Reading/Listening:
*Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life – Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm
*Pass the Spoon, a sort-of opera by David Fennessey, David Shrigley, and Nicholas Bone
Words and Music Acquired:
*Tree Lines by Exceptet (Bandcamp)
*Music and riddle culture in the Renaissance -Schiltz, Katelijne
It’s midsummer, and inspired by Nick Hornby’s blog about what’s he’s reading in the Believer magazine, I thought I’d start periodically writing about what I’m up to. Posts might just sometimes be the ‘What I’m Reading’ list, or maybe like Alex Ross’s microposts, but I’ll start with a longer thread, so buckle up.
This part of the summer is ostensibly my ‘time off’ between early summer gigs and late summer gigs, and it wouldn’t be fair to say that I’m doing absolutely nothing recreational. I have in fact been dragged multiple times a day by the current foster dog Bodie to the mulberry bush on the corner for berry roadkill snacktime. And I have been getting up at obscene hours to watch a bunch of dudes hurt themselves biking across France. (Victor Campanaerts – please be my friend one day.)
In between draggings and cycle soap opera, I’m distinctly not reading Ian Howell’s doubtlessly groundbreaking and possibly brain-breaking book, which in the stack inches from my head at night. I teach the vocal pedagogy course at UW, and every two years, my life becomes a hot dog eating contest of pedagogy articles (rereading and updating), a task which has changed my practice for the better, but the word ‘formant’ needs to get out of my face for a minute. Far far out of my face.
I’m instead preparing a recital in South Africa in August including a number of unrecorded works by women from the Afrodiaspora, and working through songs more similar to those my students learn for degree recitals than my usual fare of high-pressure, high-density vocal chamber music has been a good reminder that the end of working on a phrase cannot be getting the resonance (or even the dynamics, phrasing, etc) just right. When the music is more transparent, certain elements of vocal expressivity and storytelling, their presence or absence, call attention to themselves. I recorded myself yesterday, and – reality check – it looked far too much like I wished this were on the radio and nobody could see my face. I’ll hopefully have some recordings to share in the near future, if I can overcome my annoyance about camera angle and the mess that the mic stands make in my office.
And then there’s next season. And the next and the next. Planning 3-5 years out is more important every year, not just for myself but also for the voice department broadly. Last year, I came to the end of my multi-year plan (commissions, collaborations, thematic focuses) for both my own work and the department’s opera schedule – right at the moment when I became consumed with a couple of high-maintenance tasks. I arrived at the end of academic year, and I had nothing.
So the beginning of the summer has been about grabbing the wheel and getting this vehicle back on the road. The only idea that I’d been kicking around for a faculty concert this year came from one of my colleague’s interest in performing Ming Tsao’s Das wassergewordene Kanonbuch. So I think that’ll be on tap next winter/spring perhaps paired with some of historical puzzle pieces that inspired Ming’s piece.
I’d also been trying, in fits and starts, to collect contemporary opera scores for a while, and finally in June, I pushed the project further than typing titles into a Google doc. I’ve been looking at scores ranging from Chaya Czernowin to Jodi Goble to Melissa Dunphy and this week David Fennessey, David Shrigley and Nicholas Bone’s engagingly surreal comedy Pass the Spoon. Maybe I’ll start writing a bit about what I find in the course of my research. Researching opera is time consuming on so many levels (far more time consuming that I can regularly commit to, given teaching load and performance schedule), and my first pass through operas is purely to answer the question, “Could I imagine our students doing this?” And frankly, I’m dumbfounded at how much less concerned I am with the music and more at the way that librettos don’t give me what I want, but I’ll have much more to say about that some other time.
Many other projects on the horizon. Hopefully I’ll find a way to make this part of my weekly routine.