Opera Thrall

Of "Rigoletto" and Facebook

2009-02-04T15:27:00.004-05:00

I hate to have to do anything. Even stuff that I like to do. I hate to have to go to opera; I hate to have to go to choir; I even hate to have to do a performance of either. Then there's the more common "hate tos." I hate to pay bills, I hate to do my taxes, I hate do the dishes, vacuum, etc.

And all that carries over into other stuff, too. For example, this blog. Oh, sure, it's all well and fun when you start. Blah-blah this, blah-blah that. Then all of a sudden, you get busy with something else and then remember it's been ages since you wrote in your blog. Then it's like, "Oh crap! I need to be writing a blog entry, but I don't know what to say." So you start in on some gripe that's been bothering you, but you're now going, "Ehhhh, do I really want to be doing this?" And it's off to the next thing.

I guess it all comes down to discipline. Unfortunately, I hate to have to self discipline myself, too. Whadyagonnado?

So, last night during opera rehearsal, I remembered it had been ages since I'd written anything. I'd promised myself that I would blog productions, and here I was, a lousy two productions in and that had gone out the window.

So, here goes: I'll get everybody caught up and then I won't blog for another month, until after "Rigoletto."

First of all, a gripe. Not necessarily a key one. Just an, uh... inconsistency, let's call it. Isn't "Rigoletto" a bit of an odd opera to do for Valentine's Day? I mean, the only love in it, other than the Duke and his cronies' physical orgies, is the love between a father and a daughter. Well, I suppose one might argue that Gilda has the hots for the Duke (or who she thought that the Duke was when he was disguised as Gaultier Malde). And at the end, she dies for him, despite the fact that a mere 20 minutes earlier (performance time) she'd been raped and left by him. Perhaps we should be performing this during National Battered Women Awareness week or something. Gilda certainly ends up with a classic case of battered-wife syndrome when she throws herself into the malevolent clutches of Sparafucile in lieu of her beau. "Maybe if I die for him, he'll love me the way I want to be loved," might be her inner dialogue.

But, as we all know, Gilda's a pretty odd character anyway. I mean, she's been sequestered away by her father all these years. She's fallen for some guy she knows nothing about just because she saw him way up in the front row at church. I would say her fantasy life is pretty active since her real life pretty much sucks. Take vulnerable teenager, throw in a lifetime of overprotectiveness by her father, and voilà! Instant psycho!

I have to admit, though, Verdi has really turned traditional opera on its ear. What? The tenor's the bad guy in this one? What the...? And there's no really pure romance, you say? Instead, everybody's pretty much a baddie or whacked.

Oh, but there is a big curse. That's a big opera thing, right? Curses? And you just know that whoever ends up cursed is going to be dead or imprisoned or executed by the end of the opera just as surely as Bobby Brady ended up being cursed by the tiki god effigy.

And so we have Verdi's masterpiece where there are shades of gray all around. One could argue that Gilda is the only pure character, but even, in the end, she ends up tainted... in both senses of the word. Well, there's plenty of dirt to go 'round. Even Giovanna could be seen as a nasty character. I've seen some productions where she is in the pay of the conspirators, that she lets them in the gate, even. Nice. I guess Rigoletto failed to check her record with the National Association of Nursemaids and Nannies.

And so it goes. In turning back to the real world, I must admit that I've come home from opera pretty much every night exhausted. I don't know if it's because we didn't do a fall production to "get in shape" or whether I just was way too inert over the holidays or if Carroll's staging is a bit too frenetic for my tastes. But it's not like I didn't go into this not knowing that we were going to be running around the stage and dancing and partying, etc. It certainly wouldn't be a Carroll Freeman production if it wasn't busy.

Of course, now that Koehler's introduced me to Facebook, I'm obsessed with it, which isn't helping me get any additional rest I might need for opera. I've had a basic name-rank-serial-number MySpace page for a couple of years, but I never like MySpace. It was too hard to find people you knew unless you knew their online monikers. What's really cool about Facebook is that it does most of that legwork for you. It looks at a friend you've made and says, "Aha! Joe's from Knoxville. I'll bet Eric will know Joe." or "Eric and Sara both are in the opera fan group and live near each other, so they might know each other." MySpace didn't do any of that. Plus, with MySpace, you had all that junk that people put on their pages to have to wade through--you know, flying heart wallpaper or bizarre animated GIFs. Bleh.

But Facebook keeps everything relatively clean (though the interface, to me, seems a little confusing). Plus, it automatically notifies you about what all your friends are up to, who they've met (and if you might know who they've met). It's like being at a great big party of a well-connected friend and running into all your pals from various areas (and eras) of you life. I've "refriended" people I haven't seen in over twenty years on Facebook, all since last Friday! Pretty wild. What's even cooler is when you see that people have reconnected with others because of you. That's really neat to see.

BTW, thanks to Koehler for forming the Knoxville Opera "alumni" group on Facebook. If you're on Facebook, check it out. If you're not on Facebook, give it a look. And, btw, it's not just for high school and college kids any more. I've got friends on there that are in their 60s!

Met's "Ghost" has been exorcised

2008-11-14T13:56:00.002-05:00

The AP has released a news item detailing new cost-cutting measures taken at the Met. One unfortunate consequence of the economic measures is that the Met will not revive John Corigliano's 1991 smash hit, "Ghosts of Versailles." Instead, the Met will cast Angela Gheorghiu and Thomas Hampson in a staid production of "La Traviata."

I was just starting back on my Masters when "Ghosts" was released. I remember watching the broadcast debut on PBS and being stunned, not only with Corigliano's command of the 20th century orchestral and operatic oeuvres but with the vastness of the production... not to mention wanting to be the first to sing "The Worm" for solo class at UT. (Never did, btw.) I also was working in the UT Music Library, where we had just received a video recording--it may have even been on laser disc--of "Ghosts," which I quickly purloined to rewatch in the back room of the library when I wasn't working or in class. "Ghosts" was the talk of the opera studio back then.

I can understand the Met's reticence to mount such a vast production, probably rivaling that of their recent "Flute" in opulence and grandeur. How many opera productions call for a giant mechanically operated robotic sultanate to serve as a major character? Then there's the period French dress, not to mention carloads of choristers and supers, and probably an equally huge number of IATSE crew. Of course, Corigliano throws a mighty 20th-century style orchestra in the pit. (Contrabassoonists and all ilk of bass clarinet players rejoice!)

But, still, it would have been great to see "Ghosts" mounted in a production equal to its original intentions. It definitely blurred the line between opera and musical theater, not that that hadn't been done a thousand times already. But unlike so many operas and operettas since the dawn of the 20th c., which were basically theater pieces aspiring to opera, Corigliano started from a position of grand opera and then added musical theater features to make it more accessible while keeping artistic the original artistic integrity.

I'm sure "Traviata" will be well-received and well-performed, though.

However, one must ponder: If the premiere opera companies of the world are having to make major cutbacks such as this one, what does that bode for the coming seasons of struggling regional companies like the KO?

The Met goes tech again

2008-11-07T12:55:00.004-05:00

Caught this New York Times article about the production of Berlioz's "Damnation of Faust," touted to be the Met's first "interactive opera." Interactive how? Well, imagine singers on stage controlling lighting, sets, and all kinds of special effects merely by their movement and/or voice.

A stage director's nightmare? Maybe... Consider how theater is staged today: Actors (I use "actors" as a generic term to include singers) act on stage; a stage manager in the wings observes the action and dialog and calls light cues, set movements and/or changes, cues for sound Foley (e.g., thunder), warns actors and chorus of their entrances, and a hundred other things. But there's an often perceptible delay between when she calls a cue and when the actual operation happens. Ideally, she tries to call the cues far enough in advance to account for the delay, but anytime you're dealing with human processes, there is variability.

Imagine, however, the stage of the future: An infrared sensor picks up an actor's movement--say, an arm in the air--and sends a signal to a central computer system with specialized software that interprets that signal to cue lighting (e.g., lightning), sound (thunder), or a set piece (a wind machine). Because the computer can "talk" to all the systems faster than any human every could, the actions are, for all intents and purposes, to our "slow" eyes and ears, simultaneous. Better yet, the sensors can interpret how the actor's arm is moving. Perhaps he lowers it, signaling the lightning and thunder to abate slightly so he can deliver a line, and then throws it back into the air, signaling another crescendo in the storm.

Don't get the idea that this technology will ever supplant the stage manager. There are still stupid actors who don't know their cues to push out on stage, choruses to call to the wings, and ten thousand other things that humans, so far, do better than computers. However, this kind of technology can do what technology is usually invented to do: take some of the drudgery out of a task. For predictable processes, the machine can handle them. This leaves the stage manager free to deal with things that are more problematic (e.g., wigs caught on epaulets). Of course, she also must ensure that the technology works as it should and be prepared to take over should anything go wrong.

Technology we take for granted geeks call "ubiquitous." We don't have to think about how much gas to put into the carburetor of our cars to faster, we just push on the gas pedal and electromechanical systems do the rest. We don't have to stand by the coffeemaker to switch it off at the end of a brew cycle, it knows when there's no water left in the reservoir. We don't have to tell the television to tune to 79.25 megahertz to get channel 6, it knows that already. Just as we don't think about these technologies working, we may someday take it for granted that an automated spotlight will follow an actor around the stage or that the gels will all turn red when the devil appears or that the curtain will fall at the end of an act. We won't have to think about it, it will just happen.

Obama and Opera

2008-11-05T06:44:00.004-05:00

So, on the dawn of the day that the great diaspora known as the Bush Administration ("Administration," Ha! At least Nero fiddled while Rome burned!) is seeing its final days, I got to thinking:

Obama... opera.

Could there be a connection there, somewhere? Does our new prez-elect like opera? What does he think about it? What's his policy going to be on the Fine Arts?

So, like most i-idiots today, I googled "Obama opera."

What did I find? Well, what I found made me hope that Obama makes education a priority in our country.

The top link said "MySpace Videos: Obama and Opera by AAM." I should've red-flagged anything prefixed with "MySpace" as being spurious, but since this was an entirely unscientific experiment, merely relying on serendipity to yield its results, I went ahead and clicked.

Obviously, the video was of a rally, apparently in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There were several people standing on a dais surrounded by a rowdy crowd of Obamanites. "Okay," I was thinking to myself, "some opera singer sang the National Anthem or something." Then Obama himself came up to the dais and began speaking. After a minute or two, I skimmed further through the video to find the part where the opera singer came in.

No such luck. No singing on that video. It was then that I noticed a rather portly African American woman on the dais with Obama. "Leontyne Price?" I thought. No. Though the video was a bit grainy, I could still see it wasn't Ms. Price. Kiri, maybe? No.

Finally I did recognize the person: It was Oprah!

Alright, so MySpace people aren't the brightest bulbs on the tree. Apparently, some folks were equally confused over on Yahoo, too. I suppose that I should forgive these (I'm assuming) kids or, perhaps, non-native speakers. After all, Oprah wasn't even supposed to be named Oprah. Oprah's given name was supposed to be the Biblical name "Orpah" (Ruth 1:4), but everybody apparently had a hard time pronouncing and spelling that in her native Mississippi.

So, no direct links between Obama/Biden and opera. But, I'm sure there's some greedy little composer in his parents' basement right now writing "Obama: The Opera." Don't be surprised when it comes out. Look for it at the Met in 2012.

FYI, a pdf of Obama/Biden's platform on the arts can be found here.

"Who's the new guy?"

2008-11-03T18:28:00.001-05:00

No doubt, anyone paying attention during rehearsals for the recent Glitterville Gala noticed that there was a new face in the crowd in the orchestra. That new face is none other than associate concertmaster, Edward Pulgar. The Knoxville News Sentinel ran a story on him in this morning's edition under the rather uninspired title, "Government put music in his soul." Although, from the title, you might think that maestro Pulgars's violin prowess might have come about as the result of a DARPA experiment gone horribly wrong, the article is referring to the government of his home country, Venezuela.

Starting in the 1970s, a time when America's government had begun cutting Fine Arts programs to save money, the Venezuelan government saw fit to fund an ambitious program of classical music instruction for all of its children, especially those in the impoverished inner city, through the establishment of neighborhood music schools and the formation of local youth orchestras. The idea behind the program is that music can be both an escape and a way out of poverty for some of these kids.

Perhaps what is even more startling is that the Venezuelan government has kept funding "El Sistema" (The System) to this day. Along the way, it has produced crop after crop of talented and highly trained orchestral musicians and conductors which the world's orchestras have adoringly lapped up. A recent 60 Minutes video article (videarticle?) chronicled the rise of one of these young stars, conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

Knoxville has been the lucky recipient of El Sistema in the form of Edward Pulgar. He will be performing with other members of the KSO Principal Quartet (Sean Claire, Kathryn Gawne and Andy Bryenton) next Sunday at 2:30 pm at the Bijou Theater.

Thank goodness there's at least one government that cherishes classical music, eh? The United States continues to head down the path of eradication of all Fine Arts programs in all its schools under the auspices that our kids need more math and science. There are currently just two orchestral programs in Knox County schools, and those are poorly funded. The minimization of general music classes keeps kids from experiencing classical music, which, in turn, keeps the vast majority of them from continuing their studies. Thus, choral, orchestral, and band programs begin to wither away for lack of students.

"But just look at the Japanese and the Chinese," proponents of the art diaspora say, "our kids can't compete with them unless we bolster our math and science programs." Really? Have you checked out the ethnicity of many of the orchestras around the world. Seems there's a definite Asian faction there. So, somehow, the Chinese and Japanese manage to teach their kids math and science and music... oh, and don't forget, most of them have taken English their whole lives and can speak the language better than most native Anglophiles. Anata wa Nihon o hanashi masuka, America Iie? No?

Well, maybe your kids will do better in Venezuela. Most American high schools still teach Spanish, I think.

