Happy Halloween/I happen to like Barthes.

The work that is the most important- that shows the most—takes months and years. I’m not able to think myself to a place of ease.

I envy the Hahns and Denks that can bring transformative thinking into their practice rooms with the apprentice culture of their respective instruments supporting the idea that this thinking is worth doin’- that it will show and support their status as a career-level musician.

Singers subject one another to a complex social dance around the idea of intellectualism. You have your Ian Bostridges and then you have your Luciano Pavarottis and everyone claims to know which one was the intellectual- the one with the Phd in the history of witchcraft.

A professor of mine used to say that any group relieves anxiety and competitive tension by taking the truth and dividing it like pie. The more anxiety- the smaller the pieces of pie. You take Brahms and I will take Contemporary Music.

It is impossible- having come up through conservatory to consider a life as an opera singer without picturing your classmates and crushes from fourth semester theory sniggering at your successful debut as the red woman in some tomato sauce opera that lots of old ladies love but whose composer never made it to the MHist 101 Syllabus. I feel this way particularly after large doses of Denk, yummy as they are.

It’s good to form a plan and then to study it until it is organic and inevitable and doesn’t show and until the studying itself dissolves into play and you are just a little craftsperson up there having some fun and perhaps exorcizing some demons or if it's Handel, slaying some monsters.

Happy Halloween.

Such a poser.

I am playing a confident woman right now who wants to maintain her youth and glamour and who wants to have fun. She sees herself mainly as a sexual commodity. Her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. She feels a little trapped in her town and I've been exploring the physical aspect of this character-- how she would stand and move.

The self is so fluid: I had trouble shaking this woman off at the end of the day. This evening as I sat on a box waiting for the C. An educated looking older man said to me as he passed "That's quite a pose." I was slumped with my legs crossed leaning back on my hands with my shoulders thrust high to my ears in a posture that said "slightly contemptuous female alpha dog in heat."

Normally I would be much more self-conscious and would have had on the New Yorker "Don't approach me, I'm no one to bother about" mug that we all practice daily. But this evening-- without knowing-- I was still the prettiest girl in town surveying the peasantry of my Sicillian village.

That whole line about how theater allows the audience to live out dangerous sides of themselves in a safe way... imagine how we feel! Who knows where this girl came from...

In the mean time.

Funny that singing thing. We want it all, we want it now. I wanna sing every role in my rep at every house and whenever I hear of anyone else doing same, though I may respect her immensely as an artist and know and love her as a person, a tiny part of me goes, "Humph."

Hilarious, huh? I was in the middle of tragically musing "Oh, I'm in this tough transition right now where no one's helping me." and generally whining to the Please Hire Me Gods when I realized I have thirty minutes to get to the subway to go to the first stage rehearsal of a great role in a fantastic opera with an A house that I respect, among colleagues who sound amazing.

That old underdog sense dies hard.

Fleisher on the team...

Mr. Fleisher describes the performer as three people in one: “Person A hears before they play. They have to have this ideal in their inner ear of what they’re going to try and realize. Person B actually puts the keys down, plays and tries to manifest what Person A hears. Person C sits a little bit apart and listens. And if what C hears is not what A intended, C tells B to adjust to get closer to what A wanted. And this goes on with every note you play, no matter how fast you’re playing. It’s a simultaneous process that advances horizontally. When it works, when it all meshes, it’s a state of ecstasy.”

My person C is always on ritalin.

Aren't these new General Managers just darling?

The photo at left is airborne Gerard Mortier, the future head of New York City Opera. I had this photo on my bulletin board for about a year of undergrad.

Mortier was one of the instigators of Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin, an opera that I was doing a lot of research on at the time. Mortier had not only commissioned the opera, but had put on the Peter Sellars production of St. Francois D'Assise that had convinced Saariaho that "if they could put it on that way"... she could write an opera.

What a great example of how to administrate (administer?) your way to great new opera. You want the best composers writing your opera, not just the ones who feel a stylistic affinity to Madama Butterfly (which I happen to sing in and love). But to get that, you have to present a wide swath of the repertoire that already exists. The 20th Century classics and all that.

I could scream for the number of fabulous composers my age who give me "I don't really see myself ever writing an opera." If companies don't create an environment of dynamic, evolving theater before the commission, everyone gets confused about where the boundaries of the art form lie. Saariaho thought she would never write an opera because she thought her style of composition would never be viable under the theatrical construct she thought that opera required. Because she saw a great production of St. Francois, she's working on number three.


