So I will post recordings from time to time that give any readers a sense of where I am as a singer and maybe even older recordings to display where I came from too.
The first will be three of Dominic Argento’s Six Elizabethan Songs. These are “Spring”, “Diaphenia”, and “Hymn”. I performed these along with my current accompanist PhoebeJoy Wong at Honor’s Recital here at New Mexico State University in December, 2008. I will be performing these in a few months on a recital.
For the past 4 or 5 months I have been pondering Samuel Barber’s song cycle Despite and Still op. 41. I first heard it listening to the complete songs album with Thomas Hampson singing and John Browning on piano. Through their performances – along with Cheryl Studer’s – I was taken by Despite and Still and the whole corpus of Barber’s songs.
Barber’s songs are extraordinary for their good humor, sensitive emotional rendering, and fascinating texts. The variety is also outstanding. Think of “St. Ita’s Vision” in the same cycle as “Promiscuity” in Hermit Songs.
After listening to these songs several times and singing them, I became more and more drawn to Despite and Still. These songs are wildly mysterious, and the challenges to the singer attempting them are myriad. The melodies are vocally challenging, and the texts are difficult to understand. Three of them – “A Last Song”[originally “A Last Poem”], “In the Wilderness”, and “Despite and Still” – are poems by Robert Graves. One – “My Lizard”- is by Theordore Roethke. And one – “Solitary Hotel” – is an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The last and title song “Despite and Still” is violent and demanding. If we were to remove the singing, the person speaking might very well be shouting. The piano lays chords underneath the poor singer that make entire scales chordal tones and plays imitative harsh jabbing motives in parallel octaves. The speaker demands of his/her unnamed other that they both put other loves aside to “love despite and still”. Why does Barber set these thoughts to such upsetting music?
Have you not read
The words in my head,
And I made part
Of your own heart?
We have been such as draw
The losing straw —
You of your gentleness,
I of my rashness,
Both of despair —
Yet still might share
This happy will:
To love despite and still.
Never let us deny
The thing’s necessity,
But, O, refuse
To choose,
When chance may seem to give
Loves in alternative.(Barber then adds for…emphasis?)
To love despite and still.
The song that is perhaps the “hit” of the bunch is “Solitary Hotel” because of its catchy and – let’s admit it – sexy tango line in the piano. It is by far the most perplexing of the group, though. The piano plays a rubato laced line with a 6/8 feel in the right hand and a tango habanera beat in the left while the singer intones two or three syllable utterances.
The text is describing a scene, but the manner in which it’s described is bleak and certainly “solitary”:
Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it toward fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary. What? In sloping, upright and backhand: Queen’s hotel. Queen’s hotel. Queen’s ho-
I feel like only after digging into them for so many months am I beginning to understand this grouping.
I will have more to say about the other songs over the next few months, but there seems to be some use of what Verdi scholars would call tinta in them that may be the basis for relationship between the songs. I am not prepared to say that they have a clear cut story though.
If anyone who reads this blog over the next couple of months has worked on these songs or heard a performance that struck them, I would love to hear about it.
NPR featured an interview with Carlo Ponti Junior on Weekend Edition this Saturday. In it they discussed classical music in our schools, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Mussorgsky’s Pictures At an Exhibition, and why classical music is important. There are some recordings on the page as well.
Photo by Bridget Sidden
I am now a classically trained singer who has an eye on making my living from singing, and I have been wrestling with these questions (amongst many others) for several years now:
How do I go about getting head shots?
How do I prepare for an audition?
How do I prepare for a role?
What school should I attend?
Should I continue to go to school?
Whose advice can I believe?
How can I pay for this?
What is the nature of the professional singer?
Are competitions useful?
Should I move across the country? Or world?
How will this affect my family?
Why am I doing this?
etc…
Choosing to be a professional performer is a major decision and should be taken seriously. One the one hand, you ought to just “try things out” and “let things happen” to see whether you enjoy performing and are good at it. There is nothing wrong with performing for the sheer love of it and having no professional ambitions. On the other hand, decisions must be made if you do have those ambitions.
And this is a good thing.
Decisions and taking responsibility for them are part of maturity. Making choices as an artist is essential. And so, the more clear and deliberate choices that we make as human beings, the clearer we will be in our medium.
The medium that will be most discussed in this blog is singing, voice teaching and the other skills that may be necessary for success at those ventures.
I am currently a graduate student who has a wonderful voice teaching assistantship. At this school, I have had the chance to perform in some very cool shows where I created two roles for new musicals. I have also been the bass soloist for Bach’s St. John Passion. I have had excellent teachers at this school, and I feel that, yes, I could with enough effort and patience go and sing for a living. This Spring I will graduate, and from there my future looks as expansive and incomprehensible as the desert from a mountaintop.
This blog will be a running commentary on questions that I face as a teacher and as a performer. I hope to have interviews, reviews, pedagogy as well as advice on managing one’s career as I learn how to manage my own. I hope that this blog will eventually be a service to others who are facing these questions in their own lives. And though I will improve as a singer and human being with age, I will always try to approach my mediums through the eyes of a beginner who always has more to learn.
Ciao!