the letter. Heaven forbid that they grow or build on such advice!

And what gets my goat, too, is this statement by Marlena Malas in Anne Midgette's piece on where the big voices have gone. She says: "We want interesting artists. [...] "Where are they? There must be something wrong with what we're doing that doesn't allow that to come forth."

Obviously, depending on where you are in the process of development and training, you'll have to pick the comparatively more imaginative without technique or the comparatively more technical but clueless to train, and I think overwhelming, the conservatory attitude is to pick the latter.

Mrs. Allen contends that institutions have a responsibility to their students to ensure that they accept people they believe will be employable when they leave. Not only is this an end-result of a social contract between educational institution and student, it's in the school's best interest to turn out students who will reflect well on the school. I think this is admirable and a good way to look at it. It also explains why going with the "safe bet" might make the most sense.

But let's look at why "technique + cluelessness" is actually considered a "safe bet." What is the purpose of music - vocal music? Prima prattica harmonium or seconda prattica catharsis? Is just producing pitches in a pleasing way without an urgent need to express or communicate employable? And the bigger question is, since I think the answer to the previous is affirmative, should it be?

As Karol Berger contends in Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow, the time of contemplative, timeless harmony has given way to linear, directed unfoldings of themes and rhetoric. Stasis and communion with the spheres through music is no longer an explicit purpose or in step with the over-riding conception of the times. And if the wheel is turning back on itself (the ultimate co-opt), it won't be returning to a time where music, as widely understood, is only available if one makes it or attends a live performance.

The fact that there is such saturation of music media in a multiplicity of portable forms means that music, in and of itself, is not novel. Hearing it is no longer the critical other half of its creation. Instead, its very ubiquity overflows and spills out our ears, unprocessed as we carry on with other activities, jamming more and more musical information into our heads via flashy i-pod earbuds.

And we pay (or some of us!) for the privilege of "owning" musical performances that we can sometimes pay attention to when we're listening and otherwise tune out. It's no longer ephemeral in the way that a live performance is. Which means that perhaps we are seeking for music and performances that slip seamlessly into our lives, that can be overlayed onto our busy consciousness and accompany our fitful REM sleep. Yes, there is a market for technical accomplishment hand-in-hand with cluelessness.

But there go all the interesting artists! By considering this a "safe bet," the excitement goes by the wayside. And in further disservice to students, the safe ones are trained as if they'll be the interesting, exciting ones. Hello, insult, meet my friend, injury. I believe you two have met?

No, I think it is a mistake. And you can even thought-experiment it yourself. A good friend of mine offered to teach me kuchipudi dance lessons. I took one with her, and she said, "if you are not dancing well, that is my responsibility." She didn't mean "if you really work hard" or "if you have talent." It was exactly as she said.

As a teacher, she took on the responsibility of also discovering elements of motivation (or that they were assumed) as well as the technique. The nourishment of individuality as well as the instruction. And this, she told me, is exactly what her teacher told her when she began. So if it is true, that I would become merely a technically proficient dancer, she would take the responsibility of getting me there. It was her reputation linked to mine in a way that conservatory teachers, and voice teachers especially, seem loathe to make. If they aren't putting their effort and name on the line here, well how good can that be for the students?

If schools are inclined to hedge their bets on the students they accept, they should at least train them as such. Develop the real skills that they need. There is no reason why technically proficient singers should graduate from school not knowing how to read music, or sight-sing at an advanced level, or have a nice, polished presentation. After all, schools can only pocket the cachet of having successful students if those students picked up something really valuable during their time there (most value-added consideration in country of origin determinations in Customs-speak). But really, schools should really reconsider their stance on which of the two types to err on when picking their battles. Because they aren't following through on the choice they seem to have already made.

third lesson

2009-07-10T09:04:00.003-05:00

Third lesson with Reid-student and I got an earful. I was able to observe (and record bits) lessons his other students had: tenor, mezzo, soprano, all working singers in one way or another. It was incredibly instructive to watch other singers and compare/contrast their singing with mine -- and more importantly to watch how he handled the lesson as contrasted with the phantom voices in my head saying "now lift your palate" or whatever it natters on about sometimes, drawing from all of that mechanistic stuff I've been taught.

Instead it was all about concept, expectation, and reflex: think the pitch, the vowel, and how it's going to sound, expect the stupid thing to show up, and then go.

And the way he goes about taking you through the voice is based on what he hears come out of your mouth. It isn't a "let's do this exercise until you get it right" they're also useful as diagnostic tools. I haven't sung any exercise pattern for him consecutively more than like 6 or 7 times. It's always switch to something else -- and then we'll come back. The closest thing I can think of is a mechanic fiddling with an engine that just won't start. You mess with something, then try and start it. Observe what it does, and then go back to fiddling. By the way, here is a fantastic piece describing why the manual trades are not short on intellectual demands. It's also a little bit like self-adjusting systems where scientists hook up a bunch of circuits and then tell them whether their output is good or not and over time and repetition they just adjust to being more able to perform a task.

Some very good things gleaned:

Reflex vs. duplication. What normal teachers call "letting go" or "being relaxed" this teacher instead describes as seeking reflexive response. Like the hammer to the knee reflex exam at your physical -- you can only duplicate that by seeking a reflexive response, because that's exactly what it is. If you try and just move your knee like you observe it while it's moving reflexively, you're not going to get it; it uses different muscle groups. The idea is that singing correctly is also a reflexive action -- the only thing you can do is expect it to show up. Futzing with the palate and the support and the resonance or whatever is just like trying to recreate that reflexive action based on what you see -- they don't get to the original cause of the action so it seems reasonable that they won't be able to produce the action either.

The other way he tried to explain this was by asking how you pick up a pencil on a desk and move it to another place on the desk. The thought process isn't "ok and now I open my hand and move my forearm to this location and then lower my shoulder and close my forefinger and... etc." It's "pick up the pencil; move the pencil; put down the pencil."

The last explanation sort of crystallized in my head as I was driving home -- it's not unlike learning how to pronounce sounds that one isn't used to hearing. Like teaching an east-asian to properly pronounce american r's and l's or learning, as an english speaker, all of the weird french and german vowels or to recognize the tones in tonal languages -- you can make some progress just by having someone tell you physically how to make them, e.g., pucker your lips and then say "eeee". But that only gets you so far. Whenever you see that, you'll have to think "ok now pucker my lips and say eeeee" but ultimately, you're just going to have to figure out how that locks into your head. So when you see ü or what have you, you have a concept of what that sounds like, rather than a process.

Yeah, I guess that's the biggest difference. This kind of learning is goal-based rather than process-based. My teacher goes searching for the free sounds lurking in my singing and we make more of that. Other teachers just want to futz with my palate with the assumption that it'll result in free sounds. I'm beginning to think more and more that that's kind of a load of poppycock. There are plenty of other sounds I could make with a lifted palate.

Edit: Another nugget. Teach sez: if you feel a "resonance sensation", this means that the sound is stopping there. And if you don't feel something, e.g., in the throat, that doesn't mean it isn't active.

origins

2009-07-08T07:51:00.007-05:00

I am obsessed with origins. I didn't think so before, and it wasn't until I read my friend Betsy's blogpost on the subject that my own fascination with the subject became apparent.

I'm not particularly concerned with my origins -- at least not my familial origins -- but with general ideas of personality- or interest-origins. Maybe something along the lines of what Twyla Tharp calls "creative DNA."

After reading Betsy's post, I realized how nutty I am about origins and witnessing them. It explains my weird, mostly culinary desire to make everything from scratch -- from bread, pasta, and rose water (and secondary or tertiary products thereof) to researching how to card and spin yarn from dog hair [this, thankfully, might stay in the theoretical realm]. I used to think that I was interested in the elaborateness of it all; that I was attracted to their long processes because I am famously (or infamously, in my family) impatient.

I think now that it's because of a deep interest in the elementality of raw materials and witnessing their transformation and transmutations into more recognized objects. There's something about the arcane here and also something of the earth. It also manifests in my research interests too: writing about Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, I was interested in how it emerged and departed from oratorio norm; it explains why I am drawn to early music. There's also an element of contrast here, too -- as I'm interested in Berg more than Schoenberg, in non-Western music/art traditions as they influence, borrow, and interact with the Western tradition.

It also explains, in part, why I hunt down singer biographies and focus intently on passages detailing their training and "creative DNA." To be sure, part of it is/was hunting for assurances that I'm not completely out of my mind for starting studying singing the way I have, but it really can't explain all of it.

Origins are interesting. I'm almost beginning to think that it's an instinctual human interest, though the actual patterns or forms it takes differ. I mean, it can't be a mistake that [in the words of a film critic, paraphrased] "stories of becoming are much more interesting than stories of being."

But hey, speaking of origins, I stumbled across this fun interview with Magdalena Kozena. Her bit on not thinking about technique but instead focusing on expression and giving echoes Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's remarks on how her psychological state almost *is* her technique. AND it's basically what new voice teacher's position seems to be. Huh.

MK Interview 1 2
especially cool is the paragraph in the second in which she talks about singing songs written for men. !! I secretly have this dream of whipping out "nacqui all'affanno...non piu mesta" as some sort of cracked out party piece/encore someday.

~~LHL Interview~~ -- ~~F! I can't find it. Will update.~~

Found it! OperaNews interview "Wild at Heart" (Nov96, Vol. 61 Issue 5, p12-17)

Relevant section:

LORRAINE: "There are some singers who just have this wide-open, free voice, technically, from the start. But for me that freedom has come gradually, and it's connected to my, well, inner voice. As I become more free, and shed those layers, those skins I don't need, and let go of my past, my voice sort of follows me. I remember doing Donna Elvira, Ms. Torment, at a time when I was really struggling with everything. There were so many obstacles -- high notes, or getting through the aria, whatever -- and I don't think I could even tell whether the struggle was body first or psyche first. I can do more of what I want now, without fear, musically, technically, and it's a huge sigh of relief in my life." (emphasis added)

Instead, here are memorial pieces: OpenSource (audio) SpiderMonkey's Blog

Also, Bach (hello 90s!)

next lesson

2009-07-04T08:44:00.003-05:00

I had another lesson with Reid-student (I need to come up with a better nickname) this past Thursday, and I think there are some definitely improvements in the offing.

In practice, the approach outlined by Reid in his books and other materials is very a-technical. Not only does he eschew talking about palates and tongues and chest-positions, and openness -- it's been about making vowels, making dynamics, and singing vocalises like musical objects.

Every so often, there'll be a quick discussion about what's happening coordination-wise or an encouragement to just go with the music -- that one shouldn't expect or force everything to go the same way. The rules change depending on where you are in the voice, just like bowing rules change the higher up the fingerboard you go on a violin.

The sound is much more present and I have a really nice conception of making music as a result. Notes to be sung and filled with expression, then overlayed with the specificity and musical implications of text.

For instance, we finally worked through a bit of text in "Betrachte, meine Seel" in Bach's St. John Passion. Bach writes (and I'm free-translating):

Betrachte, meine Seel,
mit ängtslichem Vergnügen,
mit bittrer Lust und
halb beklemmtem Herzen...

Consider, my soul,
with anguished rapture,
with bitter joy and
half-beating heart...

beklemmtem is set to the "and" of 1 and beat 2 in 4/4 time. -klemmtem is figured as two-note sixteenth note groups that each return to the same pitch as the word starts and then fall in successively widening intervals of a minor second to a minor third. They could be sighs, but the textual grounding of it makes a stronger case for a heart beat.

The way I had been approaching it before, pulling way away on the second of each two-note group sounded/felt very unsatisfying although I was completely committed to the expressive idea. My instrumental training informed me that I needed to pull back the sound-making apparatus (bow on violin, finger attack on piano), but this left out the effects that vowels and consonants would have on the sound itself. With the sound-decreasing MMs falling on the weak notes of the two-note groups, pulling back on the sound in general resulted in flaccid, swoopy, dippy phrasing. Thinking about vocal music as an underlay of produced sound overlayed with text really brought out fidelity to the phrase that utilized the words to add their own effects.

I never really thought there would be a point in which I could get too much about the words, but hey -- guess what?

And now it's time to reign that in -- but not too much!

2009-07-01T10:33:00.005-05:00

Very briefly - Gardiner's second recording of Bach's Cantata 51 with soloist Malin Hartelius, a favorite!

"Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen"

"Wir beten zu Tempel an"

"Höchster, mache deine Güte"

"Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren"

"Alleluia"

New approach

2009-06-26T17:48:00.002-05:00

I had another lesson with a Cornelius Reid student yesterday and it is a wonderful way to work, for my purposes.

When I arrived, I sat in on the final bits of the previous student -- a high mezzo? It was very interesting to hear the lack of dogma being thrown around. The focus was entirely on sound and musical approach that was happening -- almost more like a coach.

No "life your palate" no "make sure to support it" none of that. Instead, as this student was asked to sing an arpeggio to the dominant, trill, then cap it on the tonic 2 octaves above where she started on a sustained tone, and then arpeggiate back down, she was encouraged to follow the line of the music, to make it rhythmic and fill it with musical intention.

Then the assignment was slightly altered. She was asked to ascend just as quickly before, to let the rhythm take over and just go with what happened -- but on the sustain and on the way down, really focus on how everything changes in feel on the way down. The teacher likened this to what happens when you're in a car and drive at 5mph vs. at 60. When you're moving slowly, you can open the door and fish out that seatbelt that got caught in the door. At 60, not so much. Rules change, as you change the parameters.

My lesson was far more exploratory. And the diagnosis was both one that I already knew and also very positively put. 1) the voice can function in the two registral actions that are necessary: falsetto and chest -- and 2) the voice is responsive to these exercises that seek to reveal its reflexive actions. Additionally, little throat constriction.

It's nice to feel that I've made some progress on my voice in all my efforts. My singing was not always responsive. Both registers of my singing have become more and more refined and under my command. The biggest hurdle is figuring out how to mix the two together. And it's a big one.

