School days

Boy-howdy! So summer gave way to a far brisker (and rainier) autumn, and my Graduate Experience is well under way. How's it going? Well, very well, in fact. I earnestly enjoy my peers, teachers and classes. I feel welcomed; I am impressed with the talent around me. But I'm also still vaguely terrified: that I'm behind, that I don't quite know what's going on, etc...

Taking advantage of beautiful September mornings (with nary a snow flake in sight - I'm looking at you, Winter Term), I've been walking the half hour or so to school.

It goes with the territory, but it's not particularly helpful. I finish my days exhausted, and I realize this is partially from the tension of trying so damn hard. Working diligently is one thing; over-stressing is quite another. I've decided, therefore, that part of my work as a Very Studious Wonderfully Adult Artist In Training is also to depend on myself for praise as well as critique, and to jump off the assumption that I am perfectly impressive and talented enough, thank-you-very-much.

Meanwhile, I am certainly settling into a nice rhythm in Ann Arbor:

My newly-claimed library carrel. Yes, I am quite proud of my little bit of [borrowed] property.

Why, yes, that is Jessye Norman, peering pensively at music before her masterclass.

I'll be holding on to the last vestiges of summer with a lovely bunch of tomatoes that I've happily pickled.

Language in two masterclasses

The masterclasses keep coming! This week we had two additional classes, each dealing with text and language.

On Thursday, Erie Mills gave class at Old First Church to some of our Little Women cast members with a focus on [American] English diction and, more accurately, phrasing. Far from spending hours nitpicking at vowels and consonants, she urged the performers to sing their text, not as a series of syllables, but as full phrases, concentrating on prosody. This is the same work that we must do in a general musical sense: seeing beyond the collection of individual notes to the phrases they make up. The former instance turns syllables into sentences; the latter pitches into melodies. In both cases, the result is actual meaning.

Looking for fluidity and strength.

Her insistence that the singers approach their pieces naturally and organically extended to the technical issues she addressed as well. Mills urged them to use their entire bodies to support their sound, thinking of a breath's trajectory as going beyond just mouth to lungs and back. Her approach was both energetic and relaxed as she reminded the performers to pace themselves and not to attempt super-human feats: "Remember you love to sing." "Human beings breathe. It's okay."

This emphasis on "humanness" in singing is one I take fully to heart. Yes, we are training ourselves to do extraordinary things with a body part that most people take for granted. But we must also remember that our voices are natural extensions of ourselves after all. Why not approach them in singing, both physically and psychologically, more like we do in familiar, spoken territory?

French vowels.

Marcie Stapp's class on Saturday night in the Southside Theater at Fort Mason dealt with more of the nitty gritty aspects of languages. She tackled major themes of diction in Italian, German and French, each language represented by two performers. But although the focus was on very specific pronunciation questions, Stapp's aim was very similar to Mills': making the text come out, naturally, easily and with the character of its language in mind. The adjustments she made to the singers' approach to sounds were not meant to add more rigid rules to the task of singing, but rather to make singing less difficult. As in Mills' class, the ultimate goal was to communicate humanly, and to do so with as little interference as possible.

Masterclass with Sheri Greenawald

Last night was the first of OAC's masterclass series at Old First Church, and I had the opportunity and great pleasure of singing for Sheri Greenawald. This was my first time doing so, but I had seen her work with others before in San Francisco and Boston, so I had some idea what to expect. As always, Greenawald was detail-driven and supportive, and a riot to watch.

While she did address a few technical concerns as they came up, Greenawald concentrated the bulk of her efforts on reshaping our interpretations. She fastidiously focused our visions of the scene for our arias, our emotional arc as dictated by the text and the music. Especially in the context of a masterclass, where time is limited, reshaping the interpretative form of a piece can work miracles in transforming the performance, so much so that the singing often improves too. More often than not, this task is about honing on the specifics of drama (or comedy, as the case may be), and I find it invaluable to have a pair of experienced eyes to give me a fresh take. Ms. Greenawald, through her work both on and off the stage, certainly fits the bill!

