Things Are Not Always What They Seem

Barbara Cook’s Master Class – A Response

As they say, I should’ve been there. And since I wasn’t, I shouldn’t have assumed.

Two days ago, I interpreted a New York Times account of Barbara Cook’s master class at Juilliard through my own particular lens of experience and expectation. Why? I believe so firmly in what I took to be the ultimate goal of this class that I made the error of assuming that the method was sound.

I’ve since heard from some of the participants and observers of that class, and now is the time to retract, reframe, and review.

Agendas

I’m wary and mistrustful of the hidden agendas of public master class exercises. Somehow, I thought – or perhaps hoped – that this class was an exception. Its goals, as least as seen through the lens of the reporter, seemed unassailable. But since learning more about what happened that day, I realized that my naiveté got the best of me.

Eye-witness accounts inform me that there was a generous helping of “tough love” (bordering on abusive) tactics. Responses like “You sing with the kind of diction that really puts me off” and “No one really talks like that; what do you think you’re trying to do?” and “What is that smile doing there? That is totally phony”.

I’m not strictly against using mildly confrontational language in the right time and place. It’s important to be unafraid to tackle the elephant in the room. When working with singers with whom you have a relationship of trust, and in an environment where artists feel secure enough to venture out of their comfort zone, it’s possible for a “tough love” approach to have lasting benefits. But in a public place, when the balance of power is as skewed as it is in a master class…. Things are learned, but too often, they’re not about performing or communicating.

Playing the Game

What happens when the obedient student feels threatened by the respected Master’s comments? Many of them have done enough master classes to know that you have to play the game according to its particular rules. Roll with the punches. Be dutiful. The star will emerge triumphant, a short-term goal will be attained, and the audience will respond positively.

Some comments from Juilliard artists who were involved with this master class:

The greatest injury was done to the singers, who were not given liberty to express themselves, but devolved into ironically artificial sentimentality in a necessary concession to win over Cook and her adoring fans, and in so doing, betrayed their own truth. They played the game to get through the master class, and they were rewarded for being less than themselves.

The game we played was "opera singer who is only concerned about making sound is taught about communication"… And, predictably, the comments from patrons at the reception afterwards [were] ‘You should sing like that all the time’...I learned that if I take all the resonance out of my voice and sing to the woman in the fourth row, I’m a genius.

Reactions

Why such reactionary and bitter comments? I will say, for those of you who haven’t been on the inside of these kinds of things, that these reactions are fairly typical. Naysayers will maintain that these are shallow self-protective responses from nervous young people.

I know some of these people, and I disagree. Yes, they are half Ms. Cook’s age with a fraction of her experience. But they are thoughtful, self-critical, imaginative, and committed to communicating through their music. And consider this: If singers feel they have to retreat to such a defensive posture, what could they possibly learn?

Technique

I’ve said that dealing with technique (vocal production, placement, projection, etc) is dangerous and destructive content for a master class. And I still mean it. But it seems that in this particular situation, it would’ve been a good idea to constructively address the challenge of aligning operatic vocal technique (read: the ability to fill a big hall) with the directness and economy of communication needed for musical theatre songs.

Again, from the participants:

Equating authenticity with the ‘abandonment of technical propriety’ only reinforces the mistaken perception that musical theater is from Mars and opera is from Venus, when the message ostensibly is that honesty of communication is requisite in all art forms… Telling ‘classically trained singers’ that their education leads to artificiality is likely to be neither successful nor meaningful for them.

[Ms. Cook’s] method of extracting ‘communication’ from me was having me pare down my instrument to a mere filament (perfect for a miked performance, really), getting rid of my stultified diction and having me sing to the woman in the 4th row. Yes, there was some communication that went on. The medium was all wrong.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Do I still believe in some of things I wrote Sunday? You bet I do.

I quoted Ms. Cook: “The place that seems most dangerous is exactly where safety lies.” But the caveat is that none of us knows where that place is for another artist. If we lead them blindly in any direction, just for the sake of variety or experimentation, we’re likely to lead them even farther astray. That ‘place’ is unique to each singer, and the answer doesn’t lie in stripping away his technique, but in using it to create a relationship with the music, with the words, with the audience.