This teacher explained that right now the voice ones to flip into one register or the other -- kind of like if I had two cans of paint: blue and yellow for chest and falsetto respectively. Ideally, I'd want to sing in a green color all the time. It can be a very deep green or a light green, and it certainly should change at will depending on what I want. But it should be green. Right now it's decidedly blue and yellow.

Where is my paint mixer?

for the last time

2009-06-23T08:49:00.002-05:00

Fach is just a one or two-word short-cut to help people who have never heard you sing a role to predict how you would sing that role based on others you have sung successfully. it's not an identity.

BASTA.

hodge podge

2009-06-22T15:35:00.004-05:00

First things first. I've been thinking a lot about getting a bicycle. In fact, I did get one, for about $100. It was with me for a couple months and then was stolen. Also because I locked it up a bit improperly, but it wasn't exactly a bike that I was going to be able to ride around everywhere, nor did it fit the rather specific things I needed my bike to be able to do: be portable, work well in commuter traffice, yet still be able to handle longer tours and bike trips.

Thought about it and it laid dormant. I had been eyeing Bromptons a good deal, but the $$ pricetag on them really stopped me from pulling the build-it-yourself trigger at NYCE Wheels Build Your Own website. This weekend, I went with F to trade in his beat-up Zenetik on-loan from Mt. Airy Bikes for another one the owner said he should try. A folded up Brompton caught my eye and I took it for a spin.

It felt great! The gear selection was such that I really could get quite a bit of power into the wheels and go for a zoom zoom. I'm going to see if I can loan one from them a bit -- or even see if they can give me a better deal than the a la carte one I've built that runs about $1300 at the moment.

Check out its folding action though:

Next, to return to a thought about a previous post on which features make voices really great in baroque/early music, I had a discussion with a friend, and I think it really is all about freedom. There are many pieces of romantic singing (many of them operatic) that can handle what sounds like strain in the vocal production -- Ortrud's Oath, for instance. I have to admit that I kind of like hearing the singer battle the orchestra as she invokes Wotan and Freia -- to hear Varnay flatten her backup band without any sign of strain whatsoever is thrilling in a completely different way.

Christa Ludwig

Astrid Varnay

Even comparing Christa Ludwig's Invocation with Varnay shows a remarkable difference. One is aware of how hard Ludwig is working, and how easily she could clamp down and tense more than she is (which is not very much). It's a clearly comparison with Waltraud Meier. I'll see if I can upload something.

Early music is almost completely unlike this in affect. Virtually at no time should the audience hear how hard you are working. They'll know anyway -- some of this shit is incredibly nutty. (Whatever Vivica Genaux sings would apply).

Alright, so fine -- freedom of the voice is paramount in this music. Meaning that a voice can freely and without inhibition achieve its expressive goals without feeling or sounding like it is hitching or working around technical obstacles, although this just is the very fact of life.

But what sort of standard to you apply in describing a free voice? It's so easy to fall on bizarre little tropes in music criticism when a writer isn't even trying to describe something technically -- the buzzwords range from strapping singers to well-oiled wooden voices (singers?).

It's bizarre, but I recently started to think about singing quality using textile immagery. Was I going for a velvet-feeling sound or a gauzy one? Taking it further, thinking about the vastly different kinds of yarn really did it for me. Someone who loves to knit (like my friend Knitting Pretty in DC might not like mohair, but could see that (I don't know the terms, exactly) that the thread is nice and consistent. The dye holds well, and color shifts are natural and pleasing rather than arbitrary and jarring.

It really pulled into focus how I think about voices and how free they are -- even with tones and colors that I myself do not appreciate.

Finally -- I still can't find a Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo that I like. The piano ones play the Arioso in such a way that it's either too fast (it is Adagio) or sounds a bit too sentimental. I like the Tureck, but it's somewhat sentimental for me. I think that I like it best on harpsichord, which allows the performer to go even slower (this is almost toooooo slow) without the sentimentality that inevitably creeps in on a piano.

All of which means that I'm going to have to learn it myself and possibly play it on a recital, which I would really like to be crazy vaudevillian more than yucky and staid.

guess who?

2009-06-18T23:21:00.002-05:00

can you guess who this is?

Bach

2009-06-17T20:31:00.024-05:00

I love this Capriccio. It's intriguing because so far as I know, it's the only keyboard composition by Bach with a programmatic agenda, especially with Bach's otherwise incredibly formalistic oeuvre.

I also love Rosalyn Tureck. I want to get my hands on the Fleisher recording of this that came out recently. Recently being in the last 2 years or so. Oh, and also see the Two Hands documentary. GRR. Anybody know where I can see it?

holy shit!

2009-06-16T00:21:00.002-05:00

Just acquired Emmanuelle Haim's recording of Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno. It is blowing my mind into smithereens that something could be so gorgeously written and performed.

More anon.

doctoral program research list

2009-06-12T08:38:00.003-05:00

Working list of programs of interest with notes.

Eastman -- strong theory program, musicology students can enroll in studio lessons as part of normal course of study (!!), great music library, good early music resources. Lots of the faculty have interests and work in women's studies and/or vocal music. Nobody seems to work on Russia but there are faculty who work on Southeast Asia and India. More research needed on funding.

Princeton -- Simon Morrison, full-funding, competitive program, small faculty (Kofi Agawu, also).

Yale -- funding, Ellen Rosand, work on vocal music, Cavalli. No Russians.

NYU -- Funding! (surprise!), Beckerman - who works on Czech music (!), early music including Caccini,

Berkeley -- Richard Taruskin, California!, California :(, state school hi :)

Work in progress

Instead of Penelope or Fevroniya

2009-06-09T10:22:00.005-05:00

I had been planning (for some time) to write on either Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (one of my favorite favorite operas -- and Wolftrap is putting it on this summer!) or Сказание о невидимом граде Китеже и деве Февронии, Skazaniye o nevidimom grade Kitezhe i deve Fevronii (hee hee! how's that for a long title?), an opera that has long held a deep fascination for me. I am ultimately planning to work on this and other Rimsky operas.

But all of that has been shoved aside. By what, you ask? Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno by Handel. Some time ago, I attended a musicology colloquium with Ellen Harris as guest speaker. She extended the observations and arguments she made in her book Handel as Orpheus and spoke about this early Handel oratorio. I thought the clips she played were absolutely stunning (organ concerto, final scene) but after sniffing around a bit thereafter, forgot about it.

Now (well, to me!), Emmanuelle Haim has recorded it with a stunning quartet of soloists. And there are some videos of recording released that are an enormous amount of fun -- some of them are below. In the quartet voglio tempo, I was struck by all of the singers -- how appropriate Natalie Dessay, Sonia Prina, Pavol Breslik, and Ann Hallenberg are to their roles and to this kind of approach to early music.

Says Haim:

Twenty years ago, everything was concentrated on the reaction against the romantic tradition of interpreting the baroque. Bill is part of that generation: people like him and Reinhard Goebel and Sigiswald Kuijken fought to establish authentic practices of ornamentation and bowing techniques. For them, it was a battle for purity. Now it is over, they have won and students learn in conservatoire both romantic and baroque methods. You can choose whether you hold a violin against your chest or your neck.

This double practice is what interests me, and that's how the players in Le Concert d'Astrée are trained. Most of them are very young and all of them are flexible. My leader also works for the 'normal' orchestra in the opera house in Toulouse, my cellist is a great jazz player, my percussionist is involved in Indian music.

This is what I like -- she still has a historical perspective on performance practice (for instance, instrumentation in baroque operas -- what might work for Handel would not work for Monteverdi, say) but feels free to adapt and adopt without a concern for purity. Musical practice miscegenation perhaps. Anyhow, her recordings both feature so-called baroque specialists and others that are anything but: Susan Graham as Dido, Ian Bostridge as (Monteverdi's) Orfeo and Aeneas, Natalie Dessay as...well as a whole crapton of things. It leads to incredibly vital music-making which is still recognizably historically informed.

--In any case, it got me to thinking about 2 things: (1) what sort of qualities in a voice suit this style of music (keeping in mind that "this style" is perhaps one of the richest and most varied period of classical composition lumped all the hell together)? and (2) holy shit, Ann Hallenberg rocks!

Let's go with #2. The evidence, your honor:

Ann Hallenberg steps in at Zurich for Bartoli:

Stepping into a difficult, untested role as a substitute for perhaps the most famous singer in Europe on a few hours notice, Ann Hallenberg was greeted with polite applause as she walked with Minkowski to their podiums in the pit. And then, somehow, a magical evening commenced.

Hallenberg singing the same role, Piacere:

AH sings Bradamante in the Spinosi recording of Vivaldi's Orlando furioso:

1) Asconderò il mio sdegno

2) Taci, non ti lagnar

3) Se cresce un torrente

4) Io son ne' lacci tuoi

test

2009-06-07T14:04:00.005-05:00

Tinkering with my strategy in posting audio. Stay-tuned.

Here is Elisabeth Soderstrom singing Sibelius's Luonnotar:

Cornelius Reid

2009-06-03T06:02:00.003-05:00

I've mentioned Cornelius Reid briefly here, but developments this past year led me to investigate him once again and more thoroughly. And when I mean investigate him, I really mean more his teachings but also information on the man himself. You can check out a website dedicated to him here (he died just a couple years ago in his 90s).

Several years ago, when I was still preparing to apply to music schools, I ordered the trio of books Reid wrote mid-century. They're each a mixture of manifesto, technical manual, and history of vocal teaching practices -- each book having a slightly different emphasis and mix of these elements. (Ironically, Patelson, where I ordered the books, seems to be defunct themselves now.)

I was hitting all sorts of roadblocks this past year. I felt that I had to sing full tilt for a semi-steady sound; I couldn't sing very high or very low; I became vocally tired relatively quickly; it took me forever to "warm up" to get a functioning sound. I decided that the most key deficiency was not being able to produce a medium volume or soft sound that would carry or be steady. And further, I thought it was because I didn't know how to make a heady mixture that I've heard my fellow students (even non-voice majors) produce and carry relatively high in the range. With this in mind, I turned to Reid's books again with an eye for something different.

In a nutshell, Reid's arguments are that (1) there was a Golden Age of song in the 17th and 18th centuries -- this is based on contemporary descriptions of singers, but also on the kind of vocal writing singers were expected to (and did) deliver; (2) in virtually all of the writing on vocal training and technique from this period do not mention or describe anything we would recognize today as "placement" or "breath support." Nothing; (3) therefore, what these teachers did focus on (vowel purity, pitch, and intensity) must be enough to resolve the technical problems and deficiencies encountered in vocal training.

In developing this argument, Reid then formulates an "answer," of some sort, to the current trends in vocal training -- namely, placement and breath support.

He writes that when the vocal mechanism is in balance (and he basically means larynx and vocal cord area), the body knows how to supply sufficient air and "support." Shortness of breath for phrasing does not mean the body does not know how to breathe -- it does. It is a symptom of inefficient vocal coordination and production. (If someone is running with shitty form and is having difficulty with running long -- or short -- distances, the approach to long-term improvement is not to practice breathing or endurance exercises -- it's to fix the form first.)

Moreover, the voice, unlike every other instrument, cannot be controlled consciously in the way that other muscles can. You cannot cause your vocal cords to vibrate 380 times a second consciously. What is under control are pitch, intensity/volume, and vowel. These are the tools that the student and teacher must use to investigate technical problems and their solutions.

Reid also invokes anatomy to support his (and I suppose, Golden Age teachers') view of the voice as a two-register instrument: there are just two motor nerves that go from the brain to the vocal cord complex. He calls these chest and head registers. The basic trouble in vocal training is to develop unused registers and then to combine these registral actions in such a way to produce and evenness of scale throughout the voice. This is approached via exercises that arrange pitch, intensity/volume, and vowel (just the very things you can consciously control) in such a way that it predisposes the voice to use one registration or another. That is to say, the voice has a reflexive tendency to use one of the two registers depending on what vowel and how loudly you sing it on a certain pitch.

From here, it's a pretty straight shot to the technical training procedure.

This approach was appealing to me because it dispensed with the entire notion of breathing support as something one needed to practice. As demonstrated in a session with one of my teachers, I can evenly release breath on a hiss at a very very slow rate. Ask me to sing and it goes to pieces. Ergo, something that I'm doing with singing is just not right.

So I did some digging around and spoke to two teachers who studied with Reid (or studied with someone who did) about vocal training. I'm probably going to do some consultation and some work with them this summer (one hopes) -- but let me first share some of the links/reading that resulted from my investigation.

The approach made sense, but was the proof in the pudding? What I liked about this group of teachers (if they can be called a group), was that they believed that everyone was able to learn to sing with freedom, and that anybody who wanted to learn how to do so, they would teach -- never mind about adding to their own reputation via their students'. I don't believe that having famous students necessarily means teachers know how to teach vocal technique. As a friend of mine pointed out to me -- the greatest predictor of who will win an award (like, say, the Nobel or Pulitzer) is winning other awards. Success feeds itself. So, I was looking for what students taught this way sounded like. And if I could figure out what they might have sounded like before (very hard or impossible), the better. What was telling were cases of singers suffering vocal damage and seeking out a Reid teacher to reconstruct their voices and techniques. That got my attention.

Anyhow - without further ado:

Studied directly with Cornelius Reid:

Judith Raskin -- so told to me by another of his students. It's not mentioned in biographical materials I've been able to find.

George Shirley -- and here with Leontyne Price

Wendy White -- who also attributes everything to Reid - her sole teacher, here with Bartoli

Julian Patrick

Ellen Shade -- and I'm not sure but is this same Ellen Shade here and here?

John Stewart -- as you might expect, it's a little bit tricky doing searches for this name and getting the right person

Marianna Kulika -- and here singing Adalgisa with June Anderson's Norma

Ariel Bybee

Katherine Posner

David Christopher

Joel Ewing

Carol Baggott-Forte

Students of Students:

Grant Youngblood -- David Christopher

Kevin Youk -- Joel Ewing, I'm assuming

Sharla Nafziger -- Carol Baggott-Forte

Stephanie Piercey -- Carol Baggott-Forte in recovery from vocal damage which required surgery

Wolfgang Weiss -- Carol Baggott-Forte

Each of these singers a) looks relaxed, b) sounds easy, and c) has great diction. It's what I want and although I've made some breakthroughs in many of my goals this year, I hope that this summer will be extremely rewarding studying this way. Will keep tabs on developments here.

