Happy Day

I had a happy day today.

Partly, this was because the sun came out for the first time in a few days, and the temperature increased yet again.

Partly, this was because I had enough time to practice.

Partly, this was because I had a great coaching where the professor offered some very useful expressive tidbits. For the Nielsen piece I'm doing, I was trying to find a way to differentiate between the two verses. He suggested that Ariel might be talking to two different people instead of just Miranda (from The Tempest.) Although he initially thought of Ferdinand as the other one, he then came up with Prospero, which is perfect because the way Ariel would talk to his master and the wizard of the island is very different from how he would talk to the young woman, Miranda, whom he may or may not love (depending on which poet you follow). Then, my professor reminded me that I should make the whole thing less jumpy - more legato - despite the dotted rhythms, and that made it even better. And then we moved on to the Honegger, where a faster tempo my professor took made all the difference in the first section of the piece.

It's always good to feel like you're making progress, you know?

The other reason today was fantastic was that I gave a good performance in studio class. I've been working with Strauss's Drei Lieder der Ophelia, which are a bit challenging to say the least. The depict the character in a state of madness and grief, and I kept thinking about how to convey madness onstage. A series of comments from my professors and revelations from my own thinking over the past few months finally clicked yesterday:

• What makes madness so chilling is the sudden changes - the way someone flips from being in one emotional state to being in another just instantaneously and without warning.
  
• People who are crazy think that they are normal. So Ophelia can sing each section truthfully.
  
• The madness in these pieces is very much in the accompaniment. I don't need to add too much on top of that.
• And, the big one, from my voice teacher last week: "Just tell the story, like you're telling it to children."

I missed a couple entrances because I was with the character or slipped out of focus for an instant, and, at the end, my voice teacher actually applauded the mistakes. "For some people," she said, "I need to tell them not to make mistakes, to fix things. But you are capable of getting everything exactly right. I want you to make mistakes because it means that you're in the music and in the moment."

Interesting.

Of course, that is a stage that I need to pass through. I don't want the mistakes a month from now in the actual performance. But it may be that they are part of the gradual letting go of my vise-like monitoring of my accuracy.

She and my classmates also pointed out that there were moments when I stopped communicating, when the language that was so present with the audience was suddenly pulled back towards myself. These were the times when I was listening to myself, judging, and analyzing what I was doing.

So much of vocal performance is a flow idea - the notion that you are completely immersed in this moving stream of notes and words. It is critical to be able to stay within that flow, in the water, rather than pulling out and watching from the shore. I'm working on being in the current all the time.

And now I get to go read about Honegger and Debussy. How great is that?

~Hope