Am I even more jaded now about the firmly entrenched diva approach to these classes? Didn’t think it was possible, but… yes.

Is it still more important than ever to throw away artifice and caution and dare to revel in the risks and rewards of live performance? Of course.

Singing Bloggers

Scroll down to the bottom of Sunday’s entry for a message from a “Singing Blogger”. S/he asks some important questions, not all of which I pretend to have the answers to. But I’ll give it a whirl in a day or two.

Sacred Monsters and Nice Guys

Master classes are many-headed monsters. I've seen very few that deliver significant results and even fewer that purport to be about what they say they are. But according to Sunday's New York Times, it sounds as if Barbara Cook is using this format to do important work with young singers.

The master classes that are really star turns for divas (or divos, thank you very much) or other ego-driven individuals are often destructive. I won't go so far as to believe that they're malicious in intent. But they often revolve around vocal/technical issues that are unwisely addressed in 15 minutes in front of hundreds of people. And there are hidden agendas that are counter-productive, to say the least.

Ms. Cook tells singers that "Your own humanity is your pathway to artistry." But any performer will tell you that allowing one's humanity to speak through the music is threatening and risky. And most of the training that we foist upon young singers is designed to reduce risk. As it should be. After all, there has to be a foundation. But somewhere, somehow, that essential risk must be honored.

She tells them "The place that seems most dangerous is exactly where safety lies." In futher elaboration by Times writer Charles Isherwood: "...self-exposure and the abandonment of technical propriety, scary as it was, was the surest, the best, maybe the only way to communicate with an audience."

Sacred Monsters

It's easy for us to see this phenomenon in opera's stereotypical and often dysfunctional diva culture. (Those same divas who insist on torturing students in master classes:)) These are people who live on the edge, who thrive on risk, danger, and confrontation. They strike fear in the hearts of mild-mannered administrators such as myself, and they find worthy sparring partners in the form of strong-willed impresarios. They have thrived in opera's culture almost from its beginning.

We, the audience, crave their potency and intensity. The art form itself consists of simple ideas, emotions, and truths that are so saturated that they be stretched out over a 3-hour opera and still speak to us. Our artists cannot pale beside this vivid material. The opera culture has always welcomed these larger-than-life creatures, and they have found a home there.

Nice Guys

There will always be divas and sacred monsters in our business. But as we strive to bring opera into the mainstream and to allow the education of our next generation of singers to be less haphazard (dare I say more thorough and linear...) we welcome a higher percentage of aspiring performers who just may be slightly less neurotic and self-destructive than many of their predecessors. Are we selling these young artists a bill of goods? We say, "Be respectful colleagues, run your singing business conscientiously, moderate your lifestyle and take judicious care of your instrument, be a 'well-rounded' person." When was the last time you paid over $100 for a front orchestra seat to hear a careful and cautious performer?

I've veered slightly past my goal in order to make a point. Do I want the performers of tomorrow to be destructive to others and dangerous to themselves? Of course not. But we should lose no opportunity to remind them never to lose their connection to that part of themselves that is so potent and laser-focused that it will speak to someone in the back row. We all have it somewhere inside us. In the 21st century we're all increasingly good at tamping it down. Technology and mass culture are its enemies. Live performance - the opportunity to allow another person and his connection to the music to touch us - will keep us connected to our humanity.

Up on the Roof

Many years ago, when we were younger and climbing on the roof every December seemed like a reasonable thing to do, we unwittingly established a Christmas decoration tradition. A few years ago we decided to take a year off, and by the week before Christmas we had strangers knocking on our door, making sure that we were all OK, that no one in the house was sick or anything. Why else would we miss putting up our lights?

Anyway, the weather hasn't cooperated this year. Cold, windy, and snowy since Thanksgiving. But yesterday found us up on the top of the house, grumbling just a little. Shoveling and sweeping snow off the roof before fighting with the damn strings of lights. Bah humbug.

Today my back aches but I know why we did it. No matter your religious, metaphysical or philosophical perspective, it's hard to deny that as we head toward next week's solstice, we need light.

Repertoire & Casting

But First….