Not about Cornelius Reid. Tomorrow.

2009-05-30T23:31:00.003-05:00

I like Alex Ross's New Yorker piece on Cavalli. After having performed in an abridged Calisto, I think I have a better appreciation for him than I once did -- though when I think of early opera, I still immediately go to my much-beloved Ulisse.

But, keeping this short, Ellen Rosand's book that Ross recommends is available, in what looks to be complete form, online at escholarsip.

more grad school research

2009-05-22T22:14:00.004-05:00

Before the semester ended, I asked my theory teacher (who was on to bigger and better things at MacCallister) if he had any recommendations for classes I should take at Peabody in my remaining, part-time student time (as he was ye old Peabody grad). The discussion expanded to my post-grad plans and aspirations and he told me a lot about his experience in the composition DMA program at Princeton.

He suggested two (maybe 3) places that I should really consider based on my interest in working on Russian opera: Princeton because of Simon Morrison, Berkeley because of Richard Taruskin, and Penn because of Carolyn Abbate.

He was a big booster for Princeton, because he liked his time there and because Simon Morrison works specifically on Russian opera (he's published books on Russian Symbolist operas, including one of my faves, The Fiery Angel and on Prokofiev. Click here for an interview with Prof. Morrison on his Prokofiev book).

I went to a talk last year given by Kofi Agawu (also at Princeton) on Imperialism in Africa as expressed in music. It was a pretty great talk, and the kind of theoretical work that he does, I would be pretty keen on blending with a more traditional musicology focus. In taking the English Musical Renaissance course that I did this last semester (and on reading one of Paul Krugman's books, The Conscience of a Liberal), not having any sort of background in economics makes it really hard to make one's own conclusions about the wider world at any given time, so it's something I'm going to have to start working on. Also, it's interesting to know more about the world.

The other good thing about the Princeton program is that not only is it very free-form, it's a very small program and very, very well-funded. Key. Oh, and it's pretty close to NYC, so that's nice, too.

Next post is going to be about Cornelius Reid and his functional method of teaching voice.

elgar's oratorios?

2009-04-20T23:34:00.002-05:00

I'm researching Elgar's Dream of Gerontius in the context of British oratorio tradition and am reading Charles McGuire's Elgar's Oratorios.

There's this passage in which he quotes Jurij Lotman, a linguist:

[The artistic text] transmits different information to different readers in proportion to each one's comprehension; it provides the reader with a language in which each successive portion of information may be assimilated with repeated reading. It behaves as a kind of living organism which has a feedback channel to the reader and thereby instructs him.

The concept of "language"... will encompass: a) natural languages (for example, Russian, French, Estonian, Czech); b) artificial languages - the languages of science (the metalanguages of scientific descriptions), the languages of conventional signals (road signs, for example), and so on; c) secondary languages (secondary modeling systems) - communication structures built as superstructures upon a natural linguistic plane (myth and religion, for example). Art is a secondary modeling system.

And then McGuire sort of maps this kind of critical language onto musical texts through a series of translations, which are also part of Lotman's critical theory. This is all kind of bending my mind at the moment. Cool.

a new direction

2009-04-19T21:41:00.007-05:00

It's been brewing for awhile, but the decision was made fairly recently to shoot for entrance into a PhD program (musicology, methinks) after Peabody rather than additional performance degrees or just going on the market as a vocalist.

The reasons are severalfold:

I'm good at academics -- more importantly, I think about a lot of things related to music beyond "what's necessary" for a performer. Investigating this would be of interest to me anyway. The model of conductors like Jane Glover and Christopher Hogwood balancing performance and producing scholarly work is appealing, though I'd be approaching it from the other side.

Because of #1, it's much more likely that I'd be better funded than if I got an MM and then a DMA.

Most importantly, I wouldn't give up pursuit of performance -- but entering this line of scholarship would be beneficial along all sorts of lines. A performance background becomes useful; an academic background is useful in performance; and it's useful to be marketable beyond performance given the vagaries of profession and getting started

I've had quite a bit of support from classmates and professors in pursuing this plan, including the incarnation of moving forward without graduating from Peabody.

And since the application process for programs would begin in earnest in 1.5 years, this would be an interesting time to document it -- not unlike the reason this blog was started in the first place (documenting application to performance programs).

Based on preliminary investigation, programs at Eastman and Berkeley would be very interesting. Eastman was actually put on the map by my ear-training professor -- who is Eastman-trained, thinks I have a shot at the program, and never failing to impress, is a founding member of Alarm Will Sound (a fact which always catches up with me at the most inopportune moments in class).

In terms of setting up research interests, I started thinking back to things I've been interested in/obsessed with. One of the more interesting things is sparked off of comments like this:

I have never found that [Fiery Angel] "works" as an opera.
Indeed, my usual reaction to Prokofiev's operas is that the orchestra seems
to be playing in another room from the voices, or might as well be for all
that either of them seems to have to do with the other.
I find Flaming Angel a very successful tone poem or orchestral suite. But
they should can the singers and the staging, which don't interact with it at
all.

This is even truer of Love for Three Oranges and War & Peace.

Hans Lich
John Yohalem

Not this specific post, certainly, but I've been registering my utter frustration with an aesthetic assumption of "gesamtkunstwerk" or even just underlying cultural expectations of what constitutes "drama," particularly since I grew up watching all sorts of things in a culture which has very different concepts of drama and synergy. Check out this Taiwanese variety show -- its post-processing happiness is readily apparent, though it lays off the visual popups.

clicky

A bit more seriously, although Chinese culture still has a tradition of classical music drama (which is fused inextricably with dance) however different the valuations of "drama," concision and brevity not considered virtues, Japan has an even different configuration. One of its classical dance forms, Kabuki, separates the vocalism from the actors, and the actors themselves inhabit an uneasy intersection of dance and drama when viewed along Western lines.

So, an area of interest of me would be music drama from traditions that do not fall under the purview of Aristotelian ideas of drama but interact with such a tradition. The biggie would probably be Russian opera, followed by Eastern European opera. And then investigating South Asian and East Asian traditions of drama.

I have a lot of reading to do.

2008-06-16T21:10:00.003-05:00

what a weekend! my sister graduated from college; I met up with an aunt and my cousin who I haven't seen in 10 years; and all of the insane travel related to thereof. I'm also settling into a really nice summer rhythm. I hope it can carry on into the school year so I'm not completely drowning in my schedule.

Today was pretty perfect. When I was walking home from visiting a friend - the weather was so clear and a beautiful temperature. I could see the moon in the distance as I crossed the bridge -- and as it was just dusking close to home, I saw fireflies! I haven't seen those in years! Enough to paste a spontaneous grin on my face.

Also, I've been totally addicted to Brigitte Fassbaender's singing. There's a set in the "Very Best of" Series (I already own the Mady Mesple (very underrated, in my opinion) and Edda Moser (ditto) compilations. Listening through on Amazon's little player, the Fassbaender one is probably just as stunning! It includes not only Suicidio, but O don fatale (in German), pieces from the Messiah, B Minor Mass, St. John Passion, and the entire Winterreise!! The last is absolutely stunning, the 1 minute snippets of each song that I heard.

Am now listening to her Schwanengesang. The thought of a Fassbaender Eboli rocks my socks. (And according to internet google groups man of letters (and recordings) Simon Roberts, her Azucena and Amneris are pretty great too).

But what I wanted to paste here in sharing (before getting back to school year recap in the next post) is Mirella Freni and Alfredo Kraus in a blockbuster duet from Puritani. YES PURITANI!

I knew that Freni did a very gorgeous recording (although with approximate coloratura) of the mad scene, here she is, singing this thing live! with lovely Alfredo Kraus. And holding her own every bit!

ahoy!

2008-06-02T09:33:00.004-05:00

It's been awhile since I've had both the time and inclination to write -- what a semester! But the next series of posts should hopefully bring everything back into relief.

I had started writing this blog to chronicle the sorts of things I encountered in switching into vocal performance. At the outset, I had consciously thought of the possibility of what to do once I did get into school and started attending. Looking back, I don't remember what I felt about my chances of actually getting into places that I applied. Of course I had my dreams, but that's not exactly something that's very rational.

In the same vein of preparing notes and keeping track of progress while applying (and getting ready for auditions), I had imagined my blogging activity would be a benchmark for my progress, development, and breakthroughs while attending school. I've been kind of remiss in keeping track of that, so hopefully this post will also be the beginning of a return to this approach (rather than simply the sharing of awesome found things on the internets..though that won't disappear. You're welcome or sorry depending on your stance).

Breakthroughs:

This first one is a two-parter. I've always had trouble with the [i] vowel -- all sorts of tightness and tension. The first breakthrough came when one of John's former students was in town on a production and came by to say hi. It just so happened that I was performing in the voice department recital and had a lesson afterwards. Ryan asked if I minded if he sat in on my lesson and helped with tongue-placement for the [i] vowel. Namely, making sure the tip of the tongue stays forward (almost even moving it forward to counteract the tendency to pull back on it) in order to encourage the base of the tongue to not clog the throat. Breakthrough 1. The next one came when I was doing exercises with my summer teacher, Ruth, just recently. The other component of stress came from the soft palate collapsing down as the back of the tongue comes up to form the vowel in some sort of sympathetic motion. Once I noticed this was happening, I could think about separating the two parts of my body to do different things at the same time. It's not perfect yet (obviously) but it's a much better, looser sound. The third breakthrough will happen when I can finally embrace the fact that the sound will just have to carry. It'll never be a "beefy" sound on [i].

Truth be told, the big sort of breakthrough of this semester has been developing a finer control of the soft palate so it doesn't just collapse all the time or jerk up or whatnot. This combined with a better connective, deeper support of last semester has smoothed my singing out immensely. Breakthroughs still in the wings include figuring out how "really" to sing up through the passaggio and into the high notes that I'm pretty sure I'll have one day. But they're just tantalizingly (annoyingly) out of reach at the moment. Bah!

Books Read:
Sort of filling out my other obsession, I picked up Julie & Julia in anticipation of waiting around in doctors' offices.

It's a fairly decent read, though the hyperbolic comparison of living in NYC to being in a Khmer Rouge camp (and similar comparisons of her middle-class life to truly desperate conditions) I find in pretty bad taste.

I also picked up volume of Joseph Kerman's criticism written for the New York Review of Books, which I am adoring, despite his polemics in Opera as Drama. I find his reviews to be much more balanced. Though maybe it's just that I've grown up a bit, read a bit more. I'll have to revisit Opera as Drama and see what I think.

And as a lagniappe, I've (re?)discovered Brigitte Fassbaender! I don't know why I always had it in my head that it was a brusque, uneven voice.

Check out these youtubes for some awesome:

Suicidio

Una voce poco fa

2008-03-21T12:32:00.003-05:00

So I was sitting in the little food area at Costco and idly watching some of the cashiers, etc.

I noticed this one slender guy with a spring in his step that still seemed to be leaning on everything. Perhaps you've seen similar: closely cropped hair, polo shirt with collar popped, cartilage and lobe piercings. That sort of thing.

But still leaning on surfaces yet not looking totally goofy in the process.

Which reminded me what my mother was telling me about leaning the sound on something. When people stand unsupported, they start wobbling about, even if it's very minor. If they have something to lean on, it'll all be in one direction.

It's a useful visual image, actually -- really interesting in terms of vocalise practices in an attempt to smooth things out and present a more uniform sound. Speaking of, I've been taking a melisma from 'Der teurer' of Bach's SJP. Feels really good and I like that it doesn't start at the bottom and go up but rather starts in the middle, goes down, and then up, then down (so I can ease into the idea of preparing the space for the higher stuff at the beginning). Also, the high stuff comes later so it's a really nice breath control reminder -- and is honing efficiency on higher passages.

But, what this post really is about: parts of the William Klein film of the Messiah conducted by Minkowski.

I might have mentioned in passing once or twice that I'd like to bear Minkowski's children. And I'd also love to be involved in some crazy film project like this.

hiding out

2008-03-18T13:40:00.004-05:00

the dearth of posts here at CB recently are possibly attributable to class nuttiness leading up to spring break (on which we are currently! hiding out in the desert). More likely, it's a combination of that, the drain on energy that a more-than-full course load + 25 hour work week crammed into a weekend, uncertainty of what happens next, and possibly general seasonal affective poopery.

However, there are some bright discoveries -- chief among them the delicious produce at H-Mart in nearby Catonsville.

Oh, and my clear desire to one day raise pet/laying chickens/turkeys/ducks. Mmmm! There's something about little clucking birds that are extremely cheering. Obviously, that's probably not going to happen in the middle of downtown Baltimore. But someday...in the distance.

As far as school goes, things are going well. Really, well as can be expected. As a friend is fond of reminding me: "If you're going to overload yourself like that, at least be kind enough to your psyche to forgive it when it can't deliver the top quality that you're used to." As far as vocal instruction goes, I'm working diligently, but I could be working a bit harder. Which I imagine is a pretty good place to be. At least I'm not burning out on it.

Kind of the opposite, it's developing really quite well -- it's just a totally odd feeling sitting here with my still-forming technique and not really able to articulate, even to myself, mentally, why X isn't working. It's easy to see that X isn't working...but the functional reason? Well, I suppose that's why I have a teacher, eh?

And speaking of teacher, not for the last time, I am reminded that the strides I've made this year would not have been possible without this particular student/teacher setup. He's so generous with his energy and his time, it's almost embarrassing to be the beneficiary. And it's a nice incentive to make the most of it. Because, you know, who knows when he will retire.

But anyway, as the first year at Peabody draws to a close, I do have some questions weighing on my mind, and I'm not entirely sure what would/could answer them. But they are nagging all the same, and there's kind of no room for that right now. I've got my first "unveiling" at a voice department recital that I need to pull together and polish. This in this last week.