Hatem Nadim, who dutifully braved The Rake's Progress and Roméo et Juliette alike.

I'm a great fan of masterclasses, both as a performer and as an audience member. Their quality, of course, relies largely on the personality and strength of the master teacher, and on the students' ability to implement new ideas quickly. Even the best masterclasses can feel long, as they can clock in at around three hours, often without intermission. But they are quite valuable, and not only for the musicians directly concerned. Most non-musicians I've invited to watch have found it fascinating to witness a piece evolve before their eyes. People with no particular connection to or interest in opera have said that they understand better the appeal of the art form because they've seen what goes into creating a skilled vocal interpretation. I encourage everyone to attend a masterclass!

Procrastination

Somehow, my small break became a very long hiatus indeed. But, no matter – here I am now, back and promising not to ignore my Scrapbook any further.

I won’t go into the details of everything I’ve been up to. It’s like that awkward phone conversation with a half-forgotten friend after a long silence; there is simply too much to say, and so there is nothing to say at all.

And, somehow, it also became nearly Summer. To mark the event (driven home by last week's heat wave in New York), I went to Brighton Beach.

It's not surprising that this turned out to be such a long bout of silence on my part. Without the framework of deadlines, even loose, self-appointed ones, things easily fall by the wayside. After all, what's one more day without writing? These are the pleasures of Procrastination, my friends, that unwelcome house guest so familiar to so many of us.

I am a big procrastinator, but I am also generally productive. The magical ingredient is, of course, a concrete motivator. This is usually external: a paper deadline or the start of a rehearsal period. Breaking up the work usually requires a personal commitment to self-imposed micro-accomplishment, however, and I my track record is uneven in this department. A paper is generally relegated to an all-night typing binge, for instance, but I can't get away with this when it comes to memorizing music. I have a long history of cramming for tests, but there are too many factors to control when it comes to performance - movement, harmony, text and character conjured in real time - for me to trust a haphazard memory bank.

Ah! To live on the edge! Charley Chase rides a bike, via Rides a Bike.

Yet things do seem to pile up; I am not perfect, after all. Currently, I'm finishing the process of learning a fair heap of music for a quickly approaching summer program with a certain amount of panic. (As anyone who's had a conversation with me in the past month will tell you.) Therein lies the ugly side of simultaneous predilection toward achievement and procrastination!

Our hero, tired of practicing and memorizing.

Dreary days

There's been a fair amount of radio silence in these parts lately. Perhaps I have been very busy, you may think. But, alas, I have no particularly good excuse for overlooking my scrapbook. In fact, it has been my relative absence of activity that has been the real culprit.

I am currently in between projects - or perhaps more appropriately, objectives. Having recently finished a round of auditions, I have not quite started working on my next venture. And, although I continue to have plans of what I want to achieve in my practice and in lessons or coachings, I've had a hard time mustering up the driving force to execute them this past week. I work; I analyze. But the better part of me is not quite there.

Ennui by Walter Richard Sickert, ca. 1914, Tate Collection.

It's a disappointing place to be in: At some point in their development, musicians learn to practice. Something shifts in our approach, understanding and/or capacities that transforms the chore we used to have to do because of external forces (a watchful parent, the threats of a teacher, an approaching concert) into an interesting opportunity to explore. Practicing becomes not simply a hateful means to more glorious endeavors, but an attractive end unto itself (at least some days). I myself have only found the confidence to truly enjoy working alone within the past two or three years. I used to be terrified that I wouldn't manage to recreate any of the sounds that I had achieved in lessons or, worse still, that I would botch my hard-earned new skills by practicing improperly. But, as basic technique became easier and even automatic, I realized I could not only practice as a means of staving off technical decay but as a way to progress on my own terms. I could trust myself to dig into the puzzle unsupervised.

