Commissioning – Co-Creating – Interpreting

Contemporary Opera Practice and Research

If I’m honest, my research is quite literally all over the map, drawn from one topic to the next by way of the dozens of new and early music collaborations of which I’ve been a part through the years and each of which I cherish. Some of my research is scholarly in nature, looking at vocal works through the lens of historical context or notational practices, for example. Some is ‘embodied’ research. Because much of my work challenges the limits of technique, I spend a lot of time developing vocal techniques to face these challenges, managing resonance, breath control, register shifts or multimodal techniques, and learning about performing in new media formats some of which, even 10 years ago, was impossible to imagine, much less to train for. 

As a teacher and performer, I welcome collaborators and students who are inspired by both traditional and innovative topics, but what excites me most is investigating creativity and expression especially in the works of composers who search(ed) for new musical languages and methods of treating text. For 17th-century vocal works whose scores are often skeletal, I’m fascinated by responsibility that is placed on performers to make choices of articulation, phrasing, harmonic and instrumental realization and arranging, and tone color that bring these scores into richly detailed life, and developing these interpretations is as much a matter of researching performance treatises as it is about developing an ear and a perception for how these choices support an emotional concept. With contemporary chamber music, I am engaged in a multi-year research project with composer-performers Mauricio Pauly and Mabel Kwan, in which I spend significant time recording and cataloging timbral manipulations of traditional and extended techniques and then applying these sounds to improvisations, listening for the spectral qualities of my collaborators’ sounds and adding my own sounds (acoustic and electronically processed) whose spectral qualities distinctly contrast from the instrumental sounds. I listen for hierarchy of content in the texture, how sounds combine or stand independently from one another. Although these musics are separated by hundreds of years, they are unified by a common research interest – learning more about how we educate our ears and, consequently, our creative response to emotion and a language of expressivity.

I’m also in the midst of a multiyear research project centering on operas of the 21st century. Over the last two decades, connections between society and opera have been made stronger as composers have increasingly chosen to set new stories and characters to music, to write for singers whose voices and gender identity perhaps don’t align with traditional categories, to consider musical tools borrowed from non-classical practices, and to think about how opera can live in media other than traditional concert hall stages. Many traditional opera companies have seen dwindling audiences and donations for the better part of half a century, and it is an undeniable reality that classical singers are being asked to do their jobs differently than they were 100 years ago. My research goal in this project is to learn enough about the most interesting and productive trends in opera to adapt opera training to adequately address these changes in the industry and the skills required to thrive.