But what sort of post would this be without some youtube?

2008-02-28T02:38:00.002-05:00

whoah, this has been floating around on the intrarwebs for awhile now, but this is actually pretty decent sound and video (i.e., you won't have to turn the volume way way up to hear it).

Julia Varady (a house favorite here) sings Abigaille

This, on the other hand, you will, but it's probably worth it.

Young young Isabel Rey singing for a Caballe masterclass

two thoughts

2008-02-16T22:32:00.003-05:00

briefly, because a dinner of empanadas awaits me and I shan't keep them lonely:

1) I had a great conversation with someone (sparked by a good night at the opera) about art not as objects, but rather the relationship between that object its context. This was doubly interesting since I seem to be having a series of such revelations about things, particularly voices and performances. Voices that I hadn't particular feelings about have become instead, very appreciated. And it has to do with context, both within the setting of the voice and my own positionality. It's interesting to think of voice not as some object that is put together, like flowers on a table in a setting or in a vase -- but rather, as a painting thereof because you can't extract it from its setting that way, despite its recognizability (well, sometimes).

2) Earlier in the week I also went to a Handel lecture given by Ellen Harris, whom you may remember from a previous post. She talked about the intersection of the profane and sacred music of Handel's italian output, though it seemed more centered on certain observations about treatments of floridity in these works. Central to her examples is the oratorio "Il Trionfo del tempo e del disinganno" in which Beauty (Bellezza) must choose between Piacere (Pleasure) and Time and Good Counsel (Tempo e Disinganno). In this work, Harris argues, floridity and virtuosity is used to depict something alluring yet dangerous, and because of the librettists insertion of Handel into the scenario in Piacere's palace, a specific kind of virtuosity is employed.

In any case, the work ends with this scene sung by Bellezza. Isabel Rey (who sounds better than last I encountered her, though even in that setting, she sounded better with repeated hearings) and accompanied by Marc Minkowski, whose babies I want to bear.

i'll have something more sometime soon

2008-01-27T17:48:00.000-05:00

but for now, let me just say that youtube user "lochness11" posts awesome stuff. to wit:

school, take 2

2008-01-16T01:09:00.000-05:00

The new school year has kicked off, and it's already crazy with all sorts of busy-ness. Suppose it's just as well to jump right in, right?

This'll be kind of short, but progress is coming along with vocal development. I feel much more mixed about it than I should because it's not developing in the specific order I'd like it to (but it's doing all kinds of nutty [good] things in many unplanned or unforeseen ways). More (or less) on this later.

However, this post is more about a trip I took to Durham, NC to visit a great friend of mine. During this trip we discovered that Foster's and the Q shack are incredibly tasty, for different reasons, and that the L word really is a good show with male eye candy (who would have thought?).

Though maybe it's just me...

Now, back to sleeping. And Haydn songs.

2007-12-28T05:14:00.000-05:00

ok, so twice in a day. in fact in so many hours, but... really?

2007-12-28T04:26:00.000-05:00

I once, in the throes of early post-adolescent passion, wrote 30 love poems for someone.

We used to have cookouts around a fire with new friends.

I sang Samuel Barber and he played guitar.

We used to get slices of pie at the coffee shop and try to goad each other into flipping the bird; I kept score.

The last time I saw him, he had grown a soul patch and ditched the baseball cap he always wore, which had inadvertently emphasized his ears. I missed it.

I drove him home through the dry summer air, pocked with lightning and sad neon. He asked me not to forget him as he hugged me tightly.

I haven't, but I don't know where he is now.

So much for love, huh?

2007-12-24T22:58:00.000-05:00

I am now home for the holidays (mmmmmm!) and my sister just "made" me (because really, I didn't protest very much at all) watch the first National Treasure in preparation for the National Treasure movie that just opened.

I now confess I have a mildly massive geek-crush on Justin Bartha, the guy who plays geeky Riley Poole. Here are some blue eyes (of which I am usually not such a fan) to keep dreaming about:

2007-12-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

on wednesday, i had my last final. it was a singing/performance final for english diction, which must have been nervewracking for the two students who weren't voice majors. i can only imagine -- and they acquitted themselves just fine.

however, one of my classmates just got out and knocked out a song by Richard Hageman, Do Not Go My Love. It was the first time I heard her sing and it was such an amazing fit, vocally, temperamentally that I couldn't help but start crying.

at least it was a more or less "pretty cry."

i think it really hits home the point of singing things that you do really well, because it's just so much less effective if you sing something with more of a "name" or "cachet" and leave much to be desired.

in any event, finals are over and it's just work this weekend, packing, and then getting on a plane home, where I'll eat, dig up some music, learn german, eat, sleep, and eat. delicious!

life changes

2007-12-12T16:52:00.000-05:00

so in addition to moving house, i recently attended a [stunning] masterclass given by Leon Fleisher.

I didn't really know what to expect -- I'm not even sure if I expected anything other than to hear people play and to hear Leon Fleisher give whatever advice he could.

It's consistently amazing what happens when people become so intimately knowledgeable (particularly on the teaching end) in different fields. The best, I think, develop some sort of underlying architectural sense for what is not quite meshing, which often have tectonic and far-reaching effects -- and other times, involve miniscule detailing but finish off a product in such a way so as to be essential, detail or no.

Fleisher was incredible at fixing things that are apparent at a listener's level but are rarely fixable from that direction. Instead, the changes need to be approached (according to Cornelius Reid) functionally. Why is this phrase drooping? If it is something that a music lover can hear and identify, that doesn't mean said music lover is necessarily able to fix it just by pointing out the symptom.

It was pretty great to watch. Also, got an interpretive idea that I'm now mildly obsessed with applying to a particular piece I'm working on. Mmm. May share if anything comes of it.

ok, now must get ready for choir concert. boo.

2007-12-05T20:51:00.000-05:00

I've become somewhat obsessed with Steve Reich's piece Piano Phase.

As I understand it, it's a work written for 2 pianos (though Reich has also given latitude for other instruments such as marimba, etc -- and has apparently said that he prefers this performed by percussionists rather than pianists). The pieces consists of twenty-three different musical ideas that are to be played for a duration as determined by the performers. They are instructed to begin playing each idea in unison, then one of the two should begin relaxing the tempo while they other keeps strict time so that the music begins "phasing" out of time, creating a particular kind of euphony that is intense.

Here's a performance with choreography that is breathtakingly and agonizingly beautiful.

There are times when I cannot be absolutely sure that the video speed is kept constant, such is the power of this performance to seemingly stop time. It feels that time itself is manipulated in this piece which is astounding.

music with cojones

2007-12-04T23:23:00.000-05:00

Apropos of a comment left by Alex (not me -- of the Wellsungs) at Maury's, I really dig it when performers (conductors, singers, directors -- ya, i think they should be lumped into the performer category. If nothing else, they're performing the more traditionally recognized performers) really give no quarter to the idea that early music is super-decorous and/or limp.

How's this for a shot in the arm:

It's so magnetically sung, and in some ways, I can see the argument for anachronistic stylistic choices in her singing, but it sounds fervently Mozartian still! Wonder of Wonders.

Also, just because she was in the same clip (though unsinging), I'm totally blown away by the disparity between Kasarova's speaking and singing voice.

i'm alive

2007-11-30T20:12:00.000-05:00

or at least I think I am. This has been a nutty nutty week, but I shall spare you the details.

The big picture is that I have moved into a gorgeous (4th floor) apartment with a good friend of mine from school. It's beautiful. Ok, and gorgeous, but you knew that. It looks transfigured after the clean-up job the management company did after we took our first look.

It seems like it's a smaller management company, so you get some of the personality of individuals, but with a more business-appropriate standardization (none of the, say, crazy landlords that try to steal your security deposit). In the case of our apartment, the choices came down to the floor tile used in the bathroom, the carpet throughout the apartment, and the wall/ceiling colors.

They're all very neutral and picked to be appealing to most everyone, but they are not drab. The carpet is a muted caramel color and is padded exceedingly well so it's very soft. The walls are painted a diffuse off-white color that picks up the color of the carpet, really unifying the space. The kitchen/bathroom tiles are similarly well-chosen.

In any event, it's also been a trying time because it is end of term in addition to the financial squeeze and time crunch of moving. But, that is over. It was definitely an exercise in trying to put aside the frustrations of things not working and instead focusing on a) what is working and maintaining it and b) what is the first source of what isn't working (rather than just symptoms).

I just put my finger on the source of vocal trouble, at least -- the time crunch has eaten into the time that I've been putting into really developing vocally and keeping the gears all oiled and lined up (such as they can be in this technique-building stage). The fact that I haven't been able to do that (or rather, chose not to with the limited time that I had) meant that I, instead, had to focus on how to make specific performances work.

Note to self: always make time for the basics!

moooooving!

2007-11-28T18:33:00.000-05:00

The past week or so has been a flurry of crap. Good and bad crap -- I think it'll end up being good crap retrospectively, but currently it's just...crap. crap crap crap.

But on the bright side, the week (and term) is (are) almost over AND tomorrow I get to bond with a Budget Rental truck and move my possessions to my new living environment.

I'm told it looks faboo (I haven't seen it yet since they've fixed it up)!

WOO. Moving.

mockumentary?

2007-11-24T08:15:00.000-05:00

courtesy of MFI and musings re Brewer and Vanessa, I discovered this.

I have to admit that I giggled a little bit when the woman from the Post-Dispatch (I think) says "she's a star." It just seemed a mockumentary-type moment a la Christopher Guest movies.

2007-11-23T01:34:00.000-05:00

Turkey day is freshly over and I just discovered this: more interesting articles/writings/interview material with Meredith Monk

Here is an excerpt to whet the appetite:

FRANK J. OTERI: [...] Do you consider yourself a composer first?

MEREDITH MONK: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Why?

MEREDITH MONK: Because the heart of my work is the singing. I think of my work as a big tree with two main branches. One main branch is the singing and it started from my solo work, exploring the human voice and all its possibilities. That's been a very strong discipline for over 30 years, working with my own instrument and discovering all the different possibilities.

and another:

MEREDITH MONK: [...] after being in New York for one year and doing a lot of performing in different galleries and churches and places like that, I really missed singing a lot, straight out singing, so I sat at the piano and started vocalizing. There was a one day sometime in 1965 when I realized, in a flash (...it really was a flash experience...), that the voice could have the kind of fluidity and flexibility of the body, say, like the articulation of a hand. That the voice could be an instrument and that I could make a vocabulary built on my own voice the way that I had in movement. In movement, I had had a lot of limitations physically. That was to my advantage on a certain level because I had to find my own idiosyncratic way of moving. In some ways, technical limitations are good, because you have to find your own way.

Incidentally, anybody know how I might get in touch with Ms. Monk? I understand she teaches voice but am not sure how I should go about exploring the possibility of study...

to make do

2007-11-21T13:28:00.000-05:00

sometimes we must make do with what we have. and sometimes we realize we have more that's valuable than anybody would have guessed, even ourselves.

I sense that a little bit with Ms. Cathy Berberian, a particular hero of mine if you're late to the party :)

2007-11-20T21:47:00.000-05:00

thought

2007-11-18T08:25:00.000-05:00

I feel I have been making great progress on fundamental technical issues so far this semester, and while working hard has been a big part of a it, just as important, I think, has been the approach that my teachers has taken with me.

It reminds me of what I read once about Jan DeGaetani's teaching style. One of her former pupils was being interviewed about his own teaching (he was being awarded something for his teaching excellence) and he spoke about DeGaetani's approach. He recalled that sitting in on her lessons, he realized that although she saw all the things that needed to be fixed, she didn't address them head on. Instead, her approach was roundabout, by "the back door" (his words, not mine!), seemingly unconnected to the problem at hand. But lo! the problem would be addressed just as surely as if it had been mentioned explicitly.

creepy

2007-11-16T20:55:00.000-05:00

I just saw two performances of Britten's The Turn of the Screw. The two casts are directed in two different readings of the famously open-ended story by Henry James.

Now very intrigued and will probably do some digging into both opera and story (which I had read, but in hiiigh schooool so long ago).

In preliminary stumblings, I found this, a video version featuring, among others, Helen Donath as the singing voice of the Governess:

Of course, I also have to share more upbeat Donath!

hee hee thong

2007-11-15T18:38:00.000-05:00

Alright, so it's no golden triumphal thong, but in some ways, it might be even better. OperaChic should be pleased (that is, if she isn't already familiar with this!)

nostalgia

2007-11-14T23:59:00.000-05:00

for the first time in i don't know how long, i felt nostalgia for the last time i was in school.

yesterday, i had followed a friend of mine to sub for a choir conducting job he did at the hospital. (yeah, it was surprising to me.)

anyhow, it was a fun time (i figure if med students have enough desire to spend 1.5 hours a week in a choir rehearsal, they really like doing it), but when i exited the hospital, i was forcibly reminded of so many occasions in the past when i had done so.

i had spent a semester volunteering in the ER on saturdays. it wasn't always a good time, but them's memories. and, the medical school film society showed lots of really great movies, so i spent many a weekend night with a close friend going to screenings there.

so i stepped out on the street and -- it sounds hokey -- but i almost forget when and where i was.

really struck home a favorite expression i read once (in a comic book of all places): elsewhen

god i am an idiot

2007-11-10T20:15:00.000-05:00

i think i just realized i'm thinking about this absolutely wrong, right down to my previous analogies about singing = balancing objects, at least in the way i had been visualizing it, especially with regard to breath support.

see, I had always thought of it kind of like one's breathing system being one long hollow pipe. and efficiency of breath was done by just "putting less" breath through the pipe.

I see now that this approach most closely correlates to a funnel balancing on a desk by it's narrow tip. It's not moving, but any sort of poke and WHOOP it's going to come crashing down.

Instead of less exhalation, I should have thought more inhalation.

Let me put it this way, if one is doing work that must be done gradually, like putting a really heavy object down, one exerts a lot of effort to first bring the object to equilibrium with gravity, i.e., to suspend it in air.

Then you gradually decrease your energy until the object is on the ground.