I have to weigh in on the veritable snowstorm of reporting and critiquing that’s been done on last weekend’s premiere of Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy at the Met. I was not lucky enough to see it, but I am looking forward to hearing it on the December 24 broadcast. Thanks to An Unamplified Voice for culling many of the various reviews of this premiere.

I’m not a critic, and I’m perpetually bemused, confused, and occasionally angered by reviews. (Go here for last summer’s entry on the subject of our artists and reviews.) Like many of my colleagues, I’ve lived this question on multiple levels. I’ve been the producer who’s received more credit than she should take, and I’ve been the artist who received more blame that she should shoulder. And every variation in between. And of course, because I’m active in this business, I’m constantly asked for my opinion of others’ performances.

I find one thing heartening about the American Tragedy discussion: the fact that it’s happening at all. While I’m at it, I guess I also appreciate the fact that so many people are wading in. For the purpose of all of this is engagement. I’m not sure I care what form that engagement takes, as long as it’s active. It’s a beautiful thing to move beyond apathy, blind acceptance, or uninformed rejection.

I’m getting dangerously close to digressing to the “what is art and why does it matter” discussion, and I can’t afford that diversion today. But I so want this engagement with the music to be the reason we go to the opera house and the concert hall. The music of pop culture (and here I don’t mean anything that’s not “classical”; I refer to any music that’s more about its trappings than its content) is an anesthetic. Pleasant in the way it numbs us and distracts us from the tough stuff in life. What we do in our business needs to be about “aesthetics” in the best sense of the word – not having to do with high culture or good taste, but standing as an alternative to the anesthetic effect of so much of 21st century mass culture. It should make us feel, think, laugh, cry, rage… it should make us care.

Oops, I’m pretty far gone. Back to work.

Casting

Many young folks who aspire to a career in artistic administration have a single-minded focus on one aspect of the job: Casting. No surprise, really, for creating dream casts is a fairly common hobby for opera fans. Also no surprise that fantasy can clash pretty horribly with reality when actual casts are being assembled for productions in the real world. But the most sobering fact is that those of us who oversee opera companies spend a very small percentage of our time on this aspect of our operations. The last two weeks of my life have been consumed with matching singers to roles, but it’s almost done, and there are another 50 weeks of the year to go.

I get a lot of questions about our casting process, so I will do my best to spin it out. I’ll try to keep it from getting tedious. But a certain amount of deadly detail is necessary in order to represent the process accurately and to disabuse readers of the notion that this is a glamorous undertaking.

As I mentioned at the end of the audition tour, we had 29 finalists who were under consideration for our company. At this point, it looks as if we’re going to be able to work with 18 or 19 of those singers next summer.

The Repertoire Recipe

1) Make a list of operas that contain ideal roles for our finalists (in operas that can actually be produced in one of our very specific venues).

2) Create a master list of the operas above that contain good roles for multiple people. (Jettison pieces that accomodate only a few singers.)

3) Make a series of draft grids that puts the casting of three of these operas alongside the casting needs of next season’s concerts, recitals, and/or outreach performances. I have started out with as many as 30 of these grids, using different permutations and orders of a series of different operas.

The final grid for the 2005 season looked like this:

4) See which ones of these permutations accommodate the largest percentage of the finalists in roles that are best suited to them.

5) Choose the most promising few and do an entire season draft schedule that describes in detail how the assignments might dovetail and how the summer calendar might be able to configured in order to present the smallest amount of conflicts between projects.

A page from this year’s grid. Pink = second Barns opera; orange = Filene Center opera; blue = NSO concert; yellow = recital; purple = improv project.

My head hurts from trying to explain this, so I think I’m done. Taking the weekend off from posting – see you next week from the studios of WETA-FM as we record a few more installments of 2006 Center Stage from Wolf Trap.

Winter comes to these Vienna Woods.

The view outside my office window. Gotta love it.