Postscript: I wrote this waaay before the insane Mortier debacle at NYCO. I still stand by the ideas here. Zachary Woolfe's awesome piece in the Times last month said better (and post-disaster) some of what I was trying to get at in 2007.

Oldies

My choir director gave me this book when I was sixteen, before I'd ever heard of the person profiled or most of the men she taught. It is an amazing read even if she did occasionally make stuff up.

It materially shaped my concept of what it means to be a musician and how we need to listen to a score for its ideas and not just for its stylistic alliances. If anyone has the right to tell us that, it's Boulanger, who taught everyone and their lover.

This guy's cool.

...

Stolen from Ross...

"Not a footstep was to be heard on any of the paths. Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly."

— Swann's Way
Proust

We will survive...

Review of Jeff Wall's photo installation things at MOMA

"He is one of the most staunchly traditional of the untraditional artists to emerge from the turmoil of the 1970s, when art was pulled apart by the political ambition and visual privations of Conceptual Art. He is also one of the best...He depicts a true believer in the Modernist and then Post-Modernist mission that art should change the world, who has been continually forced into deeper artistic waters by his faith in painting."

Wouldn't it be great if there were more staunchly traditional untraditional composers forced into deeper artistic waters by THEIR true believer faith in the older forms?

I had the following conversation with a Junior Composition Professor at a very prestigious university:

OdE: So, do you think you'll ever write an opera?

JCP: Well, it's so hard to get your pieces performed. It took me a year to get my symphony performed.

OdE: Yeah, but write something with a piano score. The good young hungry singers would sing it for free. You have competition on your side.

JCP: Good point. I hadn't thought of that. (Pause) Can I be frank?

OdE: Shoot.

JCP: Well, it's just that that whole unamplified voice tradition just wasn't the one I was raised in. I just didn't grow up with that sound and I just don't hear in that style compositionally. I think more in terms of the pop music canon. I mean, when you think about what music drama's supposed to do, Jesus Christ Superstar is the greatest opera of the Twentieth Century. I just hear more in terms of the pop style of singing.

OdE: Well, I can see what you mean tonally about the pop-music thing and mass-appeal and all that. In terms of that sound, I didn't grow up listening to much opera myself. Most singers didn't, but what about the whole aesthetic of person throwing their voice, to the group with no help... isn't that kind of ancient immediacy and freedom from amplification an important part of the communal experience of music drama too?

JCP: Well, if you don't feel it, then you don't feel it.

OdE: Okay, cool.

So I'm all ready to let this guy go and be the next best thing that's happened to the pop-classical thing. But then an hour later, it comes time for dancing... The occasion on which we've met calls for some dancing and the very good band picks up with "I will survive." Now, if that's not part of this guy's canon, I don't know what is. But the curious thing was that this guy didn't dance. Stuffy classical musicians all over the room were dancing. Professors and parents were dancing. Eighty year old convalescents were dancing. But this man, no. And it was the WAY he wasn't dancing-- furtively and eyes down in the corner like someone hiding away in academia from both stylistic teams at the same time. It's like the guy who keeps telling everyone at school that he has a girlfriend who lives in Canada who he met at summer camp-- but really there's no girlfriend and he spent summer camp reading comics in the cabin. Nothing wrong with that- just please don't hide out.

I ask with a little seriousness what kind of a composer can you be in any genre if -even on several beers- you can't dance to "I will survive."

I guess it's a little idealistic to ask that we all engage with these forms on their own terms as Jeff Wall does, no matter what kind of music you are writing or performing. I dream anyway.
Opera singers: Come home early from the Souk and get thee to Beethoven string quartets and Berio sequenzas.
Academic Composers: Listen to Bellini.

The time for hiding out ended before it began.

Jamison exudes...

This woman and her book are rocking my world right now. Positive aspects of non-traditional personalities.

My peeps and I were all poked and prodded in childhood in the fashionable Ritalin infested problem-solving school of 1980s psychology.

It's not even the stigma attached to named psychological "disorders" that sucks most. It's the widespread loss of appreciation for the slipperiness of normalcy.

What makes Dostoyevsky and Goethe and Jeanette Winterson so much fun to read is that even though you could put a label on the characters, you identify with them and take the amiguity of their sanity on yourself as the reader... and it's fun.

Oh, I guess it would be nice...

Feast of music makes a great point about the hip marketing department over at City Opera. Go team. One of my very most connected and hip buds was in on that Big Deal over a year ago with no advertisement from me, her opera singer friend.