Studio Email from August 16

August 17, 2020

Hello everyone,

I’ve heard from Victoria this week.  She is plugging along and has learned how to do online teaching, which is terrific!  Also, Denise has decided to take her training into her own hands.  I’ve sent her one of the handouts that I made for my daughter’s choir in Terre Haute.  I’m attaching it for the benefit of anyone who wants to run over the basics again.  As always, Email me when you have questions.  I do so much better with Email, where I rarely have 16 voice mails stacked up.

So today I thought I’d take up a new thread and talk about what makes a song difficult.  There are more than the two answers (breath or resonance) that generally apply when the question is about vocal technique.  Certainly a song can be hard because of the vocal requirements.  I was at a NATS workshop in NYC a few years ago when the speaker said that we should consider opera as the Olympics of singing, and that’s certainly true.  Anyone who wants to wander in the operatic repertoire needs to bring a fairly substantial skill set:  good technique, long range, wide dynamic range (they have to be loud), long breath control, musicianship, acting skills, and often foreign language skills.  Either one loves the music enough to work on all that stuff, or one chooses other reps, which can also require a lot of these things.  So yes, a song or aria can be hard because it demands hefty vocal technique skills.

Leaving that to one side, there are often songs (and a few arias) that I will give to students that are not so demanding of vocal maturity.  Often, if a high school student is a good musician, I’ll hand him or her a song in which her or his musicianship and/or language skills will allow that young singer to be impressive in all the auditions that young voice students find themselves facing.  Blaithin was very successful with Le chapelier from Satie’s Le Trois Mélodies de 1916, and Charlie was too with Le statue de bronze from the same set.  Here’s Dawn Upshaw singing the whole set, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1OrU1yRu80.

So why are these songs hard?  Well, they are in French which is enough to make most folks unhappy, and the harmony is hardly common practice, i.e. normal sounding.  Satie was one of the wild men of early 20th century writing, although his music sounds much more normal now that so many of his piano pieces have accompanied commercials and movies.  Le chapelier takes both long breath and fairly long range, is very wordy although fast, and the rhythm is just odd enough to be tricky.  It takes a determined effort to succeed.  Similarly Le statue de bronze is fast and wordy and the poetry is off the wall.  Its rhythm is even harder, and it has range challenges, too.  Again, determination and musicianship required.  Also French. 

Probably the hardest song I ever sang was Mausfallensprüchlein, which means ”mouse catching rhyme”, by Hugo Wolf.  It is one of two that my old teacher wanted me to learn that I didn’t get to.  I did learn seven other Wolf songs for a seminar on the songs of Wolf, Strauss, and Mahler, but this one and Elflied stayed in the maybe later category.  Later was a faculty concert at Brenau for which the accompanist was the world-famous John Wustman.  Mr. Wustman felt that my Wolf group needed a flashy ending so I finally learned it.  We did succeed in performing it perfectly in the concert, and I was delighted that we did, since it’s really easy to mess up the rhythm and lose your pianist.  It’s hard to lose Wustman, but even he needed me to do the right stuff.  I could not find a handy copy of the song for you to look at, so you can only listen to Elizabeth Schwartzkopt, one of the great lieder singers of the last century:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik7A49QIKIo.  If you want the silly text check it out on LiederNet, https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=11688

Doesn’t sound all that hard, right?  On You Tube you can even find a young German girl, looks about 12, singing it.  My old teacher sang it to me from her bed in the nursing home.  Yeah, well.  You just can’t be late, early, or otherwise wrong.  It’s a precision piece with fairly difficult intervals and a nonsense text.  Here’s Mme. Schwartzkopf again with Elflied and a copy of the song to look at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU6phYemZoc&list=RDVU6phYemZoc&start_radio=1


Another one, and this is in English is "Sweet Suffolk Owl" by Richard Hundley.  Not that tough in vocal demands, but seriously difficult rhythmically, and there are traps in the text, too:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h3UoZTs8MQ.  I picked this lovely Chinese soprano Christine Wen because she has taken care not to address a “sweet Suffol kowl”, which is how one hears it way too often.  Scott won a lot of competitions with this one, a fast Poulenc, and a soulful Gluck.  Hard rep is often good competition rep because it lets the young singer stay within his present abilities and show off his strengths. 

Similarly, I’ve burdened Will with a Bach aria from the Magnificat in D, Quia fecit mihi magna.  Here’s a sample of that one:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObP1UNC1mo4 with Dutch baritone Tom Koopman.  The first couple of phrases are not too bad, just tossing the melody back and forth with the cello.  Then JSB starts to decorate the line.  I think it’s like a game of whack-a-mole trying to be ready for each of the decorative figures as they show up.  Notice that the conductor gives him just a second to breathe in one spot.  Mercy is a good thing.