Blogroll

The fellow bloggers I check in on when I have time:

Arts & Culture

The Rest is Noise (Alex Ross)
ArtsJournal Sandow (Greg Sandow on the Future of Classical Music)
About Last Night (Terry Teachout on the Arts in New York City)
Deceptively Simple (A blog by Chicago music journalist Marc Geelhoed)
Night after Night (Conspicuous consumption of music, live and otherwise, in New York City)
Ionarts (Music, Art, Literature: Washington DC-based)

Arts Management

The Artful Manager (Andrew Taylor on the Business of Arts and Culture)
Adaptistration (Drew McManus on Orchestra Management)
Butts in the Seats (Musings on Practical Solutions For Arts Management)

Opera

Canadienne (Canadian soprano living and singing in Chicago) [Note: She's beginning a sabbatical, unfortunately. But check out previous posts if you are so inclined.]
An Unamplified Voice (One Operagoer’s Notes)
Brian Dickie (Life as General Director of Chicago Opera Theater)

StoryPeople

A great source of pleasure. OperaMan is one of my favorites, of course. Looking for an unusual Christmas gift? Check out StoryPeople’s prints. (This is an unsolicited plug:))

Back in a Few Days

Almost all off-topic today. Can you tell I need a break?

Taking the day off tomorrow. From everything. Back blogging Thursday or Friday. Promise (really, I do!) a description of our casting/programming process. Without real names and dates yet, for they’re still not fixed. But we’ll walk you through what we’re doing right now. Check back if you’re interested.

The Filene Center – The Venn Diagram...

Any questions?

Report on Holiday Festivities

Wolf Trap’s Holiday Sing-Along was terrific. Thousands and thousands of people… hundreds of little children on the stage during "Jingle Bells”… good December weather… a huge truck filled to the brim with Toys for Tots. Unfortunately, I sang myself out and was in tatters for the second event of the day, the Messiah Sing-Along at my church where I was due to stand in for our contralto soloist who is battling bronchitis.

Explanation required. I am not a singer, strictly speaking, but occasionally I haul my voice around pretty fearlessly, and I’ve absorbed enough basic information about intonation, phrasing, and placement to unwisely twist my garden-variety soprano into an imitation of a mezzo. It’s not a healthy vocal production, and it doesn’t hold up well after an hour of leading carols in freezing weather. Anyway, I sounded like a cross between Carol Channing and Rod Stewart. Huge hole on both sides of the bottom register break. Any salvageable music came out of it was a minor triumph of chutzpah over talent. (Or, as my friend the sick contralto reminds me, it required “more guts than sense.”) :) All of this, of course, was designed to give me true empathy for all those singers in my life.

Shop Talk – Leftovers from the Audition Trail

Résumés – a few more observations:

• Layout. The column format is time-tested and unassailable. We can look at each engagement singly, or we can skim down columns of companies, roles, and dates.
• Dates. Please list engagements in reverse chronological order. Especially because we deal with artists who are still developing, it’s important to be able to see growth and momentum.
• “Career Objective”. Don’t bother trying to include an “Objective”. I know that it’s part of the process when applying or interviewing for a lot of other kinds of jobs, but it’s really hard to include it on a singer résumé without sounding silly. Lots of effort could go into trying to figure out how to state the objective clearly. Don’t bother.
• Colleagues/References. Only list people who would be able to speak easily on your behalf. Name-dropping doesn’t really work if they don’t remember you.

Random Aria Advice for Sopranos:

• Adele’s Audition Aria. Extraordinarily hard to bring off. Almost always harmless and stultifyingly boring. You have to be a phenomenally gifted comedienne to make an impression with this in audition. Those “la-la-la’s” (you know which ones I mean) have to be to die for.
• Manon’s Gavotte. Consider only singing one iteration of “Profitons bien” (instead of the two that are written). Brings the scene down to about 4 minutes. Might make the difference and get you a second aria if the audition time frame is tight.

Tomorrow - back to casting!

Interlude: 'Tis the Season

Taking a break from talking about opera at the Filene Center. Today happened not to be all about opera, so the blog will reflect!

‘Tis the Season

Friday, 12/ 2/2005 – A typical arts administrator December day:

Morning – “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty”. Rehearsal with the Marine Band for this weekend’s Holiday Sing-Along at the Filene Center. Yours truly will be co-hosting – leading the singing and trying to contribute witty banter.

Afternoon – Mozart and Tchaikovsky. Programming and marketing ideas for next summer’s National Symphony Orchestra line-up.

Evening – Couperin and Rameau. French Baroque music of the season with the Aulos Ensemble at The Barns.

