Dalcroze

Today was a rather odd day. I rose late and treated myself to a mocha. I have caffeine so seldom that any splash of it affects me very strongly. All of a sudden, my pulse picks up and I get the urge to be Extremely Productive. It's quite fun.

So today, despite sleeping in, I ended up accomplishing a lot. This included vacuuming my dusty apartment, which is now very grateful to be clean.

Late in the afternoon, I took a break from my typing and pondering and headed off to my Dalcroze class. I've blogged about this before, I believe, but here's a quick recap. Dalcroze is a form of music theory and teaching that uses movement to help musicians internalize things like rhythm, tone, and tempo. Today, we did everything from walking the "character" of the beats (larger steps for the anacrusis, or the last beat in a measure -- the one that leads to the crusis, or downbeat) to clapping two while walking three and then switching back and forth. We stepped back rhythmic patterns at various speeds and then notated them on the board in a form of rhythmic dictation (i.e. just the note values, not the pitches.) We conducted using large arm movements and swinging our bodies in time.

The class is taught by a dynamic guy who graduated last year from the DMA program here. He's in the midst of applying for teaching positions, which is tough in the current market. Luckily for us, he's decided to continue teaching Dalcroze here while waiting to hear about a full-time option.

I always end up feeling like I'm in a combination of kindergarten, ballet class, and a sophisticated music theory class. It's a lot of fun, and it actually does make a difference in performance. I'm better able to figure out rhythms quickly and keep regular tempi. Cross-rhythms (that two vs. three thing) are also easier, which is great because I have several pieces in which my pianist plays in three while I sing in two or vice versa. (In case you're confused, what this means is that my pianist is going 1-2-3 1-2-3 while I'm going 1-2 1-2 where 1-2-3 and 1-2 are each on a "beat." Think of a triplet vs. two eighth notes.)

When I graduate, I know one of the things I'll miss is my Sunday afternoon class of cavorting. For me, it's rather like meditation. It's pretty hard to think of anything else while you're trying to maintain two different contrasting rhythms in your feet and hands -- and then switching between them. Try it sometime. It's like the musician's version of patting your head while rubbing your tummy.

~Hope

Tidbits

It's been a really interesting - and busy - week. Here are a few tidbits.

The instrument you see above is called the Guzheng. It's a Chinese harp. On Wednesday, my harp teacher taught us some of its techniques, and we played a few simple phrases. To pluck it, you tape finger picks on the pads of your fingers - the opposite side from your nails. These picks are hard plastic, and the thumb one is actually a bit curved so that it points vertically downward, parallel to the other picks, when you curve your hand above the strings. You pluck on the right side of the instrument. The left side, on the other side of the bridges, is where you bend the strings to create slides and other pitches. The strings are tuned in a pentatonic scale, which means they contain only five pitches instead of the seven we're used to hearing in a major scale. This particular pentatonic scale is D E F# A and B. (Then it restarts at the next D.) The green strings are the D's. To get the "in between pitches" like C, you bend the string on the left side before you pluck it.

The whole instrument has a very Eastern sound, and it has some fantastic music. My harp teacher actually took lessons from a Chinese master on the instrument during her undergrad education. She had to work through a translator since the woman only spoke Mandarin. The Guzheng player taught normally in Beijing, but an American professor here with a great interest in melding Eastern and Western styles brought her over for a year to teach in the US. Lacey, my teacher, learned from her here and then traveled to Beijing to spend an extra week intensively studying the instrument. The techniques are a bit different than the traditional Western concert harp, so it can be a challenge to switch between the instruments. (One difference is that, on the Western concert harp, you pluck by closing your fingers in parallel to your palm. On the Guzheng, you pluck with more of a clawing movement, closing at the mid-knuckle.)

That was Wednesday. On Thursday, I had class where I got staging for "Chacun le sait", an audition aria on which I'm working. That night, however, was the next "big event". There's a conference of Robin Hood scholars here, and Thursday night was an opening concert for which six singers performed. I was one of them. The challenge in the whole affair was that I learned the music in five days. It was given to us on Friday the 9th, but I couldn't pick it up until Monday the 12th because I was ill. While I could plunk through it on the piano, I still couldn't sing until last weekend. I had three duets, a small chorus section, and two solo pieces to learn. Both the solo pieces were a bit challenging. The second one in particular required some sophisticated high coloratura work. Called "Forest Song No. 13" and written by Reginald de Koven, it was evidently often cut from the original performances of the whole operetta. I learned today that it was actually hard to find singers capable of performing it adequately, so it wasn't often used. This would be one of the reasons I wasn't blogging over the past week :)

The Thursday night performance wasn't staged - it was a "concert version", which means we all just stood and sang. We performed in the university's chapel, a rather odd acoustical environment - great for the audience but one that tends to suck sound away from the singers "stage" area. As you sing, you feel like your voice isn't carrying or is thinner than usual. The truth is that all the sound waves just end up getting spread around the hall, away from you. Fortunately, we had a dress rehearsal Wednesday night to get used to the acoustics. And Thursday night was well-received, with perhaps 100-150 people in the audience.

