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