A Not-Peanut-Butter Sandwich

Today, sandwiched between the various errands and other pieces of work I've been doing, I had two classes.

The first was music theory. We're talking about sequences, which are a particular type of harmonic progression in tonal music. The class was split in half. First we listened to a recording and wrote down the parts played. There are various tricks you can use to figure out what the notes are likely to be -- certain things in tonal music follow patterns. There are also rules of dos and don'ts. In this class, it's a pretty good guarantee that nothing we dictate will violate the rules. In the second half of class, we got a bass line and composed the parts above it.

My second class was stage directing. This is my two hour weekly seminar with one of the opera directors here. It's an incredible class. Today, we talked about budgeting -- all the different elements that go into producing a show. Ticket sales make up between 30% and 80% of revenues depending on the opera company and the repertoire. Most companies fall on the lower end of that, which is not to say they're poorly run. Performing a lot of musical theatre might help your mix. Opera might hurt it. Doing modern productions which have royalty payments drive up costs. And on and on.

After this discussion, we moved on to actually directing pieces. There are only three of us in the class, so it's very intimate. One of my classmates played director today for me as I sang Laurie's Song from The Tender Land by Aaron Copland. She staged the aria as if I were actually going to sing it onstage as part of an opera production. (You typically don't stage as much for recital performances with arias, although opinions vary as to what is appropriate there in terms of movement.)

The closer to my "official" day at school was a voice recital by a doctoral candidate here, QP. She looked stunning and sang with a gorgeous, spinny, rich mezzo soprano sound. She chose very difficult music, and she was able to express all of it so well with such nuance. I loved this performance!

Now I'm off to work on takeaways from the conference I went to last week. "Takeaways" -- a word that feels unused, strange in my mouth these days. Pretty funny given that it was my bread and butter language just six months ago.

~Hope