Friday was my makeup audition for the spring opera work. My piece required a very different technique from Thursday night's work. I sang Franco Faccio's "Sortita d'Ofelia", which sounds like Puccini. It demands a more lyric sound, a fuller and warmer voice. The Robin Hood material, on the other hand, asks for a "twitter bird" coloratura -- placing the voice right in the "mask" - the cheekbones area. You can't have too much weight or you won't be able to move as fast or as high as you need to go. So I had to switch a bit around on Friday morning. Happily, I felt great about the audition. I really felt like I sang my best and connected with the piece on an expressive level, which completely delighted me.

This morning, I was up early again for another Robin Hood performance. One of my professors gave a paper comparing some medieval chant with the more modern setting of the same chant by a Curtis professor in the late 1920s. A tenor and I sang several examples for his paper's presentation, and the professor and our fabulous accompanist joined in at the end to sing the finale. It's really a hilarious comparison. The Curtis guy, Bec, proclaims in the preface to his work that he will remain faithful to the original 13th century material. He then goes on to use nineteenth and twentieth century harmonies and chromaticism. He re-sets the original old French text in modern French and alters some of the rhythms. He also transposes some of the excerpts up a whole step or so. If you just heard Bec's piece, you would be hard-pressed to identify it as a "13th century-inspired" work.

The audiences for all the Robin Hood stuff were very warm, and it was great fun to be involved with this! I love having the chance to perform frequently, and having three days back to back has been a blast! Now it's time to dive into learning my repertoire for classes and my recital.

I hope your weekend is just as fun!

~Hope

Back in business

Whew. I'm finally on the other side of that tonsilitis thing (knock on wood). My voice is slowly coming back -- today I was able to sing for 45 minutes. It's still a far cry from what I'll need for this week, but I'm hoping that I can ease my muscles and vocal cords back into what they're supposed to be doing.

In the meantime, I got to see a few extraordinary events this weekend. Yesterday, one of the voice department professors gave a recital with her sister. She's a mezzo, and her sister is a soprano. Their voices have some timbral similarities, of course, so they blend beautifully. The encore was a delightful piece by Brahms about sisters - how they sleep in the same bed, share clothes, and everything - but when they fall in love with the same man, that's it! No more sharing! These two performers hammed it up and had so much fun that we all did, too.

Then, this morning, I saw a master class by that same professor. It's always interesting to see a true professional teach. She worked on interesting technical problems with two young singers - one a high school senior (tenor) and the other a college sophmore (mezzo/soprano). In both cases, she talked about using your tongue more than your jaw and about proper posture and breath support. With the older singer, she was a little more specific about resonance placement and diction. In both instances, she retained a very focused approach, firing new things at them at a slow enough pace that they could absorb them but a fast enough pace to distract them from the audience or being nervous. The other important trick for a master class? Always end on a positive note. In both cases, she allowed them to sing the last bit of their piece to great acclaim by her and the audience.

This afternoon, I saw another voice teacher's recital. This was a baritone's performance, and it was tremendous. He sang a multifaceted, difficult set that included music in German, French, and English with some contemporary composers -- John Musto, John Duke, and Charles Ives. It was a challenging program, both for the singer and pianist and for the audience. We loved it, though, especially because it was not only beautifully sung but also beautifully acted. He created such a space around him for each song. And his gestures -- well, I find myself studying gestures in professionals when they do recital work. What do you do with those pesky appendages called arms and the things at the end - hands? In opera, you're given other people and props with which to interact. You often have a physical task to accomplish while you sing. But in art song? It's just you and the piano. You can't "mime" the actions - that's too false - but your gestures can't be exactly like they are in speech because each phrase takes longer to sing than it would to say. Somehow, you have to tune into the rhythm of the composer's conception of the character (rather than your own, as it would be with just spoken acting.) And you have to move your arms, elbows, shoulders, hands, fingers, palms, wrists, thumbs, and all in such a way that it "fits". My professor tonight did just that. And his expression - his body changed palpably from when his was playing an old man (stiff, a halting gait) to when he played a little boy talking about his idol - his dad (youthful countenance, wide eyes, quick movements).

It was a great, great weekend for performances.

~Hope

Phrase of the Day

I've been battling something since last Thursday. Started off like the flu and morphed into this strange fever-plus-tonsil-the-size-of-Jupiter thing. So that explains my blogging hiatus.

But the real point of this message is the Phrase of the Day.

I called Student Health to see if I could be seen today since my other tonsil is threatening to swell to the same size as the first one. And that would be very bad.

What did the receptionist say when I included fever among my list of symptoms?

"Well, we don't want you to come in if you have a fever."

Yep.

I understand being cautious about the spread of swine flu and all, but what is the point of Student Health in the first place?

~Hope