Practice sessions that are focused and productive are energizing and exciting. The importance of a session's concrete goals (mastering a tricky passage, learning a piece, etc...) may even become secondary to the engrossing act of doing - creating and expanding in the moment. On the other hand, too many lackluster sessions are disheartening indeed. You can't help but wonder if you really enjoy what you're doing at all, what the point is.

Of course, this is normal, and in any field of interest or work. There are bound to be humdrum days. But there are also exhilarating days, assuming you are following a path you really do love (I recognize not everyone is in that comfy boat, unfortunately). Maybe you need to shift something in your approach. Maybe you need some form of new, external inspiration. Or maybe you just need to wait it out. As for my own enthusiasm troubles, I'm not too particularly worried - after all, there are flowers starting to appear in Prospect Park.

Searching for Little Miss Prodigy

In the first chapter of Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov makes a passing allusion to the limits of child prodigies. He describes them as “pretty, curly-headed youngsters waving batons or taming enormous pianos, who eventually turn into second-rate musicians with sad eyes and obscure ailments and something vaguely misshapen about their eunuchoid hindquarters” (Nabokov 25)*.

While I might not phrase it quite the same way, I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment. Why is there such a cult around people who display signs of talent at an early age? Well, some of the answer is obvious, and even reasonable: we are fascinated by abnormality. We are fascinated by genius, and the child who sits at a piano making up musical hits certainly seems genial when his peers are busy eating crayons. But what happens at age twenty? Is our modern-day Mozart still, well, a Mozart? What if he isn’t?

Little Sophie Delphis, showing sure signs of early genius - look at the way she holds that stuffed monkey. Photo by Marylène Delbourg-Delphis.

Some people display prodigious talent at an early age; some don’t. Ultimately, does it really matter? In a way, yes – the Wunderkind has an edge. He has, on a basic level, had more time to practice and hone his ability. Part of the reason an obsession builds around early talent is that it takes a tremendous amount of time and learning to become proficient in any number of fields, especially when the body is expected to achieve extraordinary feats, from violin to gymnastics. An earlier proclivity toward a subject simply means more time.

And the fact that he shows more promise, earlier, may very well mean that our Wunderkind will continue to be better than others in his age bracket even when they are no longer begrudgingly expected to stick small objects up their noses for entertainment purposes. He could very well be a genius, possessing such innately superior abilities that they naturally present themselves early on. But he may simply be on a different learning curve, one that will ultimately level out.

via Cartoon Stock.

Two major problems stem from our fascination with prodigy. The first is the Good Modern Open-Minded Encouraging Parent’s obsession with finding talent at the youngest age possible. Do not enroll your hyperactive two-year-old in a ballet class; do not panic if your child is not voted MVP when a soccer ball is the size of his torso. The second is that, specifically in the arts, the quest for Doing Everything Earlier (much like its cousins Doing Everything Faster and Making Everything Bigger) often results, at best, in a proficient but robotically technical understanding. (At worst it results in shoddy technical foundations that can have quite literally crippling side-effects in later years.) Therein comes the frustrating truth of “second-rate musicians with sad eyes.” Creating art means actually living. How many experiences can an eight-year-old bring to a performance? How many can he bring twenty years later when all he has ever known are practice rooms and concert halls?

Some child prodigies are incontestably superior; some are questionable. Most are, if not mystifying, interesting, or at least pretty adorable. But they are not the be all and end all of accomplishment. They are, innately, outliers, and it is not every parent, teacher and mentor’s job to craft a Child Marvel out of every normal, even precocious, boy or girl. It is high time we stopped glorifying half-baked stabs at achievements just because they were orchestrated by someone who hasn’t yet hit puberty.

But, lest I sound too... crotchety, a bit of good clean fun, courtesy of a very young Beverly Sills, who proves you can make the transition from kiddie wonder to adult artist:

*Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage, 1989.