Post-Production: Glitterville Gala/Concert

2008-11-02T08:35:00.002-05:00

* Tons of people - had a good time; lots of costumes; but ran out of food;
* Concert - well enough

A couple of impressions about last night's KO Glitterville Gala/Concert at the Tennessee Theater:

There was a ton of people there
Everybody had a great time
More hors d'oeuvres next time
I actually have a voice left with which to sing at church this morning

Seemed like the party/concert idea was a great success. There were probably a hundred or so people waiting when the doors opened at about 6 p.m. And, boy, did most folks dress out! A few "resourceful" folks grabbed Obama portraits off the web to masquerade in. (Rather ironic, since it's usually the politicians themselves that we find that are wearing a mask this time of year.) But the beau, uh... belle of the ball had to be none other than Hillary Clinton, as played by a certain countertenor at UT. Everyone said he looked just like her.

And how about Stephen Brown's decorations! You know, Halloween is really a kind of low-brow holiday. Other than Christmas, it's probably the easiest holiday to make tacky if you're not careful. Wel, duh! Of course, Stephen Brown's going to be careful! Everything just reeked of classiness. (I have to admit, though, that I didn't get to get too close a look at what all was put out.) Amazing that a kid from Rockwood, which, I'm sure Stephen would admit, isn't exactly a cultural mecca, world go on to be fawned over by companies and well-to-dos world-wide for his taste and style in decorating for special occasions. As I'm sure they would say in Rockwood, "Ya done good thar, boy!"

The concert, likewise, seemed to go okay. As is usually the case with these kinds of things, the chorus kind of forgot their dynamics and fell back on the the old habit of loud-louder-loudest. It's always harder to sing very softly when you, as a performer in front of an audience, let the adrenaline run haywire. It does make for a lively performance, though. I think the "Sweeney Todd" scenes had a lot more energy than any rehearsal we had. Kudos to everyone for not letting that energy get out of hand on the fugal sections. Really easy to do that, too, when you're pumped for a performance.

Oh, well. We put that one to bed. But, ever vigilant, we start "Rigoletto" rehearsals next week. See ya then.

P.S. Like a total spaz, I never could remember my camera; however, Martin brought his and filled up an entire 2 Gb card with photos which he's posting on Flikr. When he gets them up on the web, I'll ask him for a link to them.

"Phantom" facts (or why you'll never see it at the Tennessee)

2008-10-31T15:43:00.002-04:00

My apologies for not writing sooner. The world has been "too much with [me]" lately, and not just in learning the "Mefistofele." Had a couple of great articles in my head but couldn't get them down on paper.

Caught this article on the St. Petersburg Times' website about the touring show of "Phantom of the Opera." The author offers some interesting facts about the original phantom and tech specs about the current production.

It's always interesting to see what it takes to put on a real touring show, how they do what they do the same way every city, every show. Of particular note: the amount of time it takes to set up production: a full 10 days! And 20 truckloads of trappings! I remember when I was a teenager my high school band would sell fruit for the fall. (And, yes, Farragut High School Band is still selling fruit to this day.) Most of the band (~130 people) along with parents, siblings, friends, etc., was required to unload two tractor trailers full of boxed citrus fruit. By the time evening fell, we were all pretty much exhausted. I can't imagine unloading 20 truckloads of stuff--stuff that isn't nice square rectangles, like fruit boxes.

Something else occurred to me while reading the article. You know, most of us take our guests artists at KO for granted, but they really are special people. Sure, being an opera star is glamorous and rewarding, but it's also a real pain! We see the glamorous side of things--schmoozing with the swells, partying with your costars, invitation-only dinners. What we don't see is them living out of a suitcase for up to 50 weeks a year. We also don't see them having to accustomize themselves to a new bed every six weeks or so. Nor do we see them craving the facilities to make mom's special chili instead of existing off of frou-frou party food. "Touring" means just that; you don't get home much.

Well, tomorrow night's the big gig. Hope everybody's not blowing their chords on these rehearsals. All well and fine to practice hard, but if you've got laryngitis during the performance, it amounts to nil.

Reunion '08

2008-10-17T10:39:00.005-04:00

I've been trying since Tuesday to write a blurb about how I think most people in the KO chorus are there for the social aspect of things, but the article kept getting blown up by my ADD, so I thought I'd start afresh today.

So, yes, KO choristers do get paid (a little) to do the opera chorus thing and, yes, we are all interested in creating the best possible artistic product we can and, yes, we all get a kick out of being on stage. But the thing that keeps most choristers coming back time and again is the people in the chorus and in the KO organization, in general. They're just a terrific bunch of people! Even though the heart and soul of the chorus changes yearly, or even during each production, it still is made up of a bunch of swells that you won't find anywhere else in town. Large construction equipment salesperson? Got him. Teachers? Aplenty. Doctors? Them, too. A sub-phylum of geeks; administrators of various ilk; Protestants, Jews, Catholics, an atheist and agnostic or two, I'm pretty sure; singles, marrieds, married with spouses in the chorus, too; young, old, older than dirt, old but young at heart, young but old at heart; collegians, high school drop-outs, doctors (PhDs), masters (and mistresses). Alright. You probably get the point.

So how do we all work together without killing each other? Oh, occasionally, we'll throw a snobby soprano or two into the pit to be devoured by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra players--which, incidentally, are people, too... even the bassoonists, who are granted special passes from the asylum on days when we have dress rehearsals or performances, are a part of our family. And we have our differences. A late, difficult rehearsal combined with a bad day at work can cloud the emotional control of anyone. We all have lives outside opera, and while we endeavor to leave them under the canopy on Depot before we enter the KO building, it's impossible not to track in a little anger or frustration from the outside world occasionally. Rest assured, though, that a smile from Big Jim or a hug from Linda is a far more potent cure for what ails you than anything in your psychiatrist's little black bag.

And, yes, while going over an entrance for the fifteenth time singing high Cs double forte can be a lot more work even than a "real" job, we do have fun. Certainly, if we had a little less fun at times our final product would improve, but you could pretty much say that about any company, right? Don, Brian, and whomever is directing give us a rather long leash in that regard, but don't hesitate to rein us in when they need to. And we know it. We know we go too far a lot... a lot!

Thanks to everybody in the company, a bad day rehearsing opera in a warehouse in a seedy part of town is better than a good day at work. Here's to keeping it that way.

Disney Releases Costa's "Sleeping Beauty" on hi-def

2008-10-13T11:51:00.014-04:00

During production for Oktoberfest last week, I noted that Disney is releasing a new anniversary DVD & Blu-Ray (i.e., hi def) set of its classic cartoon "Sleeping Beauty" which stars Knoxville's (and Knoxville Opera's) own Mary Costa. I wondered how much hoopla they would make of it (other than the constant marketing, that is). Turns out they are. I spotted this bio of Costa (far superior to the one on Wikipedia) that was publicly released by Disney. I knew that Costa had done the voiceover and singing for Aurora, but I didn't realize that Disney had actually patterned Costa's likeness for her character.

Aurora

Costa

"Sleeping Beauty" was one of my all-time favorite Disney movies when I was a kid, partly because I had fallen hopelessly in love with Aurora on the screen. (The evil Queen, and the dragon she turns into at the end of the movie, however, to this day is probably still capable of giving me nightmares.) I haven't seen the movie in over 30 years, though, largely because, as a single, childless guy, I would die of embarrassment renting a Disney cartoon at Blockbuster. (Yeah, I know: The dweebs at the Blockbuster store don't know I'm single and childless. Doesn't matter. I do! Oddly enough, though, I only have the slightest twinge of guilt renting animé. This dichotomy could be several therapy sessions, right there.)

Pity the KO didn't simultaneously schedule a production of Tschaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty" to try to ride the wave of hype, though.

New Template

2008-10-13T11:48:00.004-04:00

In looking around on the web, I noticed that this particular blog template is quite popular, so I decided to change mine to match. The old black template I was using looked cool and all, but in terms of readability, this template is much better

Report: KO's Oktoberfest

2008-10-13T11:43:00.002-04:00

I have been quite remiss in my duties of reporting on Knoxville Opera productions.

Alas! There hasn't been that much to talk about, really. Last Friday's "Oktoberfest" dinner theater was basically a repeat of last year's celebration, only this year some selections from Romberg's "The New Moon" were added to the program. In trying to Google up some additional information on this year's production, I realized that there wasn't any. Hmm... Do we not have a full-time staff at the opera company now? Especially people dedicated to publicity? Reports on Oktoberfest? None. Reviews? None. Articles about the artists appearing? None. Articles previewing the event? None. I included in this search not only Google but local searches of the Knoxville News Sentinel and even the Knoxville Opera website which, if you're interested, contains plenty of information about last year's productions. (To be fair, a small note does mention that the website is currently undergoing a transition to its new form.)

Physicists sometimes infer data from sub-atomic collision experiments by seeing which particles are conspicuously absent from an event. We might borrow this technique to infer data about Oktoberfest. Since there appears to have been little or no publicity for the event, short of that mentioned in the direct-mailings sent out to former opera patrons, one might infer that attendance suffered... and one would be right. Rumor had it that over 100 plates were unsold. One hundred missing patrons doesn't seem that big a deal for a regular two-run production in the 1500-seat Tennessee Theater with ticket prices starting about $22; however, for single-performance dinner theater in the smallish Foundry at $100 a plate, that's $10K that's going to be missed in the KO's coffers!

In defense of the KO staff, Oktoberfest really wasn't really meant to be a public event anyway. It was a night of fun for current patrons, a kickoff of this season, a reason for all the opera-ites in the Knoxville area to get together and party with good food and libations, with a few laughs and an aria or two along the way. Consequently, in this sense, Oktoberfest was a great success! From the initial downbeat of Student Prince, event-goers came alive and participated lustily in the production, pounding their tables and/or beer steins in time with the music, giving a loud hurrah for the men's chorus and their antics, and heartily applauding the arias, duets, etc. The event was also a showcase for some of our new opera apprentices at UT to shine; certainly, also in that respect, the night was a success. (This author can remember harder times where apprentice classes weren't as first-rate as those we seem to be gathering together these days.)

As far as the chorus, I think I speak for all concerned when I say we had a good time, though not quite as good a time as we would have had if we'd had the women's division of the chorus with us. Though we have a plethora of male "characters" in the men's chorus, there is an equivalent and unique number in the women's chorus that, when blended in, take things to new heights. Fortunately, full chorus rehearsals for Nov. 1's "Glitterville" gala at the Tennessee Theater start tomorrow night, so we won't have to sit on our hands long to see them.

Which reminds me... I need to start learning some music.

"Renéesance"

2008-09-23T18:36:00.002-04:00

This is the New York Times review of the Met's opening gala last night featuring a three-act (and three-opera) tribute to Renée Fleming.

Ms. Fleming chose to show off her voice in her three favorite roles: Traviata (Act II), Manon (Act III), and the Countess from the final scene of Strauss's "Capriccio."

"Renéesance," as well as "The Renée Fleming Fashion Show," were the memes that several opera bloggers had been calling this year's gala for the past few weeks, apparently mocking the big to-do that the Met had prepared, including three gowns especially designed for Ms. Fleming by famous NYC fashion designers.

But, despite the purists grumblings about an opening production being a garish tribute to famous singers, the show did go on. Reviewer Anthony Tommasini overall liked the production... um, productions?

What got me was that the performance was simulcast on a screen at Fordham Plaza and in 500 theaters throughout the U.S. and Argentina. (I must remember to ask Jerry or Vlad if Knoxvegas was included in those 500.) But what got me was the other large simulcast location in NYC, that is, Times Square. I can't make up my mind whether to be joyous at opera's appearance at what is basically the Pigeon Forge of the Big Apple or appalled that its pearls were being cast before swine. The accompanying picture to the article lends credence to the latter, I'm afraid. How anyone can sit in the center of four of NYC's busiest thoroughfares and try to listen to opera is beyond me. Between the honking of cabs (and probably loud cursing by the cabbies), the vagrants panhandling (don't let the NYPD tell you they aren't there!), Disney-store-bound tourists, and Broadway goers hustling to and from their artistic venues, how could you possibly pay attention?

But maybe that's just me. As I've revealed before, I'm ADD. The very presence of the multimillion dollar signage surrounding the square alone would be enough to send me into some kind of visual data overload convulsion. If that didn't get me, the presence of what appears to be a fluorescent-light rendition of the American flag apparently smack dab in the middle of the audience would. "Oh, really?! Renée Fleming was in those productions? I didn't notice." But that's NYC for you: Take a bit of every culture currently existing, add in art from Michaelangelo to the seediest porn movie, throw in a dash of sports and gobs and gobs of greedy businesses (Remember when Disney was considered a wholesome, family-oriented company?) and that's the bright lights, big city for you. And Times Square is the crossroads of it all... with Ms. Fleming and the Met on the big screen.

* * *

On a more local note: The Knoxville Opera gears up for its premiere gala on October 10 at the Foundry with tonight's first rehearsal of Reader's Digest versions of Romberg's "Student Prince" and "The New Moon." So much for the lazy days of summer! Guess I'd better be looking at the scores.

I wonder if they KO is preparing any simulcasts to downtown Gatlinburg in the near future?

Finale for Free: LilyPond Music Notation Software

2008-09-17T12:44:00.005-04:00

I have been a user of Finale, MakeMusic's industry-standard music engraving program, on and off throughout its 20 years of existence. Two things have always frustrated me about it: the significant cost of the software and the huge time investment required to learn (and relearn) it.

On the user-interface end of my complaint, I recall a choral composition class I took in grad school in the early 90s: Our final project was to "publish" the project we'd been working on--both in the computer lab and in class--using Finale. I never could get my project to look the way I wanted it. After many hours of cursing in the computer lab, I finally threw up my hands, jotted out my work on regular staff paper and turned it in along with a print-out of what I'd been able to cajole Finale into doing. I think, with Finale 2008, I could do the task in a couple of days of on and off work. Unfortunately, the price point for the software has remained a sticking point: A completely new, full-blown version of Finale 2009, the latest, greatest version, will set you back $600; previous release owners may upgrade for "only" $149. To their credit, MakeMusic has heard the poor musicians' pleas over the years and you can now buy the "lite"-est version of Finale for $99, or even download a completely-no-frills version called, cleverly, "NotePad," for free.