I just realized that this is what I learned to do with my breath support (which allowed an increase in volume). Instead of trying to relax my support muscles, I should engage them and engage, in addition, their opposing muscles! Short story: it's easier to fine-tune energy already being spent rather than try and engage energy from no expenditure in a controlled way.

This might yield insights into other things now. maybe.

or this might make absolutely no sense in the morning.

whoah, minnesota?

2007-11-09T23:36:00.001-05:00

So on a lark, I investigated the website of Minnesota Public Radio further and there seems to be a gigantic trove of really interesting things, even just in the classical music section.

Playlist below culling some interesting features, including Vivica Genaux (interview and singing of Neapolitan songs), Phil Gossett on Verdi's Ballo, Dinnerstein and the Goldberg Variations.

tickle the nose

2007-11-09T23:17:00.000-05:00

GAH! In an effort to get me to utilize nasal resonance areas, my teacher has asked me to do series of exercises based upon and around singing "ning" with full closure to the mouth.

just today, we were warming up with various patterns using "ning" when he said that your nose should be buzzing off the wall and it should nearly hurt!

hm. so I'm trying to work with that as a guide to my search, because heretofore, I have felt nary a tickle in my nose until now when the front of my nose was going "holy god, scratch me because I am itchy with these vibrations.

may this serve as a note to self. now to continue.

meredith monk

2007-11-08T10:01:00.000-05:00

I knew what I forgot yesterday. Well one of the things I forgot. I forgot to listen to the Meredith Monk interview (weirdly, also at Minnesota Public Radio like the Fleisher clips...)

Interview:

Meredith Monk performs Our Lady of Late (for voice, wineglass, and percussion):

also on agenda: listening to Atlas. Impressions later.

diva, or velour?

2007-11-07T17:52:00.000-05:00

I just came home from attending a concert given by a collaborative pianist of mine. Given that this week has been revolving around some bizarre little theme, it only now struck me what that theme might be.

During the Monday masterclass, Roger Vignoles often asked the accompanists to stand as he took his turn at the piano to demonstrate a point or another. Aside from recalling what Leon Fleisher had to say about how focal dystonia (and the resulting inability to play as demonstration) affected his teaching, it also was the seed for my current thoughts on how to balance volumes and what forte and piano mean, practically.

Hearing Vignoles accompany, I was struck by how strongly voiced the lines he wanted to highlight were. If one paid attention, they were played at a considerable dynamic. However, every other texture was made to be incredibly transparent and light, almost as if in compensation.

Except it's not in compensation for anything. One wants to hear what is important, and one wants to hear it clearly. This is the reason why beautifully articulated scales at a slower absolute tempo sound "faster" than slurred scales at a faster absolute tempo. It's because without clarity, sound becomes just that, disorganized sound. So a low rumble is more distracting than a clear melody with very light accompaniment texture.

Which reminded me eeeerily of a piano masterclass I had with Jose Feghali when I was a wee lad. As he put it (and as I remember it, which might be totally apocryphal at this distance), there is very little between a melodic p and melodic f when playing in a hall. The dynamic contrast comes from the volume of everything else and the texture. (A muddy texture will always sound louder than a transparent one.)

So the diva route could perhaps be to think "well, damn -- volume isn't my problem; it's all under the pianists control! play softer!" but I think that also misses the point about texture. A voix mixte production of similar volume to a tone that has more "core" will sound softer. And in a way it is. The texture is softer. chinchilla vs. cotton!

But another thing that both Feghali and Vignoles seemed to be getting at, at least indirectly, and what my experiences have been listening to student singers (and why I'm graaateful to be studying with whom I'm studying) is that they've been seeking clarity of meaning, which goes hand in hand with a clarity of text.

Vignoles wanted more clarity of line from both the accompanists and vocalists -- less so on the diction. But I also found that to be sometimes in need of some help. This bit of writing from the marvelous Ira Siff published in Opera News comes to mind:

Another benefit of Doria's [forward] placement is abundantly clear diction. This is a most attractive component of her performances of French song. The two-CD set Melodies Francaises (Malibran-Music CDRG 101) offers an artist who approaches this genre without artifice, bent on pure communication of the text. Doria began her career as a recitalist and maintained an interest in song literature into her seventies, when she made her final recordings. The keys chosen for the fifty-nine songs, recorded (with one exception) in 1953, do not give Doria's high instrument the consistent opportunity to make certain vocal effects that we have come to associate with this idiom -- floated pianissimos in particular. Such a tessitura would have impeded clarity of diction. Instead, we discover an interpreter never tempted by preciousness, who delivers the poetry with an emphasis at least equal to the one she affords the melody, capable of ravishing effects, incapable of affectation.

So my driving search is for clarity. For now and into the future.

sidenote: I'm pissed that I totally missed out on a Meredith Monk seminar that was little, if at all, advertised. GAH! But bonus stuff re Leon Fleisher!

Youtube snippet of behind-the-scenes filming of the documentary Two Hands:

An interview with Leon Fleisher when he visited the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, followed by a performance of Bach's And Sheep May Safely Graze arranged by Egon Petri.

masterclassen

2007-11-05T17:04:00.000-05:00

The voice department here had a vocal masterclass with wonderful accompanist Roger Vignoles.

Leaving aside the various challenges of masterclasses (a friend said to me that it's a nice performing opportunity because the performer gets to sing the piece twice [and improve] and the master gets to take the credit!), I thought this one was handled really quite well. Vignoles worked equally with vocalists and accompanists, which fit hand in glove with his insistence that the voice and the piano become more interwoven, interlaced.

There were also many other bits of interpretive advice, which seem, from an audience listener's viewpoint to be rather apparent after doing a combined study of the text, the vocal line, the piano setting, and their joint intricacies. (of course that's quite a lot of work that is easy to shirk in the scramble just to learn the music -- note to self, have a lot of this type of stuff to do!)

But enough about that. Mr. Vignoles is also featured in this masterclass in Edinburgh with Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf!

points

2007-11-05T01:13:00.000-05:00

A small order of Five Guys' fries is too too large to consume by oneself. Even by twoself.

I "get" to move again sometime this month - either at the middle of the month or at the end.

Performance happened this Saturday. The production was a wonderful experience from start to finish. I had no idea I would have so much fun (or how many brains I would consume as a zombie.

Next performance (of something else) is Tuesday. Oof. Must press my tux shirt! Speaking of...where is it? (and speaking of, where did I put the title to my car...)

whew. found it

the end of daylight savings is delicious, but i'm already behind! eek!

we love/hate Heinrich Schlusnus. It's mostly love. And when we hate, it's because we love.

gnight!

untitled

2007-10-30T22:36:00.000-05:00

just some music today.

his voice is a little higher than i expected

2007-10-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

But I'm excited to see him in person when he comes on his book tour nearby!

Courtesy of Lisa Hirsch both for alerting us about this specific appearance at the big G and the general authors series. Here's Alex Ross's talk:

I also have a couple thoughts based on the observations that others have made regarding the paucity of material dedicated to women composers that Hirsch brought up and made reference to.

Not having purchased the book yet (mi dispiace!), my thoughts are simply preliminary. There are a couple things that strike me as curious. So far as I can tell, the book cover

on its face, makes no distinction about a focus on *western* ("classical") music, despite the book seeming (judging from the Table of Contents) to focus pretty much on this topic exclusively. It's just sort of assumed that it'll be about western music. I understand that the provocative title of "the rest is noise" is meant to segue into Ross's observations that there are many linkages and fewer boundaries between so-called classical music and other "forms" of music in the 20th century than one normally thinks (so his book is about music and not just classical), but in a sense it also seems dismissive of non-western music -- the implication being that "if it's not covered here, it's just noise!"

In a sense, it's this title that makes it sit a little uneasily for me, now that I think about it. Obviously, no tome could possibly cover everything of interest in western music of the 20th century, but I think there is an element of, well, not irresponsibility, exactly -- perhaps insensitivity -- to attaching such a provocative (all-encompassing) title to a book that cannot possibly (even in theory, much less in practice, given length limitations that Ross implicitly alludes to) talk about everything that *isn't* "noise."

On the other hand, the title is pretty damned sexy. "The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century in the West" or "The Rest is Not Western: Listening to the Twentieth Century" just sound castrated. And, I must confess that it didn't really dawn upon me how exclusionary such a title could be until fairly recently (i.e., now).

[To my mind, there are at least two ways to read it. One is to say, all's well and good if the target audience and the author can refrain from repeating what is understood by both parties. (The response being twofold: {abstractly} excluding, or at least de-prioritizing, those who do not understand runs counter to the purported objective of such a book in the first place; and that there is a fine though important distinction between what is implicitly or explicitly understood in a conversation and what is invisible in a conversation -- I would argue that in this case, it seems the latter is more explanatory.) Another (not mutually exclusive) way to read what missing titular implications might mean could be to say that it was not purposeful (and very likely covered in the text quite close to the beginning). [Response being that even just discovered something that just popped up doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered and commensurate action take. Reductive example - just because I didn't know I had a pimple before I looked in the mirror doesn't mean it's invited to stay.]

I mean, it's a small data point because, as I mention, I'm quite sure that the "Western" qualification comes within the first 10 pages, and it's really quite premature to form anything resembling an opinion without considering the entirety of book itself. But a work's title isn't exactly the least important or meaningful of its assets, and underlying implications of "The Rest is Noise" are really quite more impactful than first appears. For instance, I don't think anybody would dream of titling a book "The Rest is Not Fit to Eat: Award-Winning Recipes" and then have the book be about western food. Nor would I dream of buying a book called "The Rest is Superstition: Twentieth Century Chemistry" and have it just be about organic synthesis. What makes it seem less jarring to speak of Music (with a capital M) when we really mean "western music"? It's been interesting to think about it. I have a couple inchoate ideas but no answers.

As far as the women composers point that has been brought up, it does seem a little strange that it would be a deliberate oversight, particularly as juxtaposed against "invisible [male] composers" (and with the pieces that Alex has written about Björk, Gubaidulina {pssst, do they make appearances in his book?}, and his concern with the Vienna Philharmonic's stance on gender).

I don't really have any sort of real opinion on this subject since I have yet to peruse the book and have no real way of knowing (short of reading it myself!) how I would think such a subject is treated. My only observation would that a really classy way of speaking about them would be simply acknowledging the difficulty that women composers have and do experience. Invisibility is an issue, and it seems clear that Alex Ross also has very clear ideas on women composers who are not "justly" neglected.

Hmm. Rainy thoughts on a rainy day. More later, mebbe :)

pendulum? or stick-balancing?

2007-10-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

I've been having very good lessons so far. Good in the sense that they feel hard -- I feel like I'm being worked during them and they leave me frustrated. In a good way; frustrated that I'm not singing better because I know it is within my grasp (as opposed to the bad way where it feels frustrating because it seems I'll never get it/understand). So it's a good situation.

And it's interesting to think about how progress is never a straight line forward. It's usual hugger-mugger wavering around equilibrium. Sometimes you overshoot, sometimes you undershoot, hence the pendulum or stick-balancing (like taking a can and balancing it on point in the palm of your hand) thought. It occurred to me how little goes a long way. At the moment, I'm needing to clean up my diction, but I've been doing it a little bit too much and it sounds too chewed up and caricatured. Not to mention destroying the musical line.

So it's a question of important things being there, but not so being there that they're overwhelming. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of piano playing and bringing out voices. It's almost that you just have to listen for them and voila, they appear. If you try too much more than that, then it sounds forced.

Dios mio, I'll get this yet!

to be experimented with

2007-10-21T20:54:00.000-05:00

Or if you're Winston Churchill, "with which to be experimented."

W.J. Henderson on Tetrazzini's debut at the Manhattan Opera Company, singing Traviata:

She sang staccato with consummate ease, though not with the approved method of breathing. Her method is merely to check the flow between tones instead of lightly attacking each note separately. But the effect which she produces, that of detached notes rather than strict staccato, is charming.

As quoted by Nicholas Limansky in Opera Quarterly, 2004.

Will investigate this more in a practice room tomorrow.

your pen and paper

2007-10-20T22:00:00.000-05:00

I'm sure there is a lot to be unpacked regarding the amount of interest in and pleasure I derive from reading singers' biographies. Maybe it's bound up in weird hagiographic narratives, particularly as I might imagine such things about me (bwahaha). I like to think it's more of a "see what kind of crap I'm getting into." But mostly, I think it's a remnant of my intense audiophilia (which is still present, mind you) which led me to singing in the first place.

By the by, Regine Crespin's autobiography is, so far, a wonderful piece of writing - full stop - never mind a wonderfully written autobiography. To wit:

You [my father] and I faced the horror together, alone like a mother with a child about to be born. But you left me, perhaps to be born in another dimension I couldn't reach. Hardly five minutes later, your drawn, pained face became peaceful, handsome again, and I, undone, was momentarily angry with you.

part 2

2007-10-19T23:20:00.000-05:00

miss me? it's ok if you did. work for friday is now over (not least because it is now technically saturday...but who's keeping score?) and so more thoughts.

trip home was rather odd for a variety of reasons, but chiefly because it was to record my mother singing a musical setting of a japanese setting of a funerary poem in english. and why was she recording this? well, my grandmother, (who is getting on in years and lately has not been very healthy) had heard this song and decided that it would be wonderful to be sung at her funeral. And of course, when you have bona-fide singers in the family...well, then.

So it was a little odd project, but it's done.

Other than that, today has been a really wonderful day, musical-exploration-wise. I borrowed two autobiographies of singers - Eileen Farrell and Regine Crespin (which I would normally buy, but are now since horribly expensive). I also checked out the 3 CD set of Rachmaninov songs sung by Elisabeth Söderström with Vladimir Ashkenazy. What a wonderful set of music! I also adore her tightly-woven sound, though admittedly not for everyone. It's also somewhat vindicating to note that keeping true to pitch all the time is no small feat, even for someone (like ES) with perfect pitch. There are times when it just sags, especially if it's not watched like a hawk. It's also sticking out much more clearly now, so I think it'll be that much easier (note: not easy) to root out of my own singing.