Shop Talk – More Audition Pianist Rants

During the lunch break at the Cincinnati stop on the audition tour, Donna Loewy, Thomas Lausmann and I decided to expand the audition pianist advice I offered in an earlier post. We figured that we have at least 75 years of accompanist duty among the three of us, so our pet peeves probably have some staying power.

• Cuts. A follow-up to my previous advisory. Don’t just mark the cut clearly with pen; rather white out all of the irrelevant music with post-its or white paper.
• Xeroxes. If you travel with copies in a binder, please make sure they’re first-generation copies. Nothing worse than trying to read grayed-out notes in dim rehearsal room lighting.
• Cadenzas. Whenever possible, write out your cadenzas. It’s sometimes unnerving to guess when you’re headed toward the final cadence.
• Double-sided. Half as many page turns.
• Staples. Exposed staples in the center binding are a rare but serious hazard. As a last resort, pianists will press down the center fold to make a book stay open. Each one of us has ended up bleeding on the keyboard after a run-in with center staples.
• Clean copies. Get rid of old pianist fingerings (fingerings from previous pianists, not fingerings from elderly pianists. Sorry... :)
• Tempo indications. As I mentioned before, it almost never works to conduct or clap to demonstrate your tempo. And comparative instructions (faster, slower…) are useless without a baseline. What does work, however, is putting a ballpark M.M. (metronome) marking on your music. Pianists aren’t human metronomes, but most of us have a pretty good feel for M.M. markings.
• Pages in backwards. Or upside down. Or not there at all. You laugh. It happens.

In the Audience

Back to the French baroque. I had some trouble acclimating to tonight’s concert. Took me almost half an hour. Not that it wasn’t marvelous in every way. Aulos played with spirit, virtuosity, and heart. And some of this music was cutting edge in its time. It’s just that in order to reframe the experience, it always takes me a while to enter into that sonic world.

Truth be told, the colors, harmonies, and rhythms of this music occupy fairly narrow and fairly conservative bandwidth to our 21st-century ears. In order for this music to speak to us, we have to enter its world. Once we do, its rewards are many. Until we do, it’s marginalized.

Musicians’ Love-Hate Relationship with December

From tonight’s holiday baroque concert to Sunday afternoon’s sing-along to a Sunday evening Messiah (Advent portion only, thank heaven.), it’s a typical start to a musician’s December. My email messages from colleagues are full of Nutcrackers and Messiah’s, with the occasional Christmas Oratorio, Ceremony of Carols or Amahl and the Night Visitors thrown in.
Freelance musicians love it because it pays the bills, hate it because it steals personal time during a season that purports to be about families. Someday we’ll get legislation introduced that re-schedules a Musicians’ Christmas in March. :)

The Filene Center - When Grand Opera Isn't

I was more than a little fried when posting last night, and I should’ve known better than to try to discuss the complicated relationship between our young artist company and Wolf Trap’s amphitheatre. It’s a thorny issue even for a clear mind.

So, if operas like Aida, Tosca and Madama Butterfly sell lots of tickets, why not embrace them? Why not perform them in our 6,000-seat theatre? Within our industry, it’s widely (but not universally) believed that developing voices should not sing a lot of grand opera. The thing is, it’s astonishingly difficult to explain exactly why.

IMVHO

A savvy voice teacher would probably describe this more scientifically and accurately, but the result would likely be pretty arcane. If you’re maddened by the generalities I’m about to spew forth, then just skip this section.

I was determined to find a sports metaphor for this phenomenon. After all, the limitations here are largely physiological. It’s not as if young singers lack the musical or interpretive chops to tackle Puccini. (Rather, Puccini gives up his secrets more easily than Mozart… If this were an intellectual or artistic issue, Puccini would be one of the first places we’d send newbies.) No, it’s a question of readiness and suitability of the instrument: the vocal cords, the support mechanism, the entire singing body. But athletics is a young person’s domain. Ball players are washed up by their 40’s. But operatic basses and dramatic sopranos don’t hit their stride until their mid-30’s.

What’s the worst that could happen if we turned a 25-year-old singer loose on Madame Butterfly? Well, the world would still turn. Perhaps she would crash and burn, maybe there would be lasting damage to the voice. Or maybe the chops would be strong enough to sustain it for a while.