But, despite Finale's dominance, alternative programs exist. For example, in Europe, the equally full-featured Sibelius is very popular. But for the past several weeks I've been playing with a very comprehensive and relatively easy-to-use software called LilyPond.

My two sticking points about Finale are rather moot with LilyPond.

First of all, LilyPond is free for anyone to download and install. It is based on GPL, the GNU Public License model of software development. Without going into too much detail (esp. about the "GNU" part of the acronym), basically, GPL is based on the idea that if we all try to get along and help each other, the world will be a better place. Software under the GPL may not be sold for profit; in addition, software is required to be collaborative, i.e., the raw computer code for GPL programs must be offered up for modification by other programmers as long as those programmers, in turn, offer their improved/modified versions up for modification by anyone else.

Second, LilyPond is rather ridiculously easy to use at its most basic level. The ".ly" files are merely text files. A budding composer may open up a regular letters-words-paragraphs-type note pad (not the Finale Note Pad) program and type in his score using very intuitive notation: For instance, if I were to transcribe "Hot Cross Buns," it would look something like this:

\relative c' {
e4 d c2 | e4 d c2 | c8 c c c d d d d | e4 d c2 |
}

The above notation would be translated--"compiled," in computer programmer speak--by LilyPond into a PDF file that looked like

which could be printed out and given to any musician.

Now, granted, this is a very simple example, but what is immediately evident to any musician is that, by looking at the above code, most anyone could hazard a guess at what the output score would look like. Better yet, anyone could type in that sequence of letters and numbers with a minimum amount of instruction. Wanna get more complicated? Try this:

\relative c'' {
\clef treble
\key c \major
\time 6/8

% You could notate "Chopsticks" as two separate voices on the staff

<<
{ g8 g g g g g | g g g g g g | b b b b a b | c4 c8 c b a | } \\
{ f8 f f f f f | e e e e e e | d d d d e d | c4 c8 c d e | }
>>

\break

% or you could notate it chordally

<f g>8 <f g> <f g> <f g> <f g> <f g> | <e g> <e g> <e g> <e g> <e g> <e g> |
<d b'> <d b'> <d b'> <d b'> <e a> <d b'> | <c c'>4 <c c'>8 <c c'> <d b'> <e a> |
}

And get this

Obviously, some things do take getting used to--all the braces and brackets and such. And I admit that I'd be able to hack out "Hot Cross Buns" and "Chopsticks" just as fast in Finale. However, as the music gets more complex, LilyPond remains fairly easier to use. An example from the first movement of J.S. Bach's Cantata No. 78, "Jesu, der du meine Seele":

The cross-staff voicing is hard to do in both programs... well, it's pretty hard to do even when you're writing stuff out by hand, but, trust me, Finale's method is far more convoluted. To change the staff in Finale, you have to enter the music in its original staff, select the cross-staff notes, and then find the right tool dialog buried deep within many menu options... and hope you've made the right option selections. You'd then have to go back and add the cross-staff lines with another tool. Within LilyPond, you merely note "\set followVoice = ##t \change Staff = lower" within the score description.

Okay, complex music requires complex measures in both programs. But perhaps the best thing about LilyPond is that rather than developing code to draw and print music with a computer, the LilyPond developers studied the ancient art of music engraving, i.e., how publishers through the years have printed music on the page, and then designed their software to recreate those functions. I could go on, but the authors make their very cogent argument in favor of LilyPond in this article, as well as giving an excellent introduction to music engraving in general. (BTW, we call it "engraving" because the original printers of music in the 15th century used blocks of wood that they would engrave with woodcutting tools to create a "stamp" that would be inked and then laid onto blank paper.)

In sum, I've been very impressed with both the ease of use of LilyPond and the quality of the music I've printed with it.

Let's face it! The quality a printed score is of primary importance in the creation of the actual artistic entity that is music. Certainly, at some time or another, we've all had to read off of an original hand-written manuscript. Generally, composers are more concerned with getting ideas on the page than they are making their ideas clear to performers. Barring the actual presence of a composer to interpret the score when any questions arise, it has always been the engravers job to make the composer's ideas clear. While Finale and Sibelius (who each claim to be "No. 1" in the music creation business) will continue to dominate the market, the discerning musician will look for the best tool for the best job, the one that is easiest and fastest to use and creates the best score engravings. I definitely intend to make LilyPond--and some of its other incarnations/helper programs a large part of my musical scoring tools

Example of J.S. Bach's manuscript from St. Matthew Passion

What price, artistry?

2008-08-19T18:13:00.002-04:00

An Associated Press article today added further fuel to the flame over the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Previous reports reprimanded Chinese government, filmmaker and production director Zhang Yimou, and NBC for adding digital fireworks to the broadcast production. Then came the hubbub over a communist party leader insisting that an attractive nine-year-old girl be broadcast lip syncing the Chinese national anthem while her supposedly uglier comrade actually sang the paean from a secluded room in the bowels of the stadium, safely away from the cameras.

Now additional word comes from various sources about the horrible toll the ceremony and its rehearsals put upon the performers involved in the spectacle. According to the article:

One performer was paralyzed from taking a 10-foot fall during a rehearsal
Other performers were injured when they slipped on the glassy surface of the giant LCD scroll that unfurled in the middle of the field
Some of the 900 performers under the boxes displaying the Chinese ideograms had to wear adult diapers to endure the 6-hour stay under their 40-pound charges
Many suffered heat stroke or other illnesses from the long dress rehearsals, one lasting a mind-numbing 51 hours!with little food and few bathroom breaks.

Apparently Zhang has nothing but contempt for Western performers, saying they needed frequent breaks and could not withstand any criticism. While he never spoke specifically of any of his experiences, one wonders if he was talking about opera performers; he did direct the premier of Tan Dun's The First Emperor at the Met in December 2006. Zhang says:

In one week, we could only work four and a half days, we had to have coffee breaks twice a day, couldn't go into overtime, and just a little discomfort was not allowed because of human rights.

Zhang continued, lambasting divas and performing arts unions:

You could not criticize them either. They all belong to some organizations... they have all kinds of institutions, unions... We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month.

There is an interesting dichotomy in these Beijing games. On the one hand, the Chinese have striven--and largely succeeded--in displaying how similar they are to more Westernized countries; on the other, as evidenced by the above examples, they have shown how much they still adhere to 1960s Cold War Communist dogma, where the people sacrifice all for the good of their country and countrymen. For instance, one of the 2,008 martial artists involved in the ceremony, a 17-year-old, said that he had nothing but "pure joy" in his heart the night of the performance.

But is this idea of "sacrifice" truly a Communist tenet? Or is it perhaps related to what we, as artists, face every day: How much do we sacrifice in the name of art?

Take your average opera singer. Most singers have spent years in classroom, practice room, rehearsal hall, and on stage to refine their craft. While many college kids are out partying, having a good time, getting wasted on alcoholic beverages or, perhaps, illicit drugs, and sewing their wild oats, the average voice student is either locked up in a cramped, hot, smelly, practice studio with an out-of-tune piano, struggling with refining his or her technique or trying to learn a new, more difficult aria; or he or she is stranded in the back of some warehouse-cum-rehearsal space down on the, uh... "less fashionable" end of town with several hundred others in equally desperate environmental conditions. Even those singers lucky enough to have avoided such intense operatic education know the discipline and--I tell some of my class voice students--athletic development required to sing properly. "Practice makes perfect," is the watch word for art.

So how much is too much? The throes of agony of a recent KO production have greatly added to the horror tales that choristers, staff, and crew alike tell during the latter hours of an, ahem, well-lubricated cast party. And yet, no production in recent memory elicited more of a reaction from the audience. Some loved it; some hated it; but rarely did they find it boring. As participants, we should feel a great deal of pride at those reactions, even though we put up with the late-night rehearsals, even though we spent countless hours waiting for our call, only to be dismissed, even though we all treaded that thin line between sticking with things and saying, "F**k it!" Would that all of our productions stir up such reactions from our audience!

Another example: I spent four years as an undergraduate in the UT "Pride of the Southland" marching band. Those familiar with college bands know that UT has one of the finest band programs in the country, and the "Pride of the Southland" marching band is a part of that fine tradition--a tradition that insists on hard work and high artistic standards. From the first of August until fall semester began in early September, we practiced almost daily. If we were lucky, we were allowed to rehearse music in the air-conditioned confines of the UT band room; if we weren't--and we often weren't--we had to spend up to 8 hours a day marching on the sweltering, then-artificial turf of Neyland Stadium, the brutal August heat and humidity of East Tennessee battering us at every corner. Things improved only marginally when school started: Marching band was actually a class you would take. "Classroom" (i.e., Neyland or a practice field) hours were from 7:30 to 9:30 am and then again from 1:00 to 3:30 pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, and, generally, 7:30 am to the end of the UT football game on Saturdays. The schedule for participating in road games could be just as difficult--load buses at 6:00 am on a Friday, ride 4 or 5 hours packed in like sardines, dress and give a lunchtime concert for alumni in whatever city we ended up near, back on the bus for another 4 or 5 hours, give another alumni concert in our destination city, then a marching rehearsal for a couple of hours before getting to the hotel. The Saturday road schedule was similar to home games, except you had to lug and load regular luggage in addition to instruments (unfortunately, mine was tuba). We'd either drive back home Saturday night or on Sunday. This went on every week from September to November. During that time, we had to learn up to six separate halftime shows, marching and music, to perfection while keeping our standard pre-game show, learned in those early weeks in the sweltering August heat, in top shape.

Did I hate it? Heck yeah, I did! It was a miserable existence! Being a commuter to UT meant I either had to pack a change of clothes on Tuesdays and Thursdays or go to afternoon classes in sweat-soaked jeans and shirts. It was usually the latter because, as a busy music student and band member, I had no time to walk six blocks back and forth from Neyland Stadium, retrieve or put away my instrument, and make my next class on time... even when it was in the Music Building. (My favorite semester was when I was forced to schedule a required sociology class located on the other side of "The Hill," approximately a mile from the Music Building, right after band. Fortunately, I had a prof that was very understanding.) It was very much like what I would have imagined army life would've been like: You get yelled at all the time, nothing you do is ever good enough, you never have enough time to do the things you need to do, and you were always sweating.

And yet, I loved it! I got great seats to every UT home game and almost every away game. (Today, the band has to sit in the south endzone of Neyland; when I was in school, we were located right down front on the 50-yard line!) I met a lot of great people, some still my friends to this day, learned to act like--and be treated like--an adult with personal responsibilities, traveled to exotic places (e.g., pre-Disney--i.e., ultra-sleazy--Times Square my freshman, and 18th, year), and generally got a whole lot of what I would call "life experiences."

Perhaps the most amazing moment in my life was being on the field for pregame at the 1986 Sugar Bowl in the Super Dome, not being able to hear myself play because of 70,000 screaming No.-8-ranked Vol fans. There were a few No. 2-ranked Miami fans there. Out of self-preservation, they were very quiet, and they left in the third quarter, just after I lost my voice from hollering and when the score was 28-7 Vols; final score was 35-7 Vols and, to this day, you can see both Jimmy Johnson and Vinny Testaverde wince when someone mentions the '86 Sugar Bowl.) Today, every time I hear "The Pride" playing any of over a dozen fight songs (live or recorded), I'm almost reduced to tears with overflowing pride, and every August, when everybody starts talking UT football, I'm as happy as a clam.

Perhaps the greatest mark of high art is that it does illicit strong reactions in people, that it does stir up a range of emotions within them. Although there is not a direct correlation between time spent on a work of art and its acclaim (or outcry), generally, the more and harder an artist toils on a work, the higher the final quality of the product... and, generally, the greater sense of fulfillment the artist has for his or her work. That was certainly true of my experience with the Pride of the Southland... oh yeah, and with the opera company... and with church choirs, and the symphony, and....

So, for the previously mentioned 17-year-old Chinese martial artist, Ren Yang, the long hours, the threat of heat stroke, the danger of injury--or even death (Being an acrophobic, I couldn't help but think what would happen if
gymnast Li Ning had fallen during his "victory lap" around the rafters
of the stadium to light the Olympic torch)--was worth it. For the rest of his life, Ren, and tens of thousands of performers like him, will remember these Beijing games. They won't remember being sick with heat stroke, they won't remember the fact that they could hardly walk with tired, sore muscles, they won't remember the stinging comments of Zhang over the loudspeaker in rehearsal, they won't remember the rainy rehearsals or the long nights at the "Bird's Nest." What they will remember is that they were a part of one of the greatest artistic spectacles to ever be seen on this earth.

So, I ask you, KO chorister, what are you willing to put up with to create incredible art?

Your friendly neighborhood opera company

2008-08-07T09:11:00.001-04:00

It seems that many of my entries lately invoke the name of the New York Times. Honestly, I'm not like a regular reader or anything. I'm lucky to make it through a few articles on the online version of the Knoxville News Sentinel and whatever headlines end up on my Yahoo! portal page. Alas! the KNS is hardly the place you would find news of the cutting edge of art except for the occasional informational "five Ws" article (Who-what-when-where-why).

So, in perusing stories on opera and music, invariably I end up with something from the Times. And it was here, in today's issue of the NYT that I found this article on a "shoestring opera company" in the Big Apple performing Monteverdi's "Coronation of Poppea." (BTW, there's an excellent, somewhat frightening, article about the Internet denizens of anarchy, also known as "trolls," in a recent issue. Nothing about art or music, but you know tech is another passion of mine.)

