Got a Marlboro?

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.

doctoral program research list

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

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

Cornelius Reid

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.

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

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?

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.

hiding out

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?

two thoughts

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.

school, take 2

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.

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

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.

moooooving!

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.

thought

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.

tickle the nose

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.

diva, or velour?

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

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!

pendulum? or stick-balancing?

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!

double-header part 1

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).

meh

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.