An important digression: It hasn’t always been thus. Licia Albanese debuted as Butterfly at age 22. Callas made her professional debut as Tosca at 18. But two important things (at least) have changed. First: Early- and mid-20th century singers were studying with teachers and coaches daily, for many hours, to the exclusion of most other activities. No liberal arts undergraduate degrees for them. Second: They were generally not staring down a career of jet-setting to a series of huge theatres across the world. Many venues (particularly in Europe) were (and are) more hospitable to the voice. And while travel was certainly arduous, the pace of a career was more humane.

Do our singers fritter away valuable years getting multiple degrees and attending class? I’m almost afraid to answer. For the record, I believe the answer is no, but there are plenty who disagree. Do our singers suffer from a paucity of targeted, sustained technical study? You bet. One voice lesson a week for two semesters (if you’re lucky) is hardly a recipe for efficient training of an entire musculature. Imagine a professional gymnast who only sees his coach 25-30 times a year.

When Grand Opera Isn’t

But just why is grand opera such a threat to a developing voice? Part of the answer lies in the size of the orchestra. It takes a lot of well-placed decibels and overtone frequencies to be heard over a 75+-piece orchestra. Another component is the emotionally gut-wrenching nature of the material. It’s easy to get sucked up in the hyper-dramatic stories and viscerally emotional music. It takes a strong foundation to put your voice at the service of such potent stuff without having it eat you alive. And finally, there’s a question of stamina. A huge outpouring of physical energy for a fairly long time.

Those of us who have the opportunity to work with singers who are primed to begin singing professionally have the obligation not to abuse the privilege. Could I make a bet that Emerging-Dramatic-Soprano would get through an Aida? Would the odds be good that Young-Lyric-Tenor could throw himself at Cavaradossi and live to tell the tale? Probably. Would it be in the performers’ best interest to do so? Decidedly not.

The Mozart Prescription

So, what should these 20-somethings sing? Mozart? It’s a topic for tomorrow. Or the next day, depending on how things run at the office.

The Small World of Blogging

Later this winter, when there’s more time*, I’ll make a short list of the blogs I read. But tonight I must mention Greg Sandow’s writing, hosted on Arts Journal. He’s posting installments of his new book on the “classical music crisis”, and this week he referenced Julian Johnson’s book Who Needs Classical Music – one of the best things I have ever read on this topic. It’s becoming a huge soapbox of mine. If you end up sticking with us all the way into January, I’m sure you’ll be subjected to some ranting on this topic. But don’t assume that you can guess what direction said ranting will take.

*I always believe there's going to be time for critical reflection in January or February. There never is. But it doesn't stop me from believing.

Casting

Oh yes, and we’re still working on operas and casts for next summer. The process will be ongoing for a couple of weeks, but I’m in one of those black-out periods where I can’t be too specific in a public forum. Information will be forthcoming soon enough. And I still have audition fodder to post. Next week.

Today was spent with a huge spreadsheet that sketches out a possible schedule scenario for 3 operas, a concert, 2 recitals, and a week of children’s performances over a 14-week period. It’s tedious, but critical. A few mistakes at this stage can result in lots of frayed tempers in July.

All this talk about grand opera has Cake’s “Opera Singer” playing in my head. Thanks to Peter Z. for allowing this song to take up the remaining scarce real estate in my brain.

"I am an Opera Singer
I stand on painted Tape
It tells me where I'm going
And where to throw my cape

I call my co-star's brother
I call my co-star's name
I play both good and evil parts
I sing to Verdi's play

And every single morning
By 10 AM I'm dressed
My rehearsals last for hours and hours
With diligence I have been blessed

Some people they call me monster
Some people they call me saint
My talent feeds my darker side
Yet no one will complain

I am an opera singer
I sing in foreign lands
I've sung for kings in Europe
And emperors in Japan

And after each performance
People stand around and wave
Just to tell me that they love my voice
Just to tell me that I'm great

I am an opera singer
I will sing when you're all dead
I sing the mountains crumbling apart
I sing what can't be said

I am an opera singer
I sing in foreign lands
Most people seem to know my name
Or at least know who I am"