The article piqued my interest: Not just because it is a story about local, unemployed artisans banding together to create an opera performance on a budget that you couldn't buy a good, recent-vintage used car on; not because the company's focus is going to be primarily dedicated to performing Baroque operas with original instruments; but because, as I may have previously mentioned, I was fortunate enough to perform "Poppea" in school and have a special place in my heart for it. Better yet, NYC company, branding itself as "Opera Omnia," is doing "Poppea" in it's audience's vernacular, English. Understandably, if you're only doing a $15k opera production, you'd probably want to maximize your audience, and even in cosmo NY, you'd catch more flies with, uh... English, if you get my drift.

"Poppea" is a good opera to do, too, if you like a healthy dose of sex with your opera. The show deals with a young, ambitious courtesan (some say), named Poppea and her sexual domination (not black leather and whips-type, mind you) over the most powerful man in the known world at that time, the Roman Emperor, Nero--yes, that Nero. There are a lot of scenes with just Poppea and Nero, in his or her bed chambers making pillow talk. I suppose you could play those scenes in a Victorian manner, but, hey! This is the bright lights, big city, New York. Everyone either has a porno shop around the corner from them or they had one nearby when they were growing up. As a visitor to Times Square in the early 1980s, I counted more porno shops and peep shows in that area than you might find "Lion King" ads today. As an entertainment, you have to compete with the likes of "Oh, Calcutta," too, not to mention thousands of other, seedier, way off Broadway shows or artsy events that would definitely get someone locked up here in the Bible belt. UT's "Poppea" in the early '90s wasn't exactly prudish. Though Carroll Freeman had not yet come on the scene, we had an equally sex-obsessed Michael Erhmann as opera director back then.

And Baroque operas are good for small companies to do. Most of them have just a few characters and, in most cases, there's not a chorus per se. The later Baroque composers like Handel and Purcell were to change that, though. Despite the deus ex machina craze in the theaters of that time, many Baroque operas are relatively simple, stagewise. They were meant to be much more portable: the King's ballroom one night and a local theater the next. There certainly wasn't the explicit attention to detail that, say, Verdi or Puccini put in their descriptions of scenery.

I applaud Opera Omnia for their endeavor. I'm sure this is more of a labor of love thing than a "we're going to be rich" thing. The ensemble encompasses various young singers in their 20s and 30s and several prominent musicians in the New York area, a retired church music director. The article mentions the recent blossoming of various small ensembles that perform in unusual venues--bars and such. It even lists other opera companies in the city: Dicapo Opera Theater, Gotham Chamber Opera ("where opera gets intimate," according to their website), Opera Company of Brooklyn, Amato Opera of New York City, and Opera on Tap, which apparently seeks to turn opera performances into something similar to a rock or jazz musician's "gig." Of interest to local opera lovers: Opera on Tap has, uh... opened a branch office in New Orleans, sponsored by New Orleans Opera, where Robert Lyall, former KO director/conductor, abides as the General and Artistic Director.

I've often wondered whether something like what all these small companies are doing might be possible here in Knoxvegas. The theater companies around town seem to be able to do it. You've got the Black Box Theater, Shakespeare on the Square during the summer, as well as numerous other "shoestring" troupes. When I was singing with the Knoxville Early Music Project (KEMP) we did several quasi-staged productions. One was based on the life of the Elizabethan poet, Philip Sydney using his poems, his songs, letters, songs relevant to his time, etc. KEMP's perennial venue was the Laurel Theater, a small church which has been converted into a performance venue. The building lends itself to more intimate music such as that of the Renaissance and Baroque that we performed, and it might make a perfect space to mount a small opera production. Though the stage is tiny, there is lots of open floor space and you could do some marvelous "breaking the fourth wall" productions in it. There is even a balcony that might be suitable for an appropriately sized Baroque orchestra.

The problem for a micro-opera (I claim coining the phrase!) group in K-town? The usual suspects: Money, time, money, participation, money, and motivation. Knoxville can barely support a traditional opera company and its university feeder program. How can it support any other organization with "opera" in its title? Such a group would be on its own, probably. The KO needs to pay its own way and can nary afford to pay another group's way. Also debatable is how the KO might take the formation of another opera company in town. Would it support such an effort or see it as a threat? There would probably be some overlap between the two groups. Not a whole lot of opera singers to go 'round in this part of the country... at least ones that would be interested in performing pro bono for x number of years while the company got on its feet. Then there is the bane of so many now-defunct performing arts organizations here in town: Good management and administration. Many local musically inclined individuals have little experience with management, fund raising, hiring talent, etc. (e.g., myself). Those that do, do that kind of thing for a living, and would rather have fun singing than to sit at a desk and hound the two Jim's (Haslam and Clayton) for money. That is a hardly glamorous job, much less one that someone might be interested in getting paid McDonald's/Wendy's wages to do.

Still, the idea has intrigued me since a friend suggested it out of the blue a few years ago. She seemed to think that that might be something I could do. Personally, I don't see how a guy who can barely keep his own personal checks from bouncing every month to be put in charge of other people's money. But I could be coaxed into taking some other role, like artistic direction or just plain ol' singer.

I invite comment on the subject of a small opera ensemble in Knoxville. Let me know your thoughts.

Truly (Dr.) Horrible (Not!)

2008-07-18T13:29:00.002-04:00

Found "Dr. Horrible." online today and immediately fell in love with it. It kind of fits my quirky sense of humor.

Okay, I admit it: Even though I pride myself on my geekdom, I've had a hard time getting into the "viral video" thing. (definition: viral video.) Yes, occasionally I'll click on a link and watch something on YouTube, but it's not like I'm going to YouTube every other hour to see what people are posting. For that matter, I don't usually watch any video on the web; I like the quiet of reading a news story on the web instead of watching an ABC News or AP video with concomitant preceding commercial. At least I can, for the most part, ignore the print ads, even the ones with animated monkeys.

"So, what's this got to do with opera?" you may be asking? Well, as far as "true" opera, nothing; it's more up the "musical" alley. During the recent Hollywood writer's strike, a few bored penners, Joss Whedon and his brothers, Zach and Jed, and Jed's fianceé, Maurissa Tancharoen, decided to get off their couches and do something fun with a bunch of their talented friends, something they would not have been able to do while employed: write, direct, and produce a short film on their own. The result is "Dr. Horrible," a web-only viral video musical adventure super-villan comedy miniseries, starring Neil Patrick Harris, aka TV's "Doogie Howser, MD" and currently star of the well-received CBS sitcom, "How I Met Your Mother"; Nathan Fillon from Fox's "Firefly" and its feature-length theater fodder, "Serenity", not to mention ABC's current hit, "Desperate Housewives"; and Felicia Day from Fox's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Speaking of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (both movie and Fox TV series) and "Firefly" and "Serenity," Joss Whedon was the writer man behind all of them, not to mention other acclaimed TV/movie things like "Angel," "Alien 4: Resurrection," as well as less sci-fi things like "Roseanne" and even "Toy Story." He's currently working on a sci-fi series for Fox called "Dollhouse," scheduled for a 2009 premiere.

According to this story in USA Today, Joss and his friends set out to prove that out-of-the-box productions could make it in Hollywood. They gathered together some cash "in the low six figures" (to us, sounds like a lot; to Hollywood, it's a bargain basement production), brought on people they'd worked with (Harris, Fillon, and Day), and asked "What if?" "Dr. Horrible" was the result and, again, per the article, it has become everything a viral-video-maker dreams of: a word-of-mouth smash hit.

As of this writing, Friday, June 18, 2008, the first two episodes of the series are live on the web, free to view; the third and final installment is scheduled to be put up on Saturday, 7/19. However, the entire series will only be available for viewing through July 20. After that, the videos will only be available on iTunes for paid download (at iTunes' standard rates, $1.99 per episode). A DVD distribution is also planned at a later date.

And herein lies the "rub" about viral videos: No one has found out a sure-fire way of making any money off of them, even ones that have professional cinematography and brilliant writing. So they're left with uploading their work(s) to YouTube and hoping, somehow, that they'll be "discovered" by a Hollywood producer. Unfortunately, YouTube and Hollywood have not been on the best terms, given YouTubers penchant for digitizing and uploading Hollywood's copyrighted content onto the site for viewing by anyone--and this is the really contentious part--for free. However, things may be changing in that vein. YouTube has cut a deal with Lions Gate Entertainment to offer clips of its movies (ad supported) on the site; and Microsoft is allowing users of its TiVo digital video recorder hardware/service to download YouTube videos for viewing on their regular televisions.

And, lest you ask, yes, you can watch clips of opera performers and performances, past and present, on YouTube, although, like Hollywood's content, some of performances may be illegally uploaded, copyrighted productions. You can't be arrested for watching them should you so deem; YouTube is the responsible party. Some local and regional companies even put clips of their opera productions up for publicity and notoriety's sake.

Anyway, if you get a chance, I highly recommend seeing "Dr. Horrible." Think of it as a cheaper alternative to the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical "Mama Mia," (which, of course, in turn was an adaptation of the music of the 70s supergroup, Abba... and I'm not bad mouthing, "Mama Mia"; preliminary reviews have been quite favorable.) So you have your choice of Hollywood film stars singing: Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth in "Mama Mia" or Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillon, and Felicia Day in "Dr. Horrible."

The lure of the supernumary

2008-07-13T14:22:00.002-04:00

Found this article in the LA Times. Opera Pacific in Orange County is looking for supers for the upcoming year.

Okay, first of all, this is in the LA Times, but it reads like something you might find in the Knoxville News Sentinel or even the Farragut Press Enterprise. I'm not an elitist... at least, don't think I am... but I expect a bit more from the LA Times than I do from a local paper. I suspect that David Colker, "Los Angeles Time Staff Writer," pretty much was spoon fed this article by Opera Pacific. Granted, what can you say about being a super in a regional opera company? Go to a few rehearsals, see opera stars either on their way up or on their way down, wear a smelly costume, and give up a week or two of your life for production, get paid a few bucks, and revel in accolades--or jeers--from family and friends who see you onstage.

On a lark, I went to the link on the Pacific Opera website regarding volunteers mentioned in the article. Surprisingly, it closely resembles the KO website's volunteer page. "We need you to help with this and that--telemarket tickets, answer phones, help with fundraisers, etc." I didn't find anything about supers on our site, though. (One note, and I'm trying not to make this sound like a complaint, the KO website has nothing about the upcoming season on it.) Again, because here the KO is in K-town, a stone's throw up the road from hillbillyville, and there Opera Pacific is in a 'burb of one of the largest and most culturally diverse cities in the world. It's somewhat surprising that OP should have to beg (C'mon, let's be frank: that's what the LA Times article is) for people to help out, little alone perform with them.

But the kicker was when I opened OP's application for superdom (Microsoft Word format) . (In KO's defense, the OP application was for the past 2007-2008 season, so we're not the only ones behind the curve websitewise.) It's pretty specific, especially the section about being able to lift 40 pounds: "Do you have any physical limitations that would prevent you from doing this kind of strenuous activity? Y or N Please explain. if you would like. Wha?! Suddenly the opera company wants to know your medical history?! "Took a bullet in 'Nam; nearly died; have artificial titanium and nylon hip socket that aches if I pick up shrieking sopranos. That explanation enough for you?" And it goes on and on! Nearly four pages worth of personal info: Your performance history, availability, wig-and-makeup knowledge, etc. I'm surprised they don't ask for transcripts and a copy of your medical files. I can just see Don T. asking some of our regular supers questions like these... or any of us choristers, for that matter. That would be interesting to watch. "You want to know specifics of my hysterectomy? As if!" Oh! And I forgot! OP wants a full-length photo of you submitted with the app.

It's funny, though, how different KO is from OP. Don rarely has trouble finding enough supers for our productions unless it's some kind of huge crowd scene. We have our usual suspects that return again and again, year after year. I wonder how much turnover OP has in the super department? It must be more than KO's. So, apparently, we're doing something right. Maybe it's because we are kind of a family at KO. I would imagine that OP, being in a more "professional" town might not be that way. It may not be that OP is a fun place to work, that everyone, by and large, tries to enjoy themselves at rehearsals, and wants everyone else to enjoy it, too. Sure, OP is a probably a lot more efficient at staging (supers are only called about eight times, according to the OP website), but is that worth having a good laugh or two? Maybe so, maybe no. And speaking of "worth," OP pays $5 a rehearsal and $10 for performance to supers; I don't know specifics, but I suspect that Don insists on our guys getting more than that. Maybe in LA there are more people slavering to see opera singers up close and personal and would do the super job for free if they had to.

Curious, I tried to find specifics out about the OP chorus, but the website only said something like "come back soon." So I looked up the OP staff, hoping to find a chorus link there. I didn't find what I was looking for, but what I did notice was the massive amount of staff that OP has to support, everything from "President and CEO" (a titular position? doubt that, given the "CEO" moniker) on down to "Ticket Services Associate." I count about 30 people on the payroll at OP, assuming all of those listed draw a paycheck. What's that? Like, 200% more than KO has?

Well, I suppose that, given its location, OP has a broad base of support (read "money") and can afford to do four productions and four performances, and has ample crowds to back them up. Still, from a super standpoint, wouldn't you rather be here?

Live Streaming Bayreuth

2008-07-02T19:07:00.003-04:00

So, you don't want to be on a waiting list for seven years before getting live tickets to the Bayreuth Festival, and you don't want to wait the several years for a potential DVD to be released of the performances there (assuming they're acceptable and marketable enough for DVD). What's a Wagner lover to do?

Technology to the rescue! You can experience all the thrills of live, grand Wagner from Bayreuth from your office or easy chair... well, "live" streaming audio and video, anyway. For those of you who aren't tech officiandos, "streaming" means sending a digital real-time audio-video broadcast over the World-Wide Web. Cameras and mics capture the action, the picture and sound are digitized and broken into packets of data that are sent to a central distribution hub that creates copies of those packets and sends them out to computers all over the Internet where they are reassembled into a "live" audio and video stream to play on your monitor and through your computer's speakers. Yes, technically, it's not "live" live--there is a delay of a few seconds to a few minutes--but a little research will reveal that even "live" TV shows are rarely not on a few seconds of digital delay, especially in the post-Janet-Jackson-Superbowl-halftime-show-wardrobe-malfunction era. That's about as live as things get without being there in person.

