Ian Sidden

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A Corner for Gratitude

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There was a moment in Die Blume von Hawaii, where I always tried to pay meta attention to what was happening and feel gratitude for it. Laya and Lilo Taro were singing in subdued light, while the rest of the cast and chorus were frozen, having just sung a big ensemble.

I was singing as Kanako Hilo and was situated center at the front corner of a high platform. One step forward, and I’d fall several meters to the stage, but while frozen, my sight could linger on the audience without it being weird. The music and the lights all came together in a swirling magic, and the drop in front of me provided the private illusion of flying.

In this moment, I felt intense appreciation for the audience’s presence, and I saw how lucky I was to be onstage singing. I reminded myself that I was there through a mixture of effort and sacrifice and luck, and that I had wanted this and was getting it at that moment. I knew I shouldn’t let it silently pass by without that recognition.

There was a similar moment in Don Giovanni, where everyone other than Don Giovanni himself was silent and sitting down in a semi-circle. I loved this production and this scene in particular, so it always came naturally that I felt gratitude for it. Masetto was in a rough place, but Ian was happy and was acutely aware of that happiness.

The gratitude was, however, tied to the knowledge that it wouldn’t last forever. Writing this now, these productions of Blume and Don Giovanni are gone, and the likelihood that I’ll get to do them again is almost nil. More broadly, I’m aware that I won’t get to sing professionally forever. There will come a day, whether by choice or not, where this path will come to an end.

And even more broadly, all of this that is now will pass. And by maintaining some corner of the mind for being grateful now, perhaps we can know that we’ve had our fill when the time comes to let go.

What if…

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Once at a coaching for the aria “Avant de quitter ces liuex”, which I regard as a technically tricky aria, I was advised to apply musical ideas from this piece to the aria:

What if you pretended a piece wasn’t hard to sing technically? What musical idea would you want to express? How do you get there?

Google Questions: “Can you be successful in theater as a baritone?”

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Website owners see some of the Google search queries that send people to their websites. Sometimes, these queries are questions, so if I can, I’d like to answer them directly.

Question: “Can you be successful in theater as a baritone”?

Yes. That doesn’t mean it’s easy though.

I’m not going to speculate about whether it’s easier or harder than having a different voice type, because there’s no voice type that guarantees work, and you’ll drive yourself crazy if you day dream about having a different voice. You always have to sing very well and have a good voice, and you have to have some combination of business sense, talent, skill, luck and the right package that makes people want to hire you. And then you need to have the mental fortitude to keep accepting success once you start to get it once you see the costs in the other areas of your life.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to know in advance whether you have that without doing your best to get it and then going out and auditioning.

But regardless of whether or not you become “successful in theater as a baritone”, the journey of learning how to sing and singing is itself rewarding. Singing is fun, and there’s a lot of beautiful baritone repertoire to enjoy.

Sing with Structure

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It’s easy to lose the plot when discussing singing technique. It’s too easy to focus on high notes and volume and forget why we want to sing well in the first place.

The techniques are about making music, and for the classical singer that goes back to singing with structure.

I like using the term structure, because it communicates the hierarchical challenges of good singing. But I also like legato or “line” since they offer additional clues for how to solve musical problems.

But if you’re singing, then you have lines within lines. Individual melodies have their own best structure, but so do individual words, and so do sentences or verses or stanzas. And underlying it is the subtext and broader story you’re telling.

The task of the singer is to combine these disparate lines and combine them into a whole structure.

And of course that means knowing something about the language and the style of the music. It’s useful to have some sense about what the composer wanted beyond what’s written, but sometimes you have to make it your own. And it has to be in concert with your collaborators who need to fit your story into the bigger story.

Your technique has to be up for the challenge. But don’t wag the dog with your technique. Determine your musical goals and then apply the technique to that structure.

The Elastic Passaggio: [a] Edition

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At the passaggi, a singer has some flexibility. With the vocal tract being comprised of flesh and cartilage, we can manipulate our throats within reason to achieve certain vocal effects depending on the musical choices we want to make.

Once you see my examples, you might think, “Yea, well duh. I’ve heard lots of singers do this stuff,” and you’d be right. But I want make these “flipping” strategies more explicit than they have been. Because the concepts of formant tuning are still relatively new, many singers approach their passaggio with a certain amount of guesswork, and that guesswork can lead to uncertainty about the results they can expect.

If you don’t know what the heck I’m writing about with regards to formant tuning, please check out the formant-tuning primer I wrote for the occasion.

My examples, by the way, will detail the strategies for ascending on an “ah” vowel (IPA: [a]) into resonant second formant third harmonic tuning (F2H3) and away from first formant second harmonic tuning (F1H2). 1
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