Ian Sidden

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A Comment on the Onegin Choruses

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Singing the Eugene Onegin choruses is a particular delight amongst the various opera choruses I’ve now sung. They also present a few challenges that are worth comment.

The dominant challenge is that the length of phrases is unusual. The opening chorus contains some long lines where the ideal spot to breathe happens later than you might expect. Here’s one such example, with my preferred breath spot marked:

 

With the “Adagio” tempo marking, you need to prepare in advance to reach the ideal breathing spot. You also have to construct the phrase musically in a way that makes sense with the language and the larger musical context. My ideal stress point are the downbeats of bars 11 and 12.

As with a lot of this music, those stress points don’t have to happen on the highest note in the phrase, so you need to restrain yourself and not just blast out the higher tones. It’s a challenge, but when it all comes together, the effort proves itself worthwhile.

Premiere: Eugene Onegin

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Tonight is Theater Dortmund’s premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. It’s a wonderful piece and a joy to sing. Toi toi toi to everyone involved.

Heute Abend findet die Premiere Eugen Onegin von Tschaikowsky im Opernhaus Dortmund statt. Das Stück ist wunderschön und eine Vergnügen, zu singen. Toi toi toi an allen Beteiligten.

More information/Mehr Infos:

https://www.theaterdo.de/detail/event/eugen-onegin/

Goodies

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A few articles that have caught my attention this week:

Don’t Be Batman:

What this study offers is a solution that is more damning than the “problem” that it addresses. If a four-year-old child has to disassociate, to pretend that she is someone else, in order to cope with the demands of your program, your program needs to stop, today.

There is a fine line between acoustic excellence and elitism:

Despite decades of compromised sound classical music survives very well in London because music is remarkably resilient. The brain’s miraculous psychoacoustic compensation abilities mean that some of the content can be stripped out without destroying the music’s essence – MP3 and other lossy formats depend on this. Sonic excellence is a laudable goal. But classical music can and will survive despite compromised concert halls and compromised audio systems. Like Class A audio systems, acoustically perfect concert halls and are a ‘very nice to have’ but not a ‘must have’.

Notable recordings of 2017 (preliminary):

I have begun compiling my end-of-year list of notable performances and recordings.

PRO-NEUTRALITY, ANTI-TITLE II:

This argument certainly applies to net neutrality in a far more profound way: the Internet has been the single most important driver of not just economic growth but overall consumer welfare for the last two decades. Given that all of that dynamism has been achieved with minimal regulatory oversight, the default position of anyone concerned about future growth should be maintaining a light touch. After all, regulation always has a cost far greater than what we can see at the moment it is enacted, and given the importance of the Internet, those costs are massively more consequential than restaurants or just about anything else.

A Sea of Best Guesses

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When we wake up and get going, we’re operating under a series of best guesses about how the world works.

We can’t know what random events will happen that day.

We can’t know how we will react until the moment comes.

We cannot know fully the contents of another person’s mind, let alone many other people’s minds, and we cannot fully understand their motivations and needs.

They can’t fully understand our motivations and needs.

We can barely understand our own motivations and needs.

We have a vague understanding of why we do what we do, and our own account of our actions may not line up with the truth.

The full truth of any given moment, however, may be unknowable, and the more time spent analyzing, the further time glides us away from that moment.

We get along with heuristics and best guesses because we have to.

And that will have to do, I guess, until we all become omniscient.

Whenever that will be.

On the Breath

Find the Overarching Breath Gesture

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Each phrase you sing can and should be prepared in the breath beginning with the moment of inhalation, and it should be followed through — like you’re riding on it — until the end of the phrase.

  • Determine how you want to structure a phrase in your practice.
  • As you inhale, hear the phrase (the pitches, the dynamics, etc.) in your mind and imagine how it should feel to sing that phrase. Tune your throat in advance of the onset and in reaction to your imagination. With practice, this can be done quickly.
  • Seamlessly integrate the end of inhalation and start of exhalation into one larger breath gesture.
  • Sing the phrase by shaping the exhalation with your body to your desired phrasing. Utilize both inhalation and exhalation muscles to find balance.
  • Repeat for the next phrase.

You can practice by doing simple sounds without worrying about more complex phrasing. Some body-connected sighing can start the connection. Do the steps above, just remove the music. Experiment with different inhalations and exhalations and pay attention to the resulting sound and how you feel about it.

There are, of course, smaller techniques within each of the steps above. Just the exhalation portion can be stuffed with other guidelines. But this is something of a macro overview, and the main idea is the mind/body integration around an overarching breath gesture, in which the actual sound-making is only a part.

Anyway, that’s my rough personal definition of “on the breath”.