Of course, Bayreuth will charge you for it: $77 to be exact... per production. Ouch! But, wait! Think about that for a minute: Think of it as pay-per-view. A quick check of my own local pay-per-view events lines up as such:

Ultimate Fighting Championship 86 - $44.99

TNA Wrestling - $29.99

WWE Wrestling - $39.99

Boxing - $49.99

Soooo, $77 is not that big a stretch, is it? I mean, if you're plopping down fifty bucks to watch a live-action cartoon... You need to face it! That's what wrestling is, right?... Why not spend the extra $22.99 to watch something quality? And while wrestling will entertain you for the requisite two hours, with "Meistersinger" will keep you enthralled for about five hours. (I'd be very curious to see a show of hands of people that would fall into the demographic of both events, please.)

Okay, let's compare apples to apples, shall we? The recent high-definition rebroadcasts of Met productions run, what? $24 or so? And those were "canned" videotaped productions in which a performance was filmed and later edited out for content and run-time. Hardly live. Ah! I recently documented a simulcast of a San Francisco Opera production at AT&T park. Hard to beat the price there--free. Of course, you won't have the comfort of your own couch, the convenience (and thriftiness) of your own fridge, and the use of your own personal bathroom for that... and you certainly can't see the performance when you're, uh... indisposed. However, thanks to your trusty laptop and a "wi-fi" router/switch in your home, you're more than welcome to drag "Götterdämmerung" in with you. (Yes, I know it sounds gross, but surely you've drug a magazine or novel in there... or maybe you've already installed a TV in your "'loo.") You won't miss a minute of the action.

Or you can just wait for the DVD to come out this November.

ADHD Entry

2008-06-30T10:36:00.003-04:00

I think I've mentioned on occasion that I suffer from attention-deficit disorder. So, in honor of that, I submit today's "all over the map" entry.

"Drive" for Dallas Opera

Just a note about Dallas Opera's fiscal success this year. And building a new performing arts center to boot!

I suppose that, given all the oil money that floats around that town, you should take some (very) small consolation that you are helping the world of opera the next time you fill up your tank.

Do we really need to see that?

An article in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald (Would that be our today or their yesterday?) refutes the rumor that Opera Australia demanded that German director Elke Neidhardt clean up an apparent "Full Monte" scene planned for her production of Don Giovanni. Nevertheless, Hungarian bass Gabor Bretz will be wearing a G-string when he steps out of a shower on stage. Neidhardt does seem a little flustered about that addition to the costume budget, and gives, uh... "ample" (?) examples of recent on-stage nudity in European productions. (Supports my recent monologue on German opera trends.) I tried to Google (insert own risqué joke here) the English National Opera production she referenced, but couldn't find it. But this article appears to support the hypothesis that, by East Tennessee's admittedly Bible-belt standards, the ENO has no problem with, um... ah... "progressive" attitudes on staging.

Puccini... Reconstructred

Everyone wonders how "Turandot" might have sounded had Puccini completed it in toto before his death. But some are more interested in the first performances of what we today consider "finished" works.

Case in point: Puccini's "Edgar," which was so ill-received at its premiere in 1889 that Puccini undertook an extensive revision of the work to make it more audience friendly. That sounds a bit ominous, given what Hollywood writers regularly do to great literary works to make their movie adaptations more "audience friendly.", i.e., dumb them down, change scenes, endings, characters, etc. But, in the case of "Edgar," at least, someone has seen fit to attempt to un-revise Puccini's work back to its original form. The editor/re-reviser, Linda Fairtile, head of the University of Richmond (Virginia) Parsons Music Library, undertook the project as a labor of love with Puccini's publisher, Ricordi, and was surprised to find that the Puccini family was very interested in it also, contributing missing pieces of the original manuscript. The revision of performed last Wednesday in Turino, Italy, with Ms. Fairtile in attendance.

Carmen Smuggler Trail Found!

2008-06-24T13:31:00.003-04:00

Check out this video! (Acrophobics be warned!) Bizet could not have known of this trail when he was writing Carmen, (the opera premiered in 1875; the walkway wasn't built until 1901) but I'll bet he was imagining something of the sort. As luck would have it, it is in the very gypsy region of Andalusia in Spain. Prends garde de faire un faux pas! Prends garde!

If that doesn't get your jollies on, I found this link last year about a trail in China that makes the Camino del Rey trail above look like the Cades Cove loop (in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park)!

Now, the next time you complain about lax safety regulations in the U.S....

Those Crazy Germans... and Swiss

2008-06-21T20:29:00.003-04:00

It never fails: Every time I'm over at the KO office, some issue of Opera News will catch my eye with a cover featuring outrageous sets or costumes that make you wonder, "Which opera could that be?" (Note: I don't get Opera News, myself, so I rely on the KO's office copies to keep me informed.)

Almost invariably, the outrageous cover will be a production from a European company, and usually from Germany or Switzerland. After all, Europeans are far more, uh... "continental" than we folk from "the colonies." They've had opera over there for over 500 years, so the old stage adage that "everything's been done" is probably the watchword of any company doing a new production that wants to be noticed. (After all, it got my attention on the Opera News cover.) My all-time favorite Opera News cover was one of a couple of characters singing in front of a giant, green Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur. It was so shocking, as a matter of fact, that I can't remember what opera it was, but I do remember it was done by some German house.

Now, I'm no expert by any means, but I can't think of any opera, ancient or modern, that calls for "giant green T. Rex situated upstage left." What? Are they doing an operatic version of the Saturday morning TV serial, Land of the Lost? "Marshall, Will, and Holly, on a routine expedition..." Heaven forbid! Nobody get the idea to do this! I hated that show! Dear Don, should some idiot ever write an opera based on LOTL--let's face it, when Jerry Springer is fair game, all bets are off!--and by some incredibly improbable circumstance the KO decides to do it, count me out! I'll not be seen on stage as a Sleestak singing "Sssssssss sssssssssss." (And, lest anyone ask, yes, I do know they're working on a movie adaptation. Yet another indelible sign of the eminent Apocalypse!)

Anyway, it was no surprise when my trolling of opera news on Google turned up this review of Zurich Opera's production of Handel's Rinaldo set not during the First Crusade but in an airport.

Yes, that's right, an airport. Why yes, of course! Why didn't I see the similarities between the goings-on at a busy aiport like Logan International in Boston and the eleventh-century siege of Jerusalem? It's so obvious!

Not! As if! Poor Handel. It's bad enough that his Messiah is almost invariably reduced to a single chorus sung during Christmas and Easter by choirs that have no tenors good enough to sing the high A on "And he shall reign for ever and ev---er" and a soprano section that can only dream of holding top-line F# for 9½ beats, little alone the following Gs. It's bad enough that modern performers cut recit after recit and maybe a few da capo arias from his operas and oratoria... when you can find modern performers even doing oratoria. No! Companies have bent and twisted his plots into creations that little pay homage to the original. (I'm pretty sure that the aforementioned dinosaur opera was a Handel opera, BTW.) Heaven forbid that a modern society that worships Wii and Xbox360--and, of course, golden circle ticket holders can afford PS3s--should have to sit through "long" productions (over an hour) of a bunch of old music--not a Les Paul in sight, even. We'd much rather get things over with so we can get home and watch our Tivo-ed episodes of Grey's Anatomy or Big Brother. Besides, the live human voice is neither live nor human anymore thanks to Cher and Ashlee Simpson. And even before Janet Jackson had her "wardrobe malfunction," networks regularly built delays from several seconds to minutes into their broadcasts of live events so that even "live" events aren't really live on TV anymore.

So we, as performers, as opera performers, have a problem: How to keep the attention of a public that sees ADHD manifestations to be at epidemic proportions alert and entertained for at least 2½ hours or more. Maybe we should only wear costumes of bright primary colors. Maybe we should learn staging that would exhaust Carroll Freeman. Maybe we should forego paying the big bucks for quality principals and focus on gee-whiz sets that are so complex they would give Bill Cheverton a migraine. (As a tech-lover, I have to say that all the stuff that the Zurich Opera's set does--from escalators and elevators to rotating scenes and opening scenery--would certainly keep me entertained.)

Or maybe we should try what Brian is doing by showing Pag alone, with no Cav next year: do really, really short operas. Menotti and Barber would love that; Phillip Glass wouldn't. Or, what about this? Do a Peter Jackson and chop long operas into originals and sequels. Will Scarpia rape Tosca? Will Rudolfo and Mimi live happily ever after? Look for Tosca II and Boheme: The Winter Comes in February!

Hey! I might have something there! People throw their whole lives away to watch the entire series of American Idol. They'll put off major surgeries, schedule early birthing, and tell the boss wanting them to work over on a project where to go. (I wonder if Don would admit that some chorister had turned him down because they just had to watch Idol lol!) And if we picked the right operas, we might be able to go through a whole season with just one, uhh... "production"? Save money on sets, costumes, and other things.

Or, perhaps, we should all pay our dues and join the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

"Who are you?"

"A twelfth-century North Umberland knight. What are you?"

"A seventeenth-century French opera singer."

"Dude, how esoteric!"

Oh well, in ZO's defense, they did pick da man to conduct. William Christie is a great early music conductor. I've got some Rameau choral stuff that just rocks! thanks to him. And, who knows, maybe the Met will someday "resurrect the seminal and wildly successful Zurich Opera production of Rinaldo from the mid-2000s."

In the meantime, Don, do you know where Brian can get a giant inflatable T. Rex for the opening scene of Rigoletto?

"Being there" for opera: a necessity?

2008-06-15T15:23:00.004-04:00

An article in the Contra Costa (San Francisco area) Times caught my eye today. Sue Gilmore, the reviewer, gives a brief synopsis of some of the concerts around the City by the Bay that she has seen recently and a note about another event upcoming:

She was a newly resurrected mass by Renaissance composer Alessandro Striggio, noteworthy in that it required a force of 40 and 60 (separate) voices (five choirs), period brass at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. (She neglects to mention that the mass was performed as part of the Berkeley Early Music Festival sponsored by Early Music America.)

She saw Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, performed by Alexander Barantschik, principal of the San Francisco Symphony, performed at Davies Hall.

Next Tuesday night's premiere of Lucia di Lammermoor, with Natalie Dessay in the title role, performed by San Francisco Opera.

Gilmore gushes on and on about the first two performances and opines about how they could only be experienced live and in person; a recording just wouldn't have the same impact. Speaking as an early music aficionado, I can vouch for the difficulty in capturing adequate performances of Renaissance choral works for many-numbered voices. Masses of that period were written to be performed and, thus, experienced within the voluminous cathedrals of Europe where space for performers and natural reverberation created an ideal atmosphere for the melding of great walls of sound. As for the Prokofiev, Gilmore says that half the thrill of the performance was watching Barantschik "bowing so dangerously close to the bridge, with such vigor and whiplash ferocity in the Scherzo, that you feared he'd saw off the pinkie of his string-stopping hand."

But, alas, when she gets to the SFO's Lucia production, she says that she will eschew the premiere at War Memorial Opera House on Tuesday night for a live simulcast of Friday night's performance broadcast on the 103-foot-wide "jumbotron" scoreboard at AT&T Park (stadium), home of SF Giants baseball.

What makes her flip-flop on the opera performance? She says, alliteratively, that it's the "dynamite, digitally delivered sound" which is every bit as good as that of the opera house and the fact that her viewing pleasure has been decided in advanced by a producer and videographer. The camera, she argues, can zoom in on a suitably perturbed character at their moment of truth and that the action on stage can be followed much more clearly by the multiple views cameras bring. As defense against "purists," she cites the recent success of the hi-def Met performances that have been delivered to digital theaters around the country which purportedly have amassed an audience of some 920,000.

But there's something else here that she hasn't mentioned, I think, that is the ultimate reason for her preference when it comes to operas. When describing Tuesday's premiere, she says that "when the bejewelled and well-heeled troop into War Memorial Opera House..." she will not be there. That description, to me, conjures up images of Margaret Dumont in the old classic Marx Brothers' comedies: stuffy, snobbish, removed from reality, every bit the socialite who carries on polite superficial prattle with other socialites whom she, secretly, cannot stand. Gilmore contrasts that image with the AT&T Park performances, where she says she's "happy to be rubbing elbows with folks in non-designer non-finery who are drawn by curiosity or determined love of opera itself. She also makes a point of mentioning that the simulcasts are free and open to the public, saying she's "thoroughly heartened by the decidedly democratic atmosphere of the free outdoor events..."

So, no pretentiousness, eh? I'll bet! To her, I'm guessing "non-designer non-finery" means Gap jeans and Aeropostale top. I'm sure she'd hardly associate with someone wearing generic J.C. Penney jeans and a well-weathered Giant's sweatshirt, especially when she mentions watching the SFO's big-screen simulcast production of Rigoletto downtown last fall while "sipping brandy-laced coffee... as the moon rose above the copper dome of City Hall." What, Ms. Gilmore? No Coors Light? And she fails to mention the party of five behind her that was almost surely there, talking and laughing so loudly as to nearly drown out her precious digital sound. Hey, girl! There's a reason it takes 100,000 watts of amplifiers and speakers--not to mention a plethora of digital equalizers, delays, companders, feedback squelchers, and a gigantic 64-channel control board--to deliver sound at a level to be heard over thousands of impolite boors! Not to say that something like that wouldn't happen in the theater, but at least the behavior of the vast majority of the audience would cause them to be, hopefully, slightly more circumspect.

So, what can we learn from this review?

