Reading/Listening:
*Transfigured New York – Brooke Wentz
*Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games – edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado
*Prism – an opera by Ellen Reid
*Orlando Furioso – Vicente Atria
Words and Music Acquired:
*Music, Migration, and Cultural Membership in Close Harmony (Leon F. Garcia Corona in American Music)
*White Face, Black Voice: Race Gender and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sister (Laurie Stras in Journal of the Society for American Music)
In a week, I’ll be in Johannesburg, so it’s crunch time. On top of practicing the Jeraldine Herbison set, Images lunaires by Tebogo Monnakgotla, Fanny Hensel, and songs by Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, Monthati Masebe, Nadine Shanti, and Shawn Okpehbolo, I realized that I’ll only have two days between getting back to the US and going to Chicago to record some Tomás Gueglio and doing some read-throughs of songs by Hilda Paredes and Chris Trapani with my pal Mabel Kwan, sooooooo I’m making the jankiest of listening tracks (rhythm, stumbling through parts of the piano) to use while I’m transiting on this trip. By the time I’m back for good, it’ll be mid-September and time for school to start, which is an overwhelming prospect.
I’ve been slowly disengaging from projects in anticipation of my travel. First it was the opera research project. I got a good start on a catalog and now have clear sense of the next step. One of the goals at the outset of the project was to identify scenes that could perhaps be used in opera workshop with a mixed group of undergraduates and graduate students, and I had assumed that the real challenge would be finding new operas singable by your average college student. And, yes, there are many operas that are out of reach for young singers, to be sure. Too high, too demanding in terms of musicianship or awkward in terms of text setting, and or works that will fall flat in a room without lighting or other visual reinforcement to help draw the audience into a poetic mood.
In fact, the bigger challenge is that most works are not easily ‘chunkable’. Historically, operas contained lots of 7-15 minute scenes that have some crucial plot point that moves the scene forward; that have a beginning, middle, and end musically; that have dynamic and well-paced (not too stagnant and not too chaotic) interactions between the characters; and the libretto has a clear tone and understands/achieves the goals of that tone. These qualities are so important for the classroom, because the primary barrier to drawing a strong performance from a student is confidence, and too many obstacles to connecting with the music or the scene is a recipe for a lack of confidence and ultimately growing resentment for the work. I absolutely believe in teaching students skills beyond realism, but it’s fair to say that an operatic training without any training in dramatic realism is missing something essential. In any case, my next step is to look at some of these seemingly ‘unchunkable’ works and ask, “How could this material be adapted or otherwise included in a curriculum, so that we aren’t giving students the false impression that the only real opera is from before 1945?” while also giving them material that meets the students where they are.
After putting opera research to bed, I returned the ‘Music and Riddle Culture’ book that I started last month and downloaded a few articles on close harmony for another project I’m working on. ‘Riddle Culture’ will definitely be back on the shelf when I come back, but I’m also finding myself pivoting on how to program Ming Tsao’s pieces and how I want to audience to engage with idea of riddles and games.
I wrangled a recording plan for January – check. Cascade Song Festival is chugging forward, and before I leave, I’ll hopefully be ready to take the next step forward in a research opportunity I’ll be offering the students (weehoo!). I had a convo with a violinist buddy about a planned program and some commissioning in 2027-28 (*gags a little*), and Quince is making progress on programming for next season.
It feels a bit like, when I get on the plane, I’ll be sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner after days of preparation. I see the dirty dishes coming, but I’m trying to enjoy this moment of release from a sense of duty to alllll the project. This will be the longest ‘vacation’ I have taken in six years, and I’m ready to let some other thoughts and feelings find their way into the space that is otherwise occupied by ‘What Next? What am I Forgetting? Who Needs Me Now?’ for most of the year.
See y’all on the other side!