Best wishes,

Pat


 

Studio Email from August 9

August 17, 2020

Hello everyone,

 

Not a tremendous bit of news around here aside from yard work – seven 30-gallon yard trash cans since last Monday.  Also, it finally came to me that the reason that I was having so much cramping in my hands might just be that I’m not playing the piano for a couple of hours most days.  Imagine!  So, since Martha thought of working on Plasir d’Amour, I’ve started practicing the accompaniment.  It’s one of the needlessly complicated Parisotti ones, or maybe I shouldn...


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Studio Email from August 2

August 17, 2020

Hello Everyone,

 

I’ve decided to go with a more positive subject line since nobody knows when we’ll all feel like in-person lessons again.  Eventually, I’m sure.  In the meantime, let’s consider Il Trovatore, or The Troubador, a Verdi opera that I will nearly always watch whenever there’s a chance – like this past Thursday when the Met streamed it.  Many people love to point out it’s flaws, particularly that the libretto is so twisty and needlessly complex that hardly anyone ...


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Studio Email from July 26

August 17, 2020

Hello everyone,

 

Rainy Saturday and I am woefully unmotivated today.  Sometimes it’s just that way.  Arietha just sent me a link to the Opera America site where there are listings of the various operas (not at the Met) that you can see online:  https://mailchi.mp/operaamerica/live-streams-and-on-demand-content-july-24-2020?e=1b8e4cf56fToday is The Makropulos Case at the San Francisco Opera, and I can’t get up enough gumption to go watch it.  I think it’s still available tomorrow, ...


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Studio Email from July 19

August 17, 2020

Hello everyone,

 

There’s not much news around here.  Frank came and left with his parents for Durham since his dad is spending his sabbatical year teaching at Duke.  They were fun, also exhausting.  I must be getting old or something.  Anyway, I hope everyone was watching CBS Sunday Morning and is ready to see the premiere of Eric Whitacre’s most recent virtual choir on YouTube at 1:30 today.  I think he kind of invented the format back in 2009, and I think that Mary sang in that one a...


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Studio Email from July 12

August 17, 2020

Hello everyone,

 

It certainly is not as much fun to have Frank here when we can only look but not touch.  Nor going places that you get to see afresh through a child’s eyes.  All things going according to plan, they will be in Durham on Wednesday.  I’m still closed for all the obvious reasons.  Any yard work that I may have done has gone under with all the rain and sunshine making the plants very happy to go places I don’t want them to go.  The bees, too, are very happy.  Sigh.

 

E...


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Studio Email from July 5

August 17, 2020

Hi everyone,

Rejoice and be exceeding glad!  I’m using my new computer, which the beloved spouse has caused to behave itself.  So that’s the happy part.  Less happy is that I’ve decided to wait a while on opening the Studio, and I’m sure everyone understands why.  Besides all the safety reasons, Frank and his parents are coming to stay for a week or so while their furniture travels to Durham where Mike will be teaching during his sabbatical.  It’s a long and circumstantial story wi...


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Charlie Parker's Yardbird at the Atlanta Opera

October 11, 2018
The AO's Discovery Series is one of the highlights of what they do.  I've seen some wonderful music theater experiences in this series, and the most recent is Charlie Parker's Yardbird.  I wish I'd had time to read the program notes before the show, because the biographical information would have helped me to follow the story better.  It's a series of events from Parker's life in a libretto by Bridgette A. Wimberly, who evidently did a considerable amount of research.  The story is not the st...
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What to do when you're doing too much

November 6, 2017

So today I’m thinking about reducing my teaching load.  While it is very gratifying to have a full Studio, it is also a bit more than I can handle at my age.  If I were still 37 instead of 67. . .  I was looking at my blog on this website, and I was sad to see that it’s been more than two years since I had time to order my thoughts and put them out there.  That’s working too hard.

My big problem is that I love my students.  I love the adults of ALL ages who come to my Studio for thei...


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Summer Reading

June 5, 2015
It is a sure sign of summer when the stack of books, bought with excitement and waiting on one's desk for time to read them, moves into the active reading environment.  My first one completed is Sharon Mabry's excellent The Performing Life published in 2012.  In her preface she said that that she did not want to write a "dry, academic book that would sit on the shelf", and indeed she did not do that.  It is a useful book filled with anecdotes and good advice.  I think I'm going to order a cou...
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