I've also finished Farrell's autobiography today. It's such a nice read. In a lot of ways, I think that the narrative that is shared is very very different from the normal "diva" book. In a lot of ways, particularly in opinions, I think she presents herself very plainly and doesn't mince words or pussyfoot around. Which isn't to say that she isn't kind or discreet - just there's not equivocation, even (or perhaps especially) when it comes to her own situation. She comes across as quite even-keeled in her analysis of her marriage, the conductors that she's worked with, her own behavior, etc. And what's most refreshing is that it's all clearly situated within her own opinion. Am starting on the Crespin now.

Also, for lagniappe, I really am finding Mitsuko Uchida in interviews incredibly vital.

Oh, and more - gorgeous toooooone. Midori!

double-header part 1

2007-10-19T17:26:00.000-05:00

As I have a long night ahead of me, a bunch of bumpy thoughts will come rocketing out, most likely in two parts.

First and foremost, there has been significant strides in the voice. Generally speaking, it feels like it's more solid, particularly in the upper reaches, which is a nice change of place. Cracks now are more clearly linked with their causes as opposed to generally unexplained fractures. It'll take time before actual confidence comes, and of course there is a lot of smoothing to be done, but generally what really came together was the sensation of resistance in the breath and sound.

It's weird, and the best analogy I can come up with a string one. When I started playing violin as a wee beteen, I was always drawn to utmost intensity. I developed a whole heck of tension in odd places trying to wring as much sound (and as dramatic a sound) as possible. Apparently, this intense sound is not how most wee violinists begin making violin noises, so by the time I got to me last (and most important/influential) teacher - of anything, really - most of our work was in scaling this tenseness and intensity back so I could play with a fuller range of colors and radiance.

Compare the sounds that Nathan Milstein (whose tone my teacher compared mine too - I have no idea if she was serious) makes in two different Bach solo compositions.

E major Gigue:

Chaconne:

If you watched them in this order, it might strike you how different the opening sounds are. The Gigue is played with flowing strokes, lots of bow. The Chaconne opens with much more intense sound, and you can almost imagine the feeling of Milstein's bow pulling the sound out from his violin (and the sound somewhat resisting), giving it that plangency and solidity.

But then if you go back to the Gigue, you can hear that pull there still!

So the best description I can give to what it is that I am on the track to figuring out is that I think I know how to get that pulled sound. I can feel a sensation in my singing of my pulling out the sound from my body (it doesn't feel like the cords, per se), which seems to have 1) focused the sound and 2) given me a lot more air capacity, in that I need less air to make the noises I was making (particularly up high). Perhaps as a reaction to how my progress in violin-learning, I think I was absolutely hesitant to introduce any kind of similar tensions (or juxtaposition of forces, shall we say, as "tension" is generally short for "bad tension" in vocal pedagogy). Before trying to sing this way, it felt like I was just pouring out air like buckets of water. Which of course would use up the air really quickly and not send it very far either.

I sang this way for my teacher yesterday, and immediately he brightened up and encouraged me to sing out even more (apparently, and my mother picked up on this when I was home this past weekend (which might have to be taken up in part 2, later)). It seems that I am psychologically worried about singing too loudly, or openly, or what - but I'm definitely not just letting the sound out enough. (I might have to bond more with my devil-may-care id which has had to channel its energy into other activities since I have been barring it from music-making, it seems).

Anyhow, some more lovely violin playing!

Edit: As a sidenote, there's this one kind of cookie that catering does in the kitchen at work that always taste/smells ever-so-faintly like cooked chicken liver (which is a flavor I happen to like...just not in a cookie).

stones of different sorts

2007-10-14T21:05:00.000-05:00

Am visiting home briefly during break:

1) milestone - 100 posts

2) grindstone - sing sing sing! (but we're getting somewhere! not sure if I'm doing it correctly, but I think I'm using my air much more economically-- *and* to some extent am mixing registers. woo!)

3) flintstone (ok I got nothing - but apropos of the Charlie Rose interview with Natalie Dessay, there's an interview excerpt from a posted interview with Joel Kaskow (who runs culturekiosque, which I began reading a looong time ago) which might throw some context on why/what Dessay says the things she says about acting, the theater, and opera. To wit:

Operanet: I read that you consider acting almost more important than singing...

ND: It is more important. For me, singing and music are only a means of expression, the goal being a theatrical and emotional experience.

Operanet: Would you say, for example, that it is 60% acting and 40% music?

ND: No, for me it would be 70% theater and 30% music and voice, which is not to say that it is unimportant, because you must have that 30%. You can't say, "I act and I don't care if I don't sing well." You must sing well and make music, be a musician. But that's only 30% of the singer's work, even if that 30% is primordial.

Operanet: When I saw you in the role of Ophélie in Hamlet (by Ambroise Thomas) in Geneva, I wrote that you sang in just about any position other than one comfortable for singing.

ND: Definitely, because if you want to sing without moving around, all you have to do is give concerts.

Full interview here: (free registration required) Interview with Dessay

4) whetstone - Imma possibly moving apartments (yay, roommmmaaaate) and as such will be bringing back such delightful things as a hippie cooker (pet name for slow cooking device that is energy efficient, not an implement to cook laid-back, peace-loving people) and a set of dinnerware.

Ok, I think I'm tapped out for now. Until more things come up!

geeeeekalert!

2007-10-11T17:49:00.000-05:00

Do your inner musicologist a favor and visit Alex Ross's, New Yorker's music critic, blog for book-related media and links. Sweeeet.

heading west

2007-10-10T22:51:00.000-05:00

In honor of traveling westward this weekend, here is an interview between Anna Deavere Smith and Jessye Norman earlier this year at Aspen.

Yay southwest and the pervasive laidback attitude! (keep with it until the interview - it can totally befuddle those used to a different pace)

meh

2007-10-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

frustration!

it comes with the territory because there are some major technical fundamentals being adjusted but my intonation and pitch sense when singing is totally off kilter, and I just feel like a complete dumbass wasting people's time when pitch is brought to my attention again and again.

obviously just pounding my way through it isn't working, so it's time for a different tack. teacher suggested I use my violin to heighten pitch sensitivity. I remember having to do this before (as a violinist and unlearning crappy well-tempered tuning), so maybe it'll help. I'm not entirely sure because the problem isn't that I can't hear these pitch differences - I can. I'm just unsure of how to deal with the fact that the pitch that I hear in my head when I'm singing is not the pitch that other people hear across the room.

GAH.

weekend hodgepodge

2007-10-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

semi-related thoughts:

ergonomic typing posture seems to be a lot like well-observed singing technique: for most people, it just doesn't matter, but if you're going to be typing full-tilt for an extended amount of consecutive time, you better pull your body posture in alignment and float your wrists like a larynx if you don't want to be super achy. you *can* get away with lousy posture, etc., but that's how you get carpal tunnel.

i'm really starting to feel settled into school, more or less. the full implications of what my teacher said to me ("peabody is gambling on you; you are gambling on peabody; you are gambling on me when you decided to study with me; and i am gambling on you, teaching you. nobody knows how things will turn out, we just work hard and hope for the best.") finally caught up. oddly enough, it was the positive implications that became clearer (oh, the possible ways of things running off the track are well on my mind, thank you), i.e., that peabody and my teacher are gambling yes, but they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't think it were a smart/good investment. obviously, it doesn't guarantee anything, but I can stop feeling oddly out of place at lessons and realize that everyone here is interested in my doing well.

divine as inspiration for disney's ursula. discuss.

Schumann

Janine Jansen seems like a very articulate person. Of course she's pretty, but a lot of it has to do with how the camera sees her and her makeup/wardrobe. Not that I think it's an illusion, but imagining that people are this pretty without effort just doesn't fly.
gah! embedding isn't working - web-foo too weak...weh weh

mmm sleepies.

tee hee

2007-10-06T02:13:00.000-05:00

oh i had totally forgotten. when i went to durham to visit a friend, we went to the fullframe festival (documentary film festival) to watch this one documentary that i fell asleep while watching paired with this todd solondz film-school project. (other things we didn't end up watching included two hands (leon fleisher!) and helvetica (documentary about a font? no thanks - though according to *everyone* we knew who saw it, it was amazing and more about aesthetics than about fonts per se)).

apparently, it's a pain in the butt to see (and it had to be screened in secrecy?) because of copyright issues from the carpenter estate. hee hee, you see, this is a documentary about the karen carpenter story using barbies. it's amazing.

google videos has it, but shhhh!

what?

2007-09-28T17:38:00.000-05:00

wait a minute. how did it escape me that the branagh film of the magic flute is sung in english?

why?

(and why am I still obsessed with something that I have such difficulty with?...and when will this be released in the US?)

a comforting sound

2007-09-25T01:23:00.000-05:00

senior year of college, my friend in the chemistry department (the only one!) assumed musical directing responsibilities of the women's slavic chorus. of course i went to her concerts. she was very talented, both as a director and a singer.

this is one of my favorite songs in their repertoire -- i can't remember (or tell since the internets aren't arriving at a consensus) whether this is a macedonian or bulgarian tune, but it's lovely regardless! it's also has many more memories attached to it, not least of which is a beautifully moonlit drive in connecticut several years ago.

cara speme

2007-09-22T21:32:00.000-05:00

from

Joyce DiDonato's Website:

Also check out Ms. DiDonato's blog (why did it take me so long to discover it? the world will never know).

the constructed narrative

2007-09-22T02:25:00.000-05:00

so I've already geeked out about Bruno Latour on these pages, but now I get to add another European philosopher of science/knowledge, the polish Ludwik Fleck. His book, Genealogy and Development of A Scientific fact is absolutely changing my life.

Whereas Bruno Latour is talking about the controversies encountered in the development of scientific fact, Fleck talks about the study of and phenomenology of what a scientific fact is. I haven't finished the book, and I'm not entirely sure that I'll be able to parse out the exact philosophical implications of all of this just yet, but the interesting contention that like any other non-scientific "fact," scientific facts are no more ur-real. Social nets condition and determine not only how facts are developed (it's pretty clear from studies done on expectation bias, etc.), but the facts themselves, Fleck argues, are themselves part of the net of intersection social conditions. To illustrate his point, Fleck looks at the genealogy of scientific facts surrounding syphilis and in particular, a genealogy of the Wasserman reaction which is used to diagnose syphilis.

I had trouble visualizing it until recently when I was in the shower. You know those little graph illustrations of curved space that always pop up when talking about Einstein and relativity?

As an analogue, think of societal knowledge or through structure as what represents gravity and curves the space, what Fleck calls "active" knowledge. Next, consider each line as a particular line of thought, with intersections as scientific facts. This, Fleck calls "passive" knowledge (in that it follows the traditional idea of 'reality' as some objective existence that can be known definitively).

So, a traditional view of science and scientific inquiry would tend to view the process as: logical inquiry (lines) being distorted by bias (gravity). Thus, unbiased (or least-biased) inquiry is possible, so the driving goal is to remove bias.

As I understand it, Fleck argues that no, this "distortion" actually is no such thing. That's just how the terrain *is* based on the prevailing thought style (as he calls him) and logical inquiry must needs fit to this terrain. The byproduct of this is that there *is* no objective truth because for this to be true, there must be cognition without a society or societal knowledge, which Fleck expressly and specifically describes as impossible.

It's taking a bit of time and energy to wrap my head around these thoughts and to visualize it -- but it's definitely changing my life, particularly with lots of collisions of secondary (tertiary or even more +ary levels) thought-styles that occurs with places of "artificial" diversity (e.g., Washington, D.C., most post-high school settings).

Anywhere, where the hell was I talking about? OH OH, the reason why this plays into music study (and life and general)? There's an interesting phenomenon that accompanies thought styles, and that is the general suppression of extraneous or contradictory information. It's certainly apparent in scientific inquiry and experimentation ("we went looking for a vaccine," "after this experiment, it was clear we needed to do X so we performed Y experiment) which almost never holds up when the process is more clearly examined and parsed (Fleck observes wrly that well-defined experiments cannot lead to cognition since well-defined experiments require the outcome to be known!). In retrospect, then, what was a kinky line of haphazard direction is straightened out into a direct A to B line. And what's interesting is that this isn't done on some sort of Cartesian plane:

But instead, this twisty turny thing, is *called* straight and the thought style bends to conform to it, assimilate it. Thus, the shortest (logical) distance between fact A and fact B is no longer a "straight line" in the sense that it conforms, instead, to the bendy twisty reality of the thought style. That's the thunder of Fleck's argument.

It's so easy to see this in terms of narratives for how people have learned to sing, which is why it's refreshing to hear people talk of how it wasn't A to B and then B to C in their learning. Renee Fleming comes to mind. Vivica Genaux is another (whose metaphor of groping around in the dark to find the door I found particularly apt).

And, my teacher also shared with me other stories in which he spent a great deal of time learning to do things that he's asking me to learn. Which helps, so I don't feel quite like a fuck up for not getting it immediately (that's a really bad personality tick that I'm trying to kick). So, it's back to humming.

Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm hm hm hm hm! Hm hm hm hm HM!

it's a teeny world

2007-09-21T16:24:00.000-05:00

I just returned from the dress rehearsal of Washington Concert Opera's performance of I puritani. On paper, it looked pretty promising:

Arturo: Larry Brownlee
Elvira: Sarah Coburn
some other people
Giorgio: David Pittsinger

I had heard from my previous voice teacher that Larry Brownlee was something special. And he was! I mean, aside from the awards that he's got, it's definitely a beautiful, round voice that's centered quite high. (In the dress, he went for the high F and got it, though it wasn't without its dangers.) It did get lost among the orchestra's thickness, though and one misses a bit of point and ping in the sound, but I think the larger issue was a lack of orchestral transparency, which I gather is unusual under Maestro Antony Walker, but whatever. We call it like we hears it.