First of all, the picture of aged biddies in furs and ill-fitting sequin dresses stepping out of their limos--or, for the poorer ones, Beamers--to go to the opera needs to be done away with... and with good reason. The idea that it takes a refined demeanor (memorize Amy Vanderbilt) and an aloof sensibility to appreciate opera is just shear poppycock. Wasn't Pavarotti produced from a family of humble bakers? Didn't Jessye Norman get her start singing gospel music at little Mount Calvary Baptist in Augusta? Yeah, highfalutin upbringings, they had. And isn't it odd that an opera chorus is almost always made up of a comprehensive range of people? Everything from poor students--not necessarily music majors--to heavy equipment salesmen and engineers to doctors and professors? Ridiculous! Opera is music; music is a key to the soul; all human beings have souls.

I, myself, though born from a musical background on one side of the family, was hardly groomed to be an opera lover. Oh, I remember on Saturday nights, dad would fire up his hi-fi (yes, long before stereo) and play an instrumental selection from Gotterdämerrung (I seriously doubt he even knew that it was an opera), but then would put on one of his favorite groups, Johnny Puleo and his Harmonica Gang, followed, at my brother's and my insistence, that he play one of our favorite fairy tale albums or something from Disney. Nobody laid any big guilt trip on me to go into music. As a matter of fact, my mom (whose side of the family was the musical one), if anything, discouraged it, having seen her brother go through tough times as a trumpet player. And yet, here I am.

Second, while I appreciate Ms. Gilmore's appreciation of opera as it is, I think she needs to come down off her high horse. The only reason that the SFO has such a snooty audience is because there are few of her generation (as she admits "child of the video generation") and younger that buy tickets and go to the opera. True, tickets are sometimes seem expensive, but don't kids plop down $40 or more to see Britney Spears? Wait! Bad example! Kanye West? I can't remember what the face value of Bonnaroo tickets, but I know that they sell from scalpers online for up to $1,000. Don't talk to me about tickets being too expensive! You won't see Pearl Jam giving free simulcast concerts anytime in this century, by the way!

I can't fault Ms. Gilmore too much. I mean, I absolutely love to listen to Devo, but I'm not sure that I, in my "advanced" age, would ever want to go to one of their concerts. (Of course, they're even older than I am!) That being said, I can't stand to watch any classical music on TV; I just feel like I'm missing most of the experience of the music. `A chaqu'un son gôut! But get your butt to live performances whenever you can. The very reason there are festivals like Bonnaroo is that there is nothing like what happens musically, socially, when a perform develops a rapport with the audience in front of him. It's a phenomenon.

Operas KO Should Do (Again)

2008-06-13T09:55:00.004-04:00

So, what's missing from recent KO lineups? What have we missed? Are there any popular operas that we could make a buck on? Are there any we've done minimally previously that would be good now? Here's my list... again, my opinion, nothing else. Plus, some dreaming, and some things that, financially, would be right out.

Così fan tutte. Of course, Carroll Freeman and the UT Opera Theater covered this one last year for the Rossini Festival, but the last time the KO did it was in 1995--and, as I recall, that was done in English. One of the courses was translated as the rather saccharine "Friendly breezes bear the message..." Yech. It would be nice to do it in Italian. Yes, I know: tons of recit., which was one of my complaints about Figaro. Still, we've done Figaro, and Barber; we ought to finish the light-hearted trio with Cosi. I doubt we could do better than a story of biker dudes and chicks, but we could give it a shot.
Turandot. Yes, big, lavish, long, expensive... all major complaints of some of the operas I blacklisted previously. But Turandot is, arguably, the very pinnacle of Puccini's genius. I mean, really! The music at the top of the Third Act, even before "Nessun dorma," is just an amazing passage! It conveys so clearly the sense of chaos and terror that has enveloped Peking and adds a certain dimension of helplessness and hopelessness. And what opera starts off with more of a dynamite blast than Turandot? "Moya! Si! Moya! Noi vogliam il carnifice! Presto! Presto! Moya! Moya!"
Rigoletto. Rigoletto. I included this one even though we are actually doing it next spring. Our last production was 2000/2001. The "Zitti, zitti" chorus for the men is just a great chorus and shows a very different side of Verdi, one that isn't always about singing loud. With Rigoletto,, novice opera-goers actually get to hear "La donna è mobile" in context and not as part of a TV commercial (and discover it's not the be all, end all tenor aria, but just a trifling little ditty). Easy show for the ladies! Fifteen minutes (tops!) and you're done for the night. The guys gotta stay... not like that's anything unusual. Which reminds me...
Dialogues of the Carmelites. I know I'm expressing an opinion, but this is way down on my list of operas I would want to see again. UT did it in the mid 90s, I think, and I went to see it then. I was curious as, being a choral and church musician, I have enjoyed Poulenc's works in the choral and organ genre. Alas, I was much disappointed. I mean, it was Poulenc, but it was Poulenc at his most depressing. (Actually, I admire UT Opera for doing what I think most would agree is not an easily accessible work.) Though the opera is about an order of nuns, it treats religion in a kind of mid-20th-century existentialist way. So, why do I include it here if I don't care for it? Simple: It's an easy show for the men... for a change!
Salome. Yes, I know, another dog. Probably the only opera KO has ever done where there were, potentially, more people on stage and in the pit than were in the audience. That being said, the music is amazing! Not easily-accessible for the average opera-goer, but in having the opportunity to sing a role and, therefore, study the score, Strauss' sturdy command of melodic motives and harmonic atmospheres captivated me. The argument of the five Jews, in the form of a very odd fugue, is genius. Plus, it's a pretty sicko story: Slutty chick has hots for prophet boyfriend but is rejected, gets naked for the king, has said boyfriend killed, and makes love to his head for the last half hour of the opera. Weird instrumentation, too! It was the first musical piece to use the heckelphone. and you won't find too many operas calling for contrabassoon, either.
Faust. While we're on the subject of, shall we say, the devilish pursuits of man, we have to mention this opera, as we would if we were talking about terrific chorus shows. There's a ton of 'em: the Kirmesse ("Vin où bierre? Bierre où vin? "Le veaux d'or" ("Et Satan conduit le balle! conduit le balle! conduit le balle!"), and what has got to be one of the bestest, most greatestest men's choruses in all of operadom, the Soldier's Chorus ("Gloire Immortelle"). In trying to memorize it, get the French right, all the verses, etc. I studied it almost constantly, at work, at school, at night, for about two months; to this day, I can sing just about all of it (well, the tenor I part) by memory. Alas! Faust is pretty long and drawn-out, meant for a time before 30-minute sitcoms and 90-minute super hero movies when spending an entire evening at the opera was no biggie. If we could ever find a way to do it again, it would be fab! Heck, let's at least do the Soldier's Chorus on some concert, Brian! It rocks!
Flying Dutchman. Yes, probably the only Wagner opera we've ever done, and probably the one and only we'll ever do. It's a good chorus show, that's for sure. Even the women get their little sewing circle scene. And of chorus... I mean, course, we ol' salts always singing of the sea and making fun of the steuermann (steersman, navigator), getting drunk, fighting off demons, trying not to listen to off-key offstage brass choirs, and putting up with temperamental German conductors. You have to admit, as hard as the ghost ship scene is, it's an impressive moment both stage- and music-wise.
Any Baroque Chamber Opera. C'mon! Just once! Do a Handel or a Purcell, or a Charpentier. There's a special place in my heart for Baroque operas. I aver that some Baroque operas are every bit as good as anything Puccini or Verdi wrote, maybe even better. I must admit to a great fondness for Baroque (and before) music, so I'm a bit biased. Plus, I had the opportunity to see Luigi Rossi's Orfeo performed by some the greatest early music experts in the world at the Boston Early Music Festival in '97. Who's to say that a Knoxville audience wouldn't enjoy one? People know about Handel (that guy that wrote the "Hallelujah Chorus" that everybody has to do at Christmas and Easter), and they probably would recognize some of the choruses from their usage in (even more) TV commercials. Dare I say, even do one that has no chorus! Save a ton of money on costumes, time, etc. (We are quite a draw, though. One wonders how our productions would sell were it not for the hundreds of people that each of us chorus members "recruit" to come to the performances.) Anyway, there. I've put my $0.02 in in plugging early music.

In looking over my choices, I realize that my dreams tend toward the more grandiose. And, who knows? It may be possible, sometime in the future, to do some of the more, uh... "involved" (read "expensive") operas. Hey, Brian's worked some pretty good miracles so far! And perhaps, by doing some different operas, we might broaden the horizons of our audience further, allowing us to delve even deeper into the opera genre. Akhnaten, anyone?

Operas KO Shouldn't Do

2008-06-12T14:42:00.004-04:00

Bloggers have a great tradition of creating endless lists. "Best sci-fi movies," "greatest moments in web history," "things not to do on a date," "most boring lectures in UT Engineering," etc. The technique is an easy "out" for the regular blogger and is somewhat self organizing. Plus, given the blog's primary purpose--expressing opinion--it's a shoe in.

Since we're here in the doldrums of summer (already double-digit days of 90-degree weather here in K-town), it's a time to look back and reflect on the previous opera season as well as anticipate the productions of this coming season. So, guess what? A list of operas that the KO needs to lay off for awhile. Thanks to Jeff Koehler's excellent record keeping, we have a list of recent history of KO opera performances (reproduced gratefully on my kocpics.com website) and can make some quantitative and qualitative analysis thereof. Though the list on the website is not quite up-to-date (#497 on my to-do list), I've accounted for the missing data. Again, this is just my opinion and not any sort of suggestion or gripe or condescension of anyone. Also, it stands to reason that some of the most popular works in the genre are included here, just because they're so well-known and are such crowd pleasers, particularly in a smaller market like Knoxvegas that has a cash-strapped company always looking for sell-outs.

Carmen. Right. Like you were real shocked about that one. By my count, we've done three in my tenure with the company (ca. 1990). Not too bad. And, to be fair, since we did it in 2007, we're probably not going to be seeing the smuggler's chorus anytime soon (especially given the experience, which will become lore of KO choristers). Still, it's probably one of the most well-known of the operas, no thanks to Walter Matthau, Tatum O'Neal, and, of late, Billy Bob Thornton. Add to that the fact that it requires quite a few sets and a larger group of performers (imagine a chorus of ten smugglers or townfolk--see what I mean?), and you just can't afford to throw it up on the stage but every six or seven years.
La Bohème. Another gimme. Another popular opera. And, like Carmen and so many of the ones on this list, a seminal work of the genre. It's a great chorus show with its spectacular Act Two, which makes it particularly attractive to a company that wishes to keep a consistent core of easily-distracted choristers on the payroll. But, again, you gotta have a good sized chorus, some kind of banda of gala-like proportions, plus beaucoup of extras to run around and fill the stage. And even the occasional opera-goer who loves its familiar tunes must say, "They're doing Bohème again?! They just got through doing that."
Marriage of Figaro. Yes, it's Mozart; yes, it's a work of a genius; yes, it's funny. Nevertheless, outta here! Too long, too complicated for a modern audience used to attempting to comprehend 30-second commercials. Also, probably seen as a bit silly by modern eyes... eyes that, oddly enough, may have rented Dumb and Dumber from Blockbuster last week. And I wonder how many well-versed opera lovers even in the chorus can say they have an appreciation for recitativo secco? Get on with the arias, for godsake!
Madame Butterfly. I hate to list this one, I really do. As wonderful as Bohème is, Butterfly is on another level. Puccini knew Paris well, as did most of his audience, so he had no problem recreating the look and feel of it for his operas. But, ah! The Orient! Strangeness! That was something that had to be conveyed in the music! He went one better later on in Turandot, both in musical intensity and conveyance of setting. Alas! Again we've done it at least three times in my tenure. And since we've also recently cycled through a production, it should be awhile before we see it back, anyway. Not a great chorus show by any means, except to say that Puccini (as in many of his operas) uses us most effectively.
Magic Flute. Given the controversy surrounding our last production, I wouldn't expect to see this one back on stage any time soon. Add to that the fact that this is a singspiel, an opera form not well understood by Knoxville operagoers simply because Flute is about the only singspiel we've done. Then there's that German language thing, which drives singers well-versed in the "pure" Italianate sounds crazy. Oh, yes, we could do it in English (and have), but the translations are always horrible. You either attempt to be true to the German meaning and lose all the wonderful poetry of the German, or attempt to rhyme the English and send the Germanic meaning to its grave, all the while sounding exceptionally silly. And nobody in Knoxville is going to come hear anyone recite German verse on stage as part of a play, especially given the complexities of the usual Mozart opera stories. Then there's all those complex deus-ex-machina sets, the myriad and grandiose costumes, and trying to find three child singers that can sing in tune and not freak out while hanging from wire rope thirty feet off the ground in front of 800 people. I have to admit some favor for this one, though, as it was the first opera that so engrossed me that i actually sat down and watched it (on PBS) beginning to end. Still, too complex and expensive to produce very often at all, even using sets that weren't designed by world famous artists.
Aida. Money, space, time, singers, animals, sets: These are four things that the KO doesn't have enough of to produce this massive spectacle. And it certainly is the only opera we've ever done that has required a local wildlife agent to sit in the rafters and point his gun at us on stage.
Barber of Seville. This has just been over-performed in K-town due to its accessibility, the fact that it's by Rossini, and has a good distribution of characters that makes it easy to perform with both students and pros.

Surprisingly enough, I found that (counting this coming season) we've performed Pagliacci four times since the early 90s, but I'm leaving it out of this list, as it's short, not particularly well-known (unless you're a Godfather or Kevin Costner/Sean Connery fan), and easy to put up on stage. Also, I suspect that, after this fall's performance, that I, personally, will be pretty over Student Prince. It's just not that memorable a piece. That being said, if we can keep doing it (on the cheap, as we have been) and people still come and see it time and time again, I can probably hold my mustard about it.

So, what's next? Operas we ought to be doing. Stay tuned.

When do we get all the cool stuff?

