Reprieve

The weather has turned unexpectedly warm here, and I'm thrilled. What a lovely chance to bask in the last golden glow of summer.

Today was filled with all kinds of catch up after the break. Classes, a voice lesson, and tons of music theory rounded out the day. A few tidbits for you:

The music bibliography class today talked about how to find vocal repertoire, especially if you only know a song title from a larger work. In music, there are so many indices for the indices, lists of various categories of repertoire. It's done by voice type, by subject ("songs about bears"), by vocal range, by composer, by you-name-it-and-it's-either-been-done-or-you-could-do-your-dissertation-on-it. I can't imagine being one of the folks whose life work is to compile these giant tomes of lists. Not entirely my cup of tea. But as a singer who searches for music, I'm very grateful to them for doing it.

My voice lesson was so much fun! I'm learning to use my middle voice much more fully, and it's an odd feeling. I grew up being so protective of my instrument, terrified of slipping too much into the infamous chest voice. (Think of the a cappella group sound with the very pop "sing from your throat" sound that many singers make.) If you sing entirely in chest voice all the time as a soprano, it's very hard on your vocal cords and you can strain your instrument or potentially develop nodes - little bumps on the cords that either require complete voice rest or surgical scraping or both. But it turns out that the alternative - singing almost entirely in head voice - isn't good either. I've been bringing head voice down "too low" in my voice, and my instrument hasn't been used, therefore, to its fullest extent. I'm not exactly singing in chest voice in the middle - it's a weird hybrid sort of thing that just requires a ton more energy.

For all the people who are not interested at all in the technical side, the short of this is that I have a much bigger, richer, fuller sound than I'd ever imagined. It's very fun and cool to figure out. But it definitely takes some work to learn how to energize my breath support in the new ways that are required. I'm using different muscles in the throat and through my "core", and that's a very interesting feeling.

The class I had tonight was Artistic Decision Making, taught by a local orchestral artistic adminstrator. Most of our discussion this evening was about how to handle artist negotiations - the conversations between the Artistic Administrator and the agents about fees, dates, repertoire, and all sorts of other combinations. It's a very interesting dynamic. The agents don't want the orchestra to go elsewhere (to another agency) for their guest artists, but they also don't want to forego much money. On the other hand, the artistic administrator doesn't want the artist to be hired by another orchestra for the dates that he/she is hoping for. Competition on both sides combined with multiple tiers (payment points) for artists mixes up the conversations quite nicely.

As for the music theory, let's just say that it's keeping me quite busy. I'm still learning how to do dictation effectively (where they play an excerpt, potentially tell you the key, and you notate it.) The written analysis isn't too much faster for me at this point. The other folks in the class have all had theory in undergrad, so this is a review/refresher course for them. For me, it's mostly new (but for the material I picked up over the summer), so I'm playing catch up. Good stuff to know, though.

Tomorrow's a busy (but fun!) day as well with opera workshop, a coaching in the morning, more music theory, library visits to continue refining my 19th Century Opera Singers topic, practice for a keyboard exam on Sunday, a meeting held by the school deans, and on and on...

Happy Almost Weekend!

~Hope