Sarah Coburn is an interesting voice. I think she's overparted as Elvira. It's so relentlessly high. And while she can have beautifully emitted high notes (from say, A to E-flat), unless she can prepare for them, they come out screechy. She has to resort to blowsy open-throated attacks to carry through the orchestra and generally seemed to be riding the "I'm gonna blow out my vocal chords" wave pretty hard. When you have to breathe every measure and a half, something's going on (or not, as the case may be).

It was certainly interesting to hear the opera and see a dress rehearsal, which I hadn't really done before, even though it's not quite like a dress rehearsal for a staged performance, I would think. I also realized that Puritani is a snoozer from the mad scene on. ZZZZ. Also, it reinforced the point that just because you *can* sing something doesn't mean you should. It felt like a lot of why this performance even happened was about ability and the music itself was just left to founder a bit. It's also not fun for the audience! You spend the entire time having sympathetic throat convulsions watching the singers struggle!

Yes, not for me. Eek. Back to humming exercises though :)

work. it's the same.

2007-09-20T02:25:00.000-05:00

ok, so it seems kind of trite to say that work, whatever it is, whenever you do it, is more same than different.

i think the biggest difference in the chemistry work/research i've had to do in academic settings and learning to sing work i'm currently doing is mostly in my feelings about it rather than the norms of the process itself.

for those of you who have "suffered" (or enjoyed, though i don't think many people did) chemistry labs - learning to sing is strikingly similar. it didn't really strike me so much until today.

voice teacher will start you out on your process by giving you relatively easy things to do - heuristics for achieving and assimilating into muscle memory the basics. forward focus and "placement," breathing, all that stuff. voice teacher is also able to tell when something works and when it doesn't (and should try to teach you how to tell the same).

Then you go and work up your experiment. And here is where the breakdown occurs. In most chemistry labs, you're required to observe what's going on and submit your findings with your read of the events. In this way, you are encouraged and instructed to develop a sense, a rhetoric, of what it means for an experiment to 'work' and to identify possible areas and explanations for when it 'doesn't.' I find that this doesn't tend to be a part of a lot of voice teaching, sadly. I think it should be.

So as you progress, you move from the more betty crocker-type exercises (wherein you know you add X of this to Y of that at Z temperature), it becomes more complex and your voice teacher becomes more of a collaborator. At this point, you know some things about your voice and mechanism better than your voice teacher might, but the insight and suggestions are far beyond what you might come up with (or it's a time-saving device).

But the clear distinction in all of this is that all of the work and experimentation, even at its more basic level when you're just following directions without having to come up with your own, is done by yourself. Obviously in all things, it would be wonderful to have someone watch over your every move and correct mistakes as they happen or before they happen so as to ensure the speediest and most efficient development, but it just doesn't happen that way, and I'm not even really sure that it should. Which may be in direct disagreement with Kim Wittman's excellent post on this sort of thing (which is, itself, an answer to a NYT article) that has been kicking around in my head for some time. (I'll find the link later.)

Mmmm. Work. It's hard. And dry. But good.

no preamble

2007-09-17T20:34:00.001-05:00

ok, this is short since it's late and I still need to go practice (nap went overlong but sooooo necessary).

two things to share: 1) it dawned on me while watching the following that I am studying with a male Elisabeth Schwarzkopf! At least in the attention to detail and going over of phrases over and over to fix things. (Also very focused on diction!)

These video clips seem really quite valuable. And while I don't doubt that many internet reports of how harsh Schwarzkopf could be in giving these masterclasses, I wonder if some of that might not be intermingled with an unfamiliarity with a tradition of such close, very blunt work. (When I was quite young - 11? I was chewed out in a public masterclass for having lots of talent by crapping it into the toilet by not practicing enough.)

Next set: no explanation needed. Mmmm brings a smile to my face!

frustration

2007-09-15T11:42:00.000-05:00

Argh. Frustration. But the good kick-in-the-ass frustration. Lots of singing, and that's definitely good, but am sooo soo soooo behind in terms of vocal development. So far behind. I'm totally frustrated and tired of not knowing how to sing. It feels like I'm in some weird 5-dimensional bottle-neck where I'm pretty close to figure out which way to go, but I'm still just futzing around and utterly lost.

But, as a good friend said to me "this is kind of awesome, because it'll mean you will work hard. Your job is not actually to sing, but just to try to sing, and your teacher will help tell you how to do that." So it's time to embrace the student-teacher relationship! Full steam ahead. So that means I have a big practice session scheduled after work today.

Anyhow, these pictures are hilarious and awesome.

vocal folds, chest registration

vocal folds, falsetto

whirlwind

2007-08-31T21:57:00.001-05:00

so the first week of orientation at school has ended. it's been so much crap all crammed together. On the one hand, I moved myself and started setting up my logistical life (work, home, etc.) - more on that later. On the other hand, a whole bunch of diagnostics and such were the order of the week.

It's a real change, adjusting to music school. My interest in classical music is now a majority opinion (though my exaact interests prolly not so much). Unlike previous school, I can't just go up to classmates and ask them about Derrida and/or Nietzche (or rather, I can, but I won't get the same kind of answers), so it's a little bizarre. What won't change is that in general, people probably won't want to hear about my chemistry nerdiness. Teeee.

For this reason, perhaps, there's been a lot of internal hand-wringing about whether or not I belong here. I'm still trying to sort out my voice, and I've got a lot of work to do in that vein. There's a fine line between needing a lot of work yet displaying promise and needing a lot of work and not displaying promise. It's all really odd, and I suspect that many of the stories one hears about are, at one level or another, hagiographical narratives constructed in retrospect.

It's, so far, turning out to be a relatively nice transition. Choral audition went well (professor thought I had a really fine voice -- I can't tell if he was serious or it was the pretty face "with a face like that you should always be downstage" [ed. hahahaha, whatevs. must check prescription on eyeglasses]), the various diagnostics have gone well, and all experiences have pointed to the faculty being really on point, warm, and helpful. Very willing to work with the special deficiencies (as well as strengths) of each of the students. It's great. I feel like they aren't stuffing me in a box so much as making me a custom-made coffin. oh wait...

In other news, the biggest worry (which is now slowly subsiding) is figuring out how to wedge work in. Currently, the plan is to work friday evenings and full days saturday and sunday. This requires a ~1 hour commute by rail on fridays and a 1 hour by car commute each way on the weekends. If possible, I'd rather crash saturday nights with a friend. Anyhow, this has become overly long and I gotta get some sleep in.

More thoughts on initial welcome time!

soooothing

2007-08-23T09:19:00.000-05:00

this is pretty hypnotic. i wouldn't mind singing this kind of stuff. video-less sound.

voice vs. package

2007-08-10T23:46:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about the general sneer about how the Met is no longer a Stimmehaus (and the general moaning about why this is the death of opera).

What crystallized it for me was reading a review in Record Review (? is that what it's called? I have no clear recollection one way or another, but it was one of those recording review mags) of the DVD recording of the M22 Nozze di Figaro.

It's actually a very unusual take on the opera -- Harnoncourt takes some very non-traditional tempi (the overture isn't at lightning speed and even sounds grand -- Deh vieni is sung at a rolling, waving clip), but I think it really works. The production also highlights a lot of ambiguity. In a lot of ways, the archetypal characters are not so easily divided between "good" and "bad" and the interactions are much more complex as a result. One line of the review really stood out for me, and I'm paraphrasing. "It turns out that Susanna and the Count really *are* carrying on an affair, and this makes the Countess-Susanna friendship hypocritical."

For many, Susanna or the Countess is the "hero" of the opera, generally seen as unreproachable in behavior and demeanor. (Aside from that little classist line that Rosina sings.) As such, it can be hard to see such a beloved character as having any sort of culpability. I think that in more recent times, this has been challenged. The whole Rosina-Cherubino attraction has been played up more overtly (and with less godmother-godchild overtones), which I think still makes people uncomfortable, despite undeniable support within the source text. So, who's to say that Susanna is not completely conflicted about the Count?

Note that I don't go so far as to believe that Susanna and the Count actually are carrying on a love affair, exactly. My sense of this production is more that Susanna has tried to keep a line in the sand, but refusing a nobleman (in whose employ she is) isn't exactly something that she can do outright. What highlights and underlines is that she isn't sure that she *wants* to refuse him as completely as she could.

Ultimately, her feelings/sense of loyalty to *both* Figaro and Rosina take precedence, leading up to the glorious finale of the opera. But, it's an open enough question which, I think, humanizes Susanna far more than the traditional pert, sparkling virtuous everywoman whose only fault is delighting in verbally scratching Marcellina.

Further, Harnoncourt's conception of the Count's and Susanna's relationship stems from his contention that the only love duet that is sung during the opera is between these two characters. I think it's a debatable point -- but the very fact that it *is* debatable makes it interesting. For once, it gives a new kind of dramatic explanation for why Susanna answers "incorrectly" to the Count's blandishmens so many times (i.e., aside from musical symmetry and structure).

The larger picture is what, then? The larger picture for me is encapsulated in what constitutes acting. I've actually been really entranced with Bando Tamasaburo, the kabuki actor/dancer. What's interesting is that in this particular art form, there is no difference between the two arts, whereas this is most certainly the case in the western tradition. A statement such as "I don't think you can act without dancing" wouldn't really fly.

I think, in a lot of ways, dance and acting are each poorer if they're considered strictly separate. In a similar way, I think that to strip out the possibility of performance transcendence on the operatic stage by focusing exclusively on the voice doesn't end up serving the dramatic form. Concert performances of stage works would be an option, as would a totally different, non-dramatic repertoire. But unless a voice is so jaw-droppingly special (and how many of them are there), there seems little point cutting out certain effectivenesses as a performer simply because they seem "secondary." Which is why I really can't fathom what it is that the noisy detractors about Gelb at the Met really want. I can certainly understand their worry -- after all, I do think that there's something to be said about actually knowing how to sing before putting yourself on the stage, but I think that a willingness to consider more things than just singing as integral to an operatic artist is generally a positive and healthy direction for the art form.

speak of the devil

2007-08-07T22:28:00.001-05:00

did a bit of internet snooping and what do you know? nilsson singing the Farberin in a production at Stockholm, 1975. It's the scene where she renounces her shadow (otherwise known as the lightsaber scene).

in which alex digresses a lot

2007-08-07T17:51:00.000-05:00

Woo! Ok, so as promised over at MFI, I am posting about the DVD of Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten conducted by Sawallisch and recorded at the Aichi Prefectural Art Theater in Nagoya, Japan in 1992.

Some small opening notes. It's on 2 DVDs split with Act 1 on the first disc, the remaining two acts on disc 2. No bonuses, I believe (too lazy to check? check). The booklet has a small little essay on the development of the production between the Bavarian State Opera and the Japanese stage director Ichikawa Ennosuke. The booklet also contains some interesting pictures (they are better lit than screen captures from the DVD would be), including one of Barak holding a sword, which they've made look like a lightsaber! The lightsaber and the vaguely desert-nomad outfit that Barak and sein Weib wear definitely make it look George Lucas-related. tee hee!

It's pretty clear from the cover and box materials that this is (at least partially) an East Asia/Japanese take on the production. Sort of taking the "Asian Fairytale" descriptor of the libretto at face value. I'm certainly not all that well-versed enough in it all to really say one way or another. Astrid Varnay makes a point in her autobiography that it has distinctly seemed more Western than Eastern, given the focus on childbearing and integration in the body, whereas Eastern philosophies, in her view, seem to put a premium on liberation from the exigencies of the body. Which would be true for the strains of Buddhism that I am familiar with. If anything, the libretto of Frau seems to be more Taoist if it is indeed Eastern. (I should probably look into this -- there definitely is a deity/mortal separation among other things.)

It seems to me that when discussing Frau, there seems to be 4 big questions:

1) Complete? Cut? Which cuts?

2) How's the conducting?

3) The production?

4) How's the singing?

To this I would add:

5) How are the 5 protagonists portrayed?

(This would prolly fall under production if you're reeeally picky, but I think it's a big enough subset that it merits a separate question.)

Here is the cliff's notes version:

1) Cut. Supposedly 20 minutes (cf. Robert Levine's review). No, I don't know which 20, sadly, though Straussmonster might know! :)

2) AMAZING. Like I could not have imagined. I don't know how this stacks up against his studio, but it's gloriously fluid conducting on this DVD.

3) It mostly works. The kabuki/normal person divide is both visually interesting and symbolically arresting. There are no big technological elements (unlike the Samson and Dalila temple non-implosion from the Moshinsky production), so everything works and works well (aside from the golden fountain, which falls flat). Phil Gossett would approve of the fast scene changes and quick on/off stage magic summons (i.e., Young (Naked, Unsinging) Man).

4) The 5 principals are all competent, but Marjana Lipovsek is a nuclear warhead.

5) This is going to take repeated viewings for me to get all the nuances, or lack thereof. The problem is that most of the principals seem to be so hard-pressed for the singing that they can't really do much with their phrasing and character-building. One of the best analyses that I've read envisions this as a kind of warped Cosi fan tutte, where the two lover-couples are actually taught how to be more whole human beings, i.e., their current states all lack something. The trick is how to portray that and maintain sympathy.

Longer answer to #4:

Luana De Vol is the Empress and copes well with the demands. She has her moments, particularly in certain vaults into held top notes. Given enough prep time, she can handle it beautifully. The problem is that this happens only a couple times in the score. The upper middle is much less beautiful and very poor of overtones. She's dramatically committed but her vocal technique precludes facial expression and she has no clue how to put attention into her body, so next to Marjana Lipovsek, she looks like a flopping, ineffectual doll.

Here's a playlist with kabuki actor Tamasaburo, who specializes in playing women's roles, an onnagata.

Marjana Lipovsek as the Nurse is comfortable enough with the vocal demands of the role that she alone really presents a character. The only trouble is that the Nurse doesn't seem to have quite as many interpretive challenges as the 4 lovers. To be sure, there are mercurial mood changes, and Lipovsek is right there with them. There just doesn't seem to be much more than (omg omg omg, humans! smelly evil filthy things. we must wash our handses of their filth. scrub scrub scrub). I think there is probably something here about where to let the other shoe, so to speak, drop when the crazy OCD scrubbing comes to the fore.