2008-06-05T12:34:00.008-04:00

Anybody who spends about five minutes talking to me knows that I'm a tech nut. I blame my parents: my father, in particular. Though both of them only managed a few post-secondary night school classes in their education, they ended up working in one of the world's centers of high technology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), aka "X-10" (in olden days, along with the "Y-12" weapons facility and the "K-25" gaseous diffusion plant), or just "the Plant." Granted, they were only a secretary and a graphics designer, but they brought a lot of scientific wonderment home to their sons, the oldest of whom would listen to them, enthralled. So, no big surprise, by the age of five I knew what a computer was and how it was going to change the world, and how I wanted in on that.

Of course, back in the 60s, the Cold War space race was driving innovation and even the sky was not, literally, the limit. We'd be on Mars by the mid 70s, they told us, and then we'd mine the asteroids after that. Nobody thought much about "What if our budget dries up or the technology is just too complex for us to master given our current level of knowledge?" Or "What if we get involved in a war and can't get out of it?" (Sounds vaguely familiar...) Reality has a funny way of changing the future.But, regardless, I bought into the biggest dreams back then, hook, line, and sinker. And, quite frankly, I'm still smitten by what the future holds: nanotechnology, quantum computing, gene therapy and cloning, "green" technology to sustain, maintain, and restore our environment.

But then, here's this opera thing that I do. Invented in the 16th century, performing works at least a hundred years old, using instruments that haven't changed in hundreds, even thousands (in the case of the human voice) of years, in a 80+-year-old theater. Quite a dichotomy. Oh, I can marvel at the theater rigging and the automated lighting controls, but those are about as cool as things get backstage.

At least, in Knoxville. A review in the San Jose Mercury News touts San Francisco Opera's new production (with Washington National Opera) of the first opera of the Ring series as "'Das Rheingold' Goes Hollywood," replete with "[George] Lucas" reference. The production apparently is very high-tech. No surprise. After all, the San Fran area is near "Silicon Valley," where the level of technological development is so high and fast-paced, a computer ordered from one of the companies in its environs will be obsolete by the time UPS gets it to your door. ("Oh, 4.5-nanometer processor technology. How absolutely quaint, darling! Are you going to tell me next that its transistors are doped with hafnium? Are you into antiquing? Ha-ha. ")

According to the review, this production uses some very high-tech scenery, including huge video projection screens, to tell the story. Even the story (as if purists out there aren't already howling) has been changed: Wotan is now a 1920s-era American business tycoon, Valhalla a skyscraper, and the giants steelworkers.

"Sigh." I wish that we could do some cool production like that in K-town. We can wistfully remember our brief engagement backing up the Kronos Quartet a couple of years ago, but that's about as far out as we've ever gotten in terms of a real "techie" production. (Granted, that was pretty far out.) Simply by its size, our last Aida in the Civic Coliseum could certainly be counted as high tech, I suppose. Could we count our last Flute, too? The set was designed by a modern artist... and we had those cool Plexiglas and laser pointer flashlights. And we did that a-Strauss-opera-that-wasn't-Fledermaus before Aida. That was pretty far out, musically.

But, other than that, we can count sets that were built in the past five years as being "high tech" as far as we're concerned. Costumes that could not have been worn by Pavarotti when he was first starting out would be pretty progressive for us, too. But, such is our lot in life. The costs of doing really progressive and/or high tech productions are expensive; likewise, the return-on-investment we get for even a tame production of Tosca tells us we can't afford to be too innovative.

I guess there's something to be said for "same ol' same ol'." There are some things that we have in this day and age that are counter intuitive to opera. TV has conditioned us to take in the world in 30-second bites. The Mercury's reviewer, Richard Schein does complain about SFO's Rheingold being too long at 2¹/₂ hours. Even with all the "gee whiz" of the production, the 21st-century attention span makes longer works seem tedious; a century ago, folk would not have minded so much. (I salute the SFO and conductor Donald Runnicles, though, for having the guts to do it sans intermission, no matter how many people I'm sure whined about it.)

And, as I get older, old, familiar things seem more and more, uh... "familiar." My laptop is four years old (Pentium 4 Celeron at 2.4 megahertz [MHz]); my desktop is six or seven (Pentium 4 maxed out to 3.06 MHz). I have recently switched to using Ubuntu Linux (8.04, "Hardy Heron" release) as my primary operating system, though I do still keep Windows XP in dual-boot on my desktop. And I was the first one on my block to get a cable modem.

All these supposed ancient and/or unrefined technologies do what I want them to, albeit slower than an overclocked Core 2 Quad (i.e., 4 processing cores) Q9450 "Nahalem" 2.66 MHz processor with Windows Vista SP2 and two SLI-linked graphics processors with oodles of DDR3 memory connected to Verizon fiber-optic network, all for pwning World of Warcraft newbies, doing HDTV animation compiling, or calculating billions of Mandelbrot sets that... No? Don't see me doing that stuff? OK, uh... I mean, balancing my checkbook every month.

I guess that's what we have with KO: It does everything local music fans want, it balances the budget every month... well, mostly every month, and it plugs along with its 80+-year-old theater, 1,000-year-old voices, 10-year-old rented props/set/costumes, and 16th-century art form realized by at least 100-year-old operas/composers.

Yet another sign of the apocalypse... appropriately enough

2008-05-31T12:58:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Knoxville blog Cup of Joe Powell I found this story on the movie news site Cinematical about--and I'm not kidding about this (see other sources below)--Al Gore's award-winning 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth being made into an opera!

Yep! I was skeptical, too... until I ran it through Google and found numerous--and more august sources than a Hollywood movie fansite--references to it:

Yesterday's edition of UK's Guardian
The Associated Press (via Yahoo)
And, for you whacked-out, right-wing, gun-toting, Creationist Republicans out there, Fox News... although, I wouldn't exactly go as far as to call Fox News "august."

"OK," I can hear you saying, "it's probably some obscure opera professor/composer at Indiana U. trying to make a name for him/herself. It will be performed by the opera theater there with an audience of a couple of local newspaper reviewers and parents of the performers." Don't we wish?! Nope. It is being composed by Italian Giorgio Battistelli, who has composed a list of operas for various European opera houses (e.g., Strasbourg, Rome, Munich, and London) running all the way back to 1981; his scores are even published by Ricordi. (From what I've seen, Brian uses Ricordi editions an awful lot for our operas.) I just have to note just for the humor of it alone, his opera Frau Frankenstein was performed by Berlin Opera in 1993.

But Berlin did not commission An Inconvenient Truth (that's Una verità inopportuna in Italian.) No, no! It was commissioned by and is slated for its premier in 2011 at La Scala, no less!

The Guardian article goes on to say that Battistelli was recently composer-in-residence at Deutsche Opera in Rhein, Germany. Since the commission so new, there's no idea (from anyone, including composer) as to how Truth will play out, whether it will be directly about global warming or a biographical treatment of Al Gore's life or something entirely different.

Regardless, it's going to be an odd book-to-movie operatic adaptation, I'm sure. But, then again, when Jerry Springer: The Opera has attracted rave reviews and famous stars like Harvey Keitel, you should pretty much be prepared for anything in this business. As Cinematical points out, this story has all the makings of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

So, I'm looking forward to the Knoxville Opera's premier of Iron Man or Sex in the City in the mid 2010s, let's say. Or, if we want to stick with the docu-drama genre, we could go with some of Michael Moore's stuff, like Bowling for Columbine or Sicko. Surely we could get some serious financial consideration from Regal Theaters for any of these!

A Remembrance of Things Past

2008-05-30T18:10:00.004-04:00

In digging around in the archives at my parents' house, I found an old picture of my high school concert band taken in 1980, when I was a junior. That's me way in the back in the middle with a tuba. Yes, it was 1980s, but obviously the style back then was still heavily reliant on what we'd probably call now "70s kitsch": Note the ruffles everywhere, on the dresses and on the director's (right side) tux shirt. The ties are pretty wide, too, though it's hard to tell in the photo.

I knew mom had kept a bunch of school photos of my brother and I--regular school photos, band photos, football photos (my brother, not me). But she had a habit of storing them away where we couldn't find them. I guess she thought that if we kept them she'd never see them again. And she was probably right about that. But she also had the annoying habit of forgetting where she had put things, especially little-used items like old high school photos. (Yes, she did have some pictures of dad, my brother, and myself displayed strategically throughout the house. And yes, they were hopelessly out of date.) To be fair, though, she did it with her own photos, too.

We were just never the type of family to crack open the old photo albums and look through them all together. In the (very) early years, my dad had an 8-mm camera, and we would break out the projector for those and have "movie night." But then the camera messed up, the projector bulb blew, and that was the end of that. But dad did have several 35-mm still cameras, as well as a real 70(?) mm box camera, that he would take pictures and have made into slides. (Thank goodness he did that! I'm already on my third medium-size "albums, photos, and slides" packing box out at the house. If he'd had prints made, I would've had to have rented one of those storage pods, I'm afraid!) Occasionally, we'd drag the slide projector out to look at things, but not very often. We just liked to remember things in our heads. I suspect that my grandmother's views on mementos may have had an effect on mom. She probably thought of family photographs and the like as frivolousness. She was very much into the "denying ourselves and helping others" thing, and while there's certainly nothing wrong with that, I think occasionally she took it a bit too far in neglecting her family.

But here Alex and I are, neck deep in slides, photos, and 8-mm film rolls that we have no idea about the who, what, where, why of any of them. It may take years of research with relatives and friends to find out what all the unidentifiable ones are, if we identify them at all. I am planning on getting everything digitized, though, which will make things hopefully a little simpler. There are some very good photo organizing software programs out there. Despite the hassle of all these items, it is fun to see instances in your life that you'd forgotten or put aside. A trip down memory lane never hurt anyone, and by looking at the pics, you can often better discern where that memory lane is coming from. There are surprises--"My hair wasn't that long back then"--and lots of "Oh yeah! I remember this! We were..."

And so we come back to the photo of the band. Since I was a band geek in high school (I was a choir geek only at church), this photo means a lot to me. Lots of faces that I'd forgotten; some I remembered, but differently; some I'm absolutely elated to see, e.g., some of the hot (in 70s parlance, "foxy") flute players in the front row there that were hot majorettes in fall marching band. (Y'all go dream about your cheerleaders. I'll stick with the majorettes, thank you... they generally wear less!)

I've spent three or four hours the past few weeks puzzling out faces and attempting to attach names to them. The more I get, the more I remember. It's like some huge Kim's game. "I think her name was Natalie. Oh, and she had a friend, Paula... that's her right there... and they used to tease us tuba players. And one time at band camp"--spare me the "American Pie" references, please--"we got mad and decided to play a prank on them by..." So, even if I knew all these peoples' names, it takes forever just because of the flood of memories flowing back. And then Alex will chime in with someone's name he knows and it's off again.

It is tremendously gratifying to "see" these people again. If it weren't for my church choir and school band directors and all the friends I made in those organizations, I wouldn't be the musician, wouldn't be the person I am today. And, let's face it, high school is an amazing time in a person's life.

But perhaps the most shocking part about looking at this old picture is seeing that tuba player in the center in the back and trying to remember, "What was that guy like?"

Where's Brad Pitt when you need him?

2008-05-22T23:33:00.001-04:00

Rules for when you're in Warsaw:

Rule #1: You don't talk about opera club.
Rule #2: You don't talk about opera club.

Happy Friday, everyone.

And you thought KO's production of Tosca was opulent

2008-05-21T15:19:00.001-04:00

An article in the L.A. Times says that the L.A. Opera's current production of Tosca, which premiered last week, is using the original jewelry worn by Maria Callas in her Met debut of the title role in 1956.

The jewels--a tiara, a necklace, and earrings--are made of 200 tear-shaped crystals and were created by renowned Milan designer Atelier Marangoni. They are currently owned by Swarovski, a company based in Austria, who is letting the LAO use them, gratis, in order to publicize its travelling exhibition of jewelry worn by Callas in over 18 of her productions, including La Gioconda, Tristan und Isolde, and La Traviata. The exhibit is scheduled to "play" at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in May 2009.

The jewels' value is judged to be about $85,000! Before anyone gets any ideas, the jewels will be stored in a safe under armed guard at the Music Center. They will be removed from the safe by armed guards and brought to the stage moments before Tosca, sung by Adrianne Pieczonka, makes her Act 2 entrance. I'd bet the guards would have no reservations about making their operatic debut should anyone in the audience--or on stage or back stage--get any funny ideas during the production.

Hmm... I wonder... What does Mary Costa have in her jewelry boxes? If LAO can use a gimick like this, why couldn't the KO? Someone check and see what Mary wore for Traviata which was the innaugural performance of the KO(C) in the mid-70s.

Tosca at Covent Garden

2008-05-15T13:42:00.001-04:00

Came across a review of the Royal Opera's production of "Tosca" at Covent Garden in the UK's Telegraph. I get a kick out of reading these reviews. Most of them have a distinctly snooty tone, which makes them all the more fun. We laugh at Harold Duckett's reviews of KO productions, thinking them less reviews and more synopses, but I guess he's not any worse than some of these supposedly more sophisticated reviewers that work for more sophisticated newspapers and review more sophisticated opera companies/productions.

The nerve of this guy (Rupert Christiansen)! He's reviewing one of the world's top opera companies at one of the world's top performance venues, and he has the gall to complain about this and that! Yes, I know. That is the definition of "critic," after all. And were he to gush on and on about every production (compare his review to this), things would get boring very quickly. But, as it were, it's not necessarily a "panning" of the performance. He does put some positive spin on things. First, he says that this revival is better than the first in the summer of 2006 in terms of set preparation, stage management, and lighting. And then he picks his favorite singers of the evening to gush on about, sometimes throwing out rather presumptuous superlatives: "[Tenor Jonas Kaufmann] is without doubt the most persuasive Cavaradossi since Domingo's heyday." Yikes! Talk about the performance pressure! "You could be the next Domingo!" Well, I guess every tenor would die to hear something like that. Plus, it makes a great blurb for your bio. My favorite quote from the review is the superlatives aimed at Paolo Gavanelli as Scarpia while simultaneously backhanding the Tosca, Micaela Carosi. I quote the paragraph here in its entirety:

Gavanelli makes an insidiously vile Scarpia, quietly sadistic but utterly ruthless in pursuit of his perverted appetite. If only he had been up against a rather more subtle Tosca than Micaela Carosi, an old-school Italian diva with a line in traffic-cop gestures and a sizeable and effective but rough-edged dramatic soprano which paid little heed to the nuances of the text.

