Master Class

Judy Kaye and her husband gave a master class today. It was extraordinary.

Five of my fellow students sang for them. In each case, I watched their initial performances and thought, "What will they possibly critique?" Each first run was so good. Yet in every case, the two artists found interesting and new angles to lift the students to entirely new levels.

The repertoire presented was all in the musical theatre/operetta genre. This basically means a slightly different technique than opera (more forward voice, what sounds to me like less open space or full resonance - a bit more "talky"/belt, more diphthongs and fewer pure vowels, etc.) as well as a different style of acting. When opera/art song is performed unstaged (i.e., with just a piano), it's rare to use props. But when you have musical theatre, props are a frequent part.

Here are the pieces that were sung:

Vanilla Ice Cream from She Loves Me (the musical that pre-dates Meg Ryan's You've Got Mail - essentially the same story)

A Bit of Earth from The Secret Garden

Funny from My Favorite Year

What Good Would the Moon Be? from Street Scene

My Friends from Sweeney Todd

Beauty from The Light in the Piazza

All were beautifully sung. The comments that Ms. Kaye and her husband gave were focused on the dramatic side of these pieces. Overall, they kept coming back to the idea of intimacy, of realism. "Acting," her husband said, quoting his acting teacher, "is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances." When you think about that, you begin to realize that acting is not "performing". It's all too easy to think about grand gestures, about "putting on a show" for people in the audience, about "making them understand." But, while there are "performance pieces" (e.g., Norina's "So anch'io la virtu magica"), none of these pieces are it. Instead, all of these are sung as introspective soliloquies (except for Funny, which is really sung half as a soliloquy and half to the pianist.) That changes the game. Turns out the audience will come with you, like "peering into a snowglobe", as one of my studiomates commented, if you simply "be".

The other point they had was that you should "Discover what you're going to say next - you don't know yet." When we prepare a piece really well, it can become rote. We as a performer know what's coming up. Perhaps we're thinking about the technical requirements we'll need to ready ourselves for a big phrase, or we're worrying about the next interval or diction nuance. But our characters are inevitably "thinking on the spot." These thoughts aren't written out for them. They are making it up as they go along. And the audience needs to feel like we are doing that, too. It reminds me of something my Voice Rep professor said; he saw a concert where Benjamin Britten accompanied Peter Pears on some of Britten's song literature. These pieces were clearly composed in advance. But the concert appeared like it was improvised on the spot - the performances that both Britten and Pears gave were just that fresh.

Finally, Ms. Kaye pointed out that everything goes back to the text. When she learns a new piece, she starts with the text, asking herself "Who am I? What do I want?" For her, the music just flows from that. If it's composed well, it should be a natural extension of the interpretation of the character.

All of these are rather lofty ideas, but what did they actually have people do to put them into effect? In "A Bit of Earth", they had the singer turn his back to the audience and speak the text conversationally to Ms. Kaye's husband, David, who sat on a stool in front of him. In several of the other pieces, they had people start their performances sitting down, as if to themselves. In "Vanilla Ice Cream", they had the soprano actually write the letter she writes in the song, taking her time with each word. In "Funny", they had the soprano stand behind the pianist, place her hands on his shoulders, and actually sing to him. And in "My Friends", they gave the baritone a pen (meant to be the knife to which he sings) and had him focus completely on it, singing to it and drowning out everything else around him.

It was really interesting and very well done. We were all so pleased and grateful that these two incredibly talented artists took the time to come speak with us.

The rest of my day was filled with performing. I sang Vivaldi's "Senza l'amato ben" in Voice Rep for the class this morning. In the afternoon, I sang Britten's "Be Kind and Courteous" in Studio. I still have work to do with each piece, but I was pleased with the performances overall. Tonight, I'm constructing my own personal logo for my Digital Portfolio Class and working on a paper on "Be Kind and Courteous". Meanwhile, the search for Shakespeare repertoire continues...many obscure manuscripts lurk around the world. Boy would I love to travel to Helsinki to get my hands on the Finnish one...or Vienna to find the one by Vogl. But I think my summer travels will have to last me for a while.

~Hope