Janis Martin sings the Farbering with a lighter tone than De Vol's, but more piercing. I would almost say she seems a better fit for the Empress, except that the higher tones aren't terribly comfortable, and she's hard pressed to pull several together as a phrase when required. The Dyer's Wife as a character seems really hard to deal with. This is what a famous proponent has to say in her memoirs (which I just recently bought as the english translation is relatively new!):

One had to be very cuatious playing the Dyer's Wife opposite [Walter] Berry; even Strauss saw her as a battle-ax! ... As Berry made his Barak the most pitiable, love-hungry and henpecked husband you could imagine, it was not necessary to make the wife so coldhearted. In my opinion, Barak is not so pitiful. I see him more as a pasha who wants nothing more from his wife than the satisfaction of his lust whenever he is in the mood. He has absolutely no understanding for his wife's dreams of romance and a better life. She has a roof over her head and food -- what more does she need? Day in and day out she is slave to his three lazy brothers who are constantly underfoot in their shabby hut; Barak, unmoved, looks the othe rway while they try to grope his wife. In her desperation and loneliness she sends out signals meant to make Barak jealous. And he becomes jealous, which is actually an expression of his bruised ego. The Dyer's Wife loves her husband and down deep she longs for the fulfillment of their love as much as he. But in the dreariness of everyday life, they cannot find a way to one another. All this must be kept in mind when Berry is performing Barak. Otherwise, there is the danger of the wife coming off as a real shrew.

Martin, sadly, didn't quite hew together some sort of character that you could sympathize with or whose actions you could rationalize, particularly with some of the quicksilver mood changes (e.g., sleeping draught shenanigans where she says, BAH YOU OAF...wait, who told you to drug my husband? OMG WAKE UP. Oh, now you're up. Butthead).

Alan Titus was merely competent. I got bored watching him. Barak is boring. But a dull-sounding, non-pingy Barak is even more boring. Meh.

Peter Seiffert has the unenviable job of singing the Emperor. But man is his costume cool. The arrows really make the costume. I don't know if it's because he's a dramatic woodblock or because the costume plus the ridiculous tessitura, but he moves like he's got no joints. The singing is mostly on the exciting side of precarious. At least it's pingy!

There you have it. I'm glad I bought it, though. Sawallisch's conducting is kind of a revelation. The really sticky orchestral masses clarify themselves and make sense. Even the choral voices (unborn children, the women slaves during the first Farberin transformation) sound magical. No small trick. The production, too, aside from being a little murky, but that might have to do with watching this on a laptop from a distance, is really beautiful and works smoothly. There are no hiccups amongst the cast or crew -- everyone knows that they're doing. And if their limitations are greater than some of the other proponents, they do their limitations justice.

Maybe I'll follow some of this up in a later post. Maybe :)

judicious cropping

2007-07-26T08:39:00.001-05:00

I was looking through the magazine rack at the bookstore close to work and I saw the cover of NYMag with NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer on the front.

Whoah.

I had (and still don't) really have any idea of who he is.

So I opened it up and saw this:

...

whoah.

And then I saw this and realized the magic of a photo shoot and judicious cropping.

Which isn't to say that he's unattractive, but there be some photo magic happening in the first two.

There's something related here between judicious cropping and the the technologies of performance reproduction (speaking of, I'm curious what Adorno has to say about this. I'm still somewhat daunted by the size of his "Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction"), but I can't think of it right now without sounding tired and obvious.

Because I'm tired, obviously :P

first lesson

2007-07-25T14:38:00.001-05:00

First lesson from my peabody teacher! woo!

I was a little trepidatious leading up to this lesson because I had a tough time deciding between teachers. But I think this lesson was an "it" lesson.

There was an insistence that everything work well -- no easy pass on anything, including on interpretive matters (important, because otherwise I can get bogged down in all of the technical stuff to think about) and most nit-pickingly (and enlighteningly), diction. It's a super-detailed approach (yet logical, i.e., no random launching into anything I can't handle...it's just *hard* to handle, which is a great motivation, because it's not so far out of the bounds of my current reach that it's demoralizing).

Also, I met an accompanist/collaborative pianist who was not anything that I expected. So that was great too. The both of them don't mince words, which I think is great, because it's also strangely laid back. I hope I'm up to this.

Notes to myself:

pinch just under the bone of my nose to feel the focal point of sound.

concurrently open the back of the throat, behind the tongue, as wide as it will go. to "balance" the sound.

No mini-vowels in italian that creep between consonants. This is the hardest - the connection of unusual (for me) consonant sounds without vowels. Also, listen to italian diction. No lazy anglo-italian accents!

Study texts.

ROAR!

raspberries?

2007-07-24T09:21:00.000-05:00

One of the first times I heard the name Dorothea Röschmann was over at MFI where he describes the voice as "raspberry purée."

I'm having trouble pulling my feelings together about this singer. I think there are some rather prescient musical ideas in the singing I've heard her do (almost completely restricted to Pamina - but I think I'm going to pick up the M22 Nozze, so I'll see what she does with Contessa Almaviva), but I always get the sense that phrases are...not exactly chopped, but a little abrogated. Like they're rounded off too soon. It's like the mirror-image of the Kasarova problem, where the phrase peters out before the end.

So I'm listening to the Abbado Zauberflote and after she sings Pamina's suicide scene, I thought...well, how about a comparison?

Röschmann (cond. Fischer, Paris Opera, 2000)

Popp (cond. Haitink, rec. 1987?)

Battle (cond. Levin, Met 1991)

Hmmm, there are a couple others on youtube but it seems kind of odd. I really wish there was a post somewhere of Malin Hartelius singing this.

For reference, this is her Ach, ich fuhls

Oh whoah, and her Konstanze (embedding disabled, sorry!)

you've seen this, right?

2007-07-22T02:27:00.000-05:00

perspective

2007-07-19T08:34:00.000-05:00

Ok, so it should be no surprise that I have difficulties with Die Zauberflote. Very briefly, I find it difficult to square the problematic things that I perceive in the libretto with general critical reception/appreciation of the music.

On the one hand, I realize that my anxieties are a product of ahistorical forces, and that if it were possible for me to experience the work in its time, I probably would have a different perspective. But, that's just impossible, and to pretend to be able to cast off the years of intervening history and concomitant changes in thought would be disingenuous, I think.

So what to do? I actually think it's a disservice to gloss over the difficulties and say that "well, in Mozart's time..." If the music is to be continually played *outside* Mozart's time, there should be some sort of rationale that does justice to its difficulties.

I've been reading these two books, each of which dedicate chapters and many pages to discussing Die Zauberflote, dealing with gender anxiety (which is a large source of the unease with Zauberflote).

I'm still not quite sure I'm as well-equipped critically to fully understand all the references cited, but the books have been very informative so far. I'm in the process of gleaning more in closer reads (that is, because I can't find my Fux book to do counterpoint exercises -- I hope I don't have to buy that one again!).

In any case, gender anxiety, particularly in opera/classical music (which is still weirdly male-dominated and baldly stated as a positive). Also, see the numerous threads on usenet (e.g., rec.music.opera) where many posters cannot wrap their heads around a woman playing Julius Caesar. What's even more bizarre is that they have accepted that the role shouldn't be sung transposed; instead they want a counter-tenor because it's more "masculine."

I dunno. I find wee countertenors a little hard-pressed to sound more masculine than Ewa Podles (not a "male" role, but seriously):

In any case, I've also been reading the usenet posts of Piotr Kaminski, who, along with other posters like Simon Roberts, have really interesting critical ideas.

Based on suggestions, I might be acquiring new Zauberflotes. In the meantime, enjoy this little youtube of Pamina's "suicide scene." I first thought the visual was a little bland and vaguely qbert, but the play with perspective is incredibly telling, and I think really fits with the more complicated aspects of Zauberflote-in-modern-times as well as the specific dramatic scene. yay for animation.

p.s. I'm sure you can tell who sings Pamina!

long overdue post on the nordic voices

2007-07-12T16:24:00.000-05:00

One of the most beautiful evenings I spent listening to voices live happened when I was in Taipei one summer. It was the summer after graduating from college, and even though I was traveling on the other side of the globe, I still toted a couple things that comfortably reminded me of school and my existence there.

At any rate, there were a couple performances that friends had bought tickets for during my trip. They were part of a choral festival in which various vocal ensembles from around the world performed. The first night featured a choir from Korea and a six-voice Swedish ensemble called Nordic Voices.

The programming of NV was really quite superb. It was mostly twentieth century works, concentrating on the latter half, with particular relish in programming aleatoric and humorous works. What also struck me was how beautifully trained their voices were. The first soprano, in particular, had an incredible, enveloping timbre, projection, and control. Memory being a fickle, nonetheless I have a visceral recollection of what it was like to hear that voice swell and it was unlike any evening that I spent in the company of name singers at the Met, for example. (Duly noted that the size of venue could not be more different, as well as the lack of accompaniment.)

The excellence of the concert notwithstanding, the most beautiful moment of the evening occurred at the final encore when the singers, holding bouquets, turned away from each other to face the audience in a line where the footlights would be if the stage had them, and sang a "norwegian lullaby" in the warmest tones of sleep imaginable. At the second verse, the dynamic warmed still further, ever softer, until it seemed even the lights hushed to hear the melody. It was an amazing evening.

I can't believe I was such a doofus (or in such a funk, take your pic) that I missed their concert at the National Gallery of Art last winter. Boo on me!

This, looking back, may have been one of the more important signs to me that maybe opera might not be the best fit for me (who knows until I'm in a production!). That isn't to say that it won't fit -- in fact, I think it will be a wonderful fit, at least temperamentally. But it's no longer the only option in my mind, and I think that's only a good thing.

School starts in a month and a half! I've already found a place to live and I sign the lease next week. Immense!

(I notice that there are some video clips of NV available. I'll try and do some html-fu when I get home so I can post them here!)

dose of awesome

2007-07-04T11:01:00.000-05:00

lookie what i found on youtube!

bullets to a new day

2007-06-28T16:36:00.000-05:00

Eeeek, I have been remiss in writing on this blog for quite a bit of time, but I think now is a really good time to bring this thought-repository up a little bit more to speed. Well, let's not waste more time!

In the interest of disclosure, it's been a tough personal time recently. I doubt anybody really wants to know the details, but I think it's important to acknowledge that it did happen, especially since the bigger issues touched upon (like ego, body image, intimacy) are likely to be recurring. I suspect I'm not unique in this situation, but I think it's important that I log the good and the bad (at least that the bad occurred and the good that was entangled in it, so I can get better at separating the two).

I have my motorcycle endorsement! Yes! I am now on my way to getting myself wheels for much less than it would cost to own a car. Yes, it is more dangerous than driving a car, but I think the benefits outweigh it: namely it is mobility and flexibility (I hardly need a vehicle for every day), it's easier to park, it's cheaper both to own and to pay for gas, and let's not forget the *awesome* factor. I want to be this dude on a motorcycle!

I went a dear friend's wedding in San Diego. Leaving the wedding aside, what the hell was I thinking when I went to school on the east coast? And why am I staying there? (reminder to self: music school, sigh). I could have studied environmental engineering at Berkeley, but instead I studied chemistry...uh...somewhere else. Not that I regret anything, but San Diego was amazing. I got to sit in a clover patch next to the beach and watch the bees hum. It was a fantastic weekend.

I also went home to visit my parents (and my sister and her boyfriend came to visit at the same time too, so that was good). We took the boyfriend about the state to see the White Sand Dunes, Carlsbad Caverns, and of course, the UFO Museum in Roswell. In between, there were amazing sights that forcibly struck home how much I love New Mexico. I have a list of 5 different places I would want to live incognito when I get older. Maybe I can convince my sister to send me the pictures she took of some of these places.

In terms of vocal bootcamp...it was that. Sort of. I'm pretty much convinced that the next big battle is figuring out how to deal with the passagio and the upper register such that I actually can sing lines up there rather than just isolated tones. I'm pretty convinced that *something* different has to happen mechanistically, but nobody I've really studied with has made much progress in helping to illuminate that. I think that's the biggest technical thing that's sitting right in front of me right now, so I'm hoping that studying with someone for several years at a stretch will help facilitate that work. (And who am I kidding, there are plenty of other things to take care of as well.) I did make quite a few strides. Before going home, I had toyed around with a "Kermit the Frog" placement. In its tightest incarnation, it gives a golden and tightly wound vibrato to the sound. I definitely sound like a tenor when I sing this way. But it also does really unpleasant things to the larynx, so I have been trying to figure out how to incorporate that space with the other throat-tension-diffusing things that I am doing. I think I've made quite a few strides forward in that case, still maintaining the range height that I have and not killing the bottom of the range either. I'll have to play with this a little bit more, but it's a nice avenue to look down.

My parents are visiting! So I've been madly cleaning (which the apartment needs anyway because I've been gone for 2 weeks!). I think that about catches everything up to the moment. I best get back to cleaning -- but I *definitely* will get back to posting all the things I've been promising (e.g. Nordic Voices, eeek!) to post about.

WEEEEEE!

no news yet

2007-05-30T11:18:00.000-05:00

Ok, more placeholder stuff -- not much to report, though I wanted to share a podcast that I've been a fan of for awhile.

I think I first read about ScreamandKill.com at MFI. The hostess/podcaster Stella Maria Krazelburg von und zu Brabant is a scream (sometimes almost literally) but the stuff that she finds is pretty brilliant (Elisabeth Grümmer singing Dove sono auf deutsch in the current podcast, things like Astrid Varnay's Di tale amore in previous ones).

In other news, things are cooking up at work and "sorta being able to pay for school" is now becoming much more "yeah, I can pay for school!" so that's a nice development. Weee.

Also, signed up for a motorcycle safety course and will be in the market for a bike. Y'know, so I can leave broken hearts in my wake. Um..ok so maybe that's a little far-fetched, but the gas mileage will be sweet, as long as I pay attention. Hmmmm.

Ok, next post will be about Nordic Voices and my minor "stress" about being an artistic miniaturist. Promise. *crosses fingers*