I particularly love the "old-school Italian diva with a line of traffic-cop gestures." It kind of says it all.

It reminds me of a rather-well-known aging soprano that gave a master class and performance at UT when I was a graduate student there. In the master class, the very first thing she did after being introduced and sitting down was to throw up an admonishing finger at us and declaring, "Do not anger the singer!" She went on to recount some instance in which James Levine (James Levine!) did something to upset her and "I walked off the stage!" I knew we were in for a "treat," of sorts, and that the master class was going to be anything but boring. Things got worse that evening when she presented an amalgam of scenes from various operas under the moniker "Le Jardin d'Amour" (the garden of love) using the KOC apprentices to fill out needed characters. Suffice it to say that she had the "traffic-cop gestures" down pat, and that, combined with her horribly trite staging, her far-gone aging voice, and the most outrageous costumes imaginable turned it into an absolute riot of campiness and theater of the absurd. It was so bad, so incredibly, hilariously bad, that our director of opera at the time and the husband of a well-known UT voice teacher had to give up on holding in their laughter, dispensing with any decorum, and and just rolling in the aisles. So you can only imagine what we students were doing.

So, yeah, maybe we need critics. They allow us to put things in perspective and not believe the little worlds we create around ourselves and our performing groups... which is not to say I won't be guffawing at the next Duckett review.

The rich man's Rocky Horror Picture Show?

2008-05-12T16:11:00.000-04:00

An Associated Press article chronicles Zurich Opera's problems with their current production of Fledermaus. Its general director, Franz Wesler-Möst, who is also music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, has refused to conduct the last two performances on May 17 and June 20 because of "artistic reasons." Apparently, Wesler-Möst is unhappy with vein of the stage director, Michael Sturminger's production, mainly, that the he has chosen to infuse the opera with vampires, complete with Dracula's castle.

Well, after all, it is called Die Fledermaus ("the bat"). lol! I guess the modern trend of juxtaposing operas against weird places and time periods goes against Wesler-Möst's staid, prude sensibilities. And one might see how he might think that. The thing that has always bothered me about Fledermaus is the lack of a direct connection of the story with the title. Those familiar with the story know that "the bat" has very little to do with the opera. The plot is based on Falke's scheme to seek revenge on his dear, old friend, Eisenstein, for leaving him passed out and dressed in a bat outfit one night when they were bar-hopping. So, really, there is no "bat" in the opera itself, just in the backstory. The opera story is based on the tried-and-true Mozartian plot of mistaken identities, character substitutions, and a big finale where all is revealed and all are forgiven.

Now, how Sturminger was able to bring his "vampirical" vision into the plot remains to be seen, unless you happened to have gone to the previous two performances, which Wesler-Möst conducted. Ironically, in one of those twists that Mozart's librettists would have been intrigued by, W-M's (I'm sick of typing "Wesler-Möst"--do you know how hard it is to generate an umlauted "o"?) performances will be seen by more people, as the two performances he did conduct will be edited for release on DVD in a few months. So... he won't conduct the remaining two live performances but will be forever perpetuated as the conductor of that production on a digital format likely to last for the next 25-30 years.

Of course, the production could turn out to be a hit, a tour de force destined to be brought up whenever opera cognisceti talk of Fledermaus or mentioned on some future, mutated version of Dan Berry's "Echoes of a Golden Age" radio program on WUOT... but, judging from the Vienna Times (Wiener Zeitung) review of it (or, rather, Babelfish.com's machine translation thereof), that doesn't appear to be the case. The review is generally lukewarm, which is what the review says of the production: run-of-the-mill, humdrum, "phoned in." (BTW, Orlofsky turns out to be the Dracula, I think.) So maybe W-M's rep is safe.

Maybe the Zurich will forgive him, or those that have seen the production, sympathize with him. He's due to direct Carmen this summer and Rosenkavalier, Figaro, and Così next year. One would think that those would be tame productions. (Though, with Carmen, we KOans can speak from experience on outré performances.) I guess if some stage director was off his/her rocker, they might have a red-painted horse and rider (naked?) on stage for Rosenkavalier. After all, those northern European houses are well-known for their bizarre productions. Considering that, a few years ago, I was reading in Opera Digest about a Handel opera at... maybe Vienna State Opera?... and looked down to find a picture of a giant dinosaur on the stage, a Dracula in Fledermaus wouldn't be quite so odd.

The Future of Opera?

2008-05-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

Happened to catch this story in the British paper The Guardian. The Royal Opera House is looking for talented film-makers to produce a version of Romeo and Juliet. The catch: The film can only be 40-seconds long! It's true! The short, which can be filmed with camcorder or--get this!--cell phone camera can be uploaded to the Royal Opera House's YouTube site and voted on. The most popular entry will be featured all over England in a set of advertisements promoting the Royal Ballet's production of R&J.

I mean, there's the popular Complete Abridged Works of William Shakespeare play, but this is a whole 'nother level! This is like The Inquirer's version of the Reader's Digest version of R&J as edited by producers from MTV! How comprehensive can you be in 40 seconds? Sorry, that's "up to 40 seconds." It could be shorter!

I think I can give a shot at the script. Feel free to borrow and adapt this for your entry. I'm not entering. I never can hold my cameraphone steady enough.

----------

Romeo (to Juliet): You looked really sexy in your nightie on that balcony.

Juliet: You're kind of Studville yourself in those tights. Is that a sword in your pocket? Or...

Romeo (interrupting): But our families hate each other.

Juliet: Yeah, and you killed my bro, dude.

Romeo: Sorry 'bout that. Let's run off together.

Juliet: Great idea!

Lord Capulet (to Juliet): As if! You're marrying Paris!

Juliet: I'd just as soon fake my own suicide.

Friar Lawrence (to Juliet): Seriously? Here, drink this.

Juliet: I'm sleepy.... (nods off).

Romeo: Did you say you were dying? Then I'll die, too! (Takes poison, dies.)

Juliet (rousing herself): What? Romeo's dead. Alas! (Stabs herself, dies.)

Capulets, and Montagues: How sad. Let's not fight anymore.

----------

Yeah, you're probably right. Too long for the contest and the YouTube generation. But, maybe, if I get LonelyGirl15 and the "Leave Britney alone!" guy to play the leads...

Postlude

2008-04-25T16:49:00.000-04:00

Hard to believe that the Tosca is already over, much less the whole season. You just get in the "habit" of seeing everybody every couple of months during the year, and then at the end, bam! Gone for the whole summer. Of course, some we won't see again. Graduations, new jobs--either a new one here that will require a greater amount of time or one in another city far away--marriages, and other of what my tax preparation software calls "life events" will contribute to the attrition.

Of course, Jennifer and Aaron, long-time (long-suffering?) members of the KO chorus, who have paid no attention to that snotty "You'll never get anywhere if you sing in the chorus" attitude that a few nameless students at UT have, are graduating and moving on to the University of Wisconsin to pursue higher degrees of learning... that is, after they get married up in Buffalo. I didn't hear honeymoon plans, but, then again, I'm a guy, and we guys don't ask those kinds of "touchy-feely" questions very often. Of course, it's common nowadays for college kids who get married to put off the honeymoon for awhile, either due to financial or time constraints, so that might be the case with J&A. And they'll certainly have lots of places to explore once they get up to Madison. We wish them the best. A quick check of the web tells me that Madison has a city opera company. They're doing Butterfly, Così, and Faust next year, so it sounds like a fun season if the happy couple decides to pursue continued opera chorus (or better!) membership. And the university opera program presents two major works and many one-acts and opera nights.

Every year at this time we say, "We ought to get together and do something this summer," but we rarely do. It's rather ironic that summers, historically looked upon as a season of relaxation and leisure, have become one of the busiest times of the year. We try to cram everything that we've been missing out on throughout the year into three months of nonstop action. Apparently, there is a congratulatory party for Jennifer and Aaron's wedding scheduled sometime in July, so that will be one opportunity. Another, and one I certainly hope can happen (Oh, Lawsy! I hope can happen!) is that my brother and I are planning on throwing a grand bash to celebrate the completion of the renovation of our house. One hopes we have enough money left over to do so! Stay tuned, either for that announcement or for news of my commitment to Lakeshore Mental Health Facility. ("I don't know, doctor. He just wigged out and starting yelling something about cabinets not coming in on time or something.") One or the other will happen, I fear.

Well, I was planning on doing some kind of synopsis of the year, but that will have to wait for another day. I have a very large, furry, black kitty at my feet currently that is demanding her Fancy Feast Grilled Chicken Feast ASAP. TTYL!

Here We Go Again

2008-03-29T18:11:00.000-04:00

So, Monday night's the big night! The first evening of staging... and, knowing the speed at which David Bamberger works, probably the last. Certainly, Carroll Freeman I admire for coming into staging completely prepared, but David takes it to another level. He comes in knowing exactly how he wants things to be staged. Not only that, but he also has figured out each character's inner dialog. (Sometimes it's as simple as "You've finished singing and so you go off stage.") I imagine that Carroll will get to that level when he's as old as David.

Not that there's much staging to do or learn. The sops and tens probably get the most complex staging in the sacristy scene. We'll probably need to dart back and forth, yadda-yadda. Certainly, with the kids on stage, there will be enough pandemonium to get the point across. The Te Deum is pretty much park-and-bark. We might get to process in during the initial intonation of the Te Deum, but I'm betting that'll pretty much be it.

Pregnant with Art

2008-02-05T11:49:00.000-05:00

Since last week, I'd wanted to write a bit on Verdi's recitatives, but I couldn't think of enough to say. I'm working on a fairly difficult Bach recit and aria right now for church, so I was kind of attuned to the recits in Forza. However, performance practice is one of those long-winded topics that requires copious research and long references to obscure articles written in in the 1930s. Believe it or not, it's something hat I find not all that unpleasant; nevertheless, I wrote all the research papers I'm going to write getting my Masters. Plus, I'm not sure I had a solid point to make with it, except that Bach and Handel wrote recits, and Mozart, and Verdi. How they were related was where I began running into problems.

So, here we are in production week already. Everybody's happy-go-lucky mood has turned to dour and dim. Trying to remember new staging, you forget the new dynamics; trying to remember the dynamics, you forget the words; trying to remember the words, you forget to carry your prop on stage; trying to remember to get your prop, you forget your staging. It's a vicious cycle--a vicious cycle that you hope will get better in the two rehearsals we have left. But you're so frustrated by things, you just get "over it," "it" meaning everything that you've been working on for about two-and-a-half months total, not counting the holiday break. You're saying to yourself, "Let's just get this over. Tonight's and tomorrow's rehearsals I can just plow through. Then I'll have a glorious evening off--except for making something for the cast party--and then I can survive Friday night, have a little fun at the party, then enjoy Saturday and plow through the last performance on Sunday to enjoy going to dinner or (dare I say!) going home to bed."

To be honest, I get that way nearly every production. Maybe if I wasn't struggling with some problems with my vocal technique, maybe if I had a body that fell inside the bell-curve of sizes of costumes that Malabar has to offer, maybe if I was a better dancer, maybe if my years of experience with stage makeup meant I was getting better at it, maybe if I paid better attention... It goes on from there. Eventually, I get to the point where I wonder why am I still doing this if it's such a frustrating experience.

I mean, are we making a difference? Are we affecting people's lives with our art? There are people out there in East Tennessee that don't even know that Knoxville has an opera company. Heck! There are downtown Knoxvillians that don't know it! Will John (or Jane) Q. Public, who's still thinking about Tuesday night's "American Idol" and wondering what the praise choruses will be at church on Sunday morning care if "La Vergine's" dynamics are off... or will he even know it. It used to be you could almost bet that, at some point in a person's childhood, they would have had to take piano lessons; used to be at some point a person learned about singing in some choir somewhere; used to be people would listen in every Saturday afternoon for the Met broadcasts.

That's all in the past. Our lovely education system has failed to create an art-wise public. Yes, the three Rs are important, and, yes, it is important that we teach our children well enough to be competitive in the global market and changing technologies. It's also important that we teach them the value of exercise, the tenets of good sportsmanship, and the variety of activities, from football to table tennis, that allow us to burn off stress and have a little fun.

But it's also important to teach the history of art. Why did Van Gogh cut off his ear? What was Mozart dealing with when he wrote his Requiem? Who's Twyla Tharp? Why did Beethoven only write one opera? How did others in the past express themselves? Over all, these questions amount to the question "How can I express myself in a way that is unique and says something about me?" Isn't that art? Shouldn't that be important? Wouldn't it make the world a better place for people to write, draw, dance, or paint their feelings of angst rather than expressing them with a gun?

Wouldn't it be great if, at some point on Friday night or Sunday afternoon, that one person in the audience be inspired with Verdi's story? Or touched by the tragedy of his characters in Forza? "How am I like Alvaro?" "Poor Leonora! I feel for her! I know what it's like to lose a loved one under tragic circumstances." "What a silly vendetta! ... But, you know that big fight I had with my sister last year? We haven't spoken since. I should call her."

So, here we are, back with ill-fitting costumes, a stage setup that wasn't really designed for acoustic music, ten-year-old-makeup, and a shoestring budget that gets thinner by the minute, not to mention whatever "baggage" each of us brings to the theater from our "real" lives. How in the world are we going to reach those people out there in the audience?

Maybe that's the truly greatest art: Creating art when you don't think or feel like you can. Art is not a sure thing. Sometimes something we strive to create just doesn't turn out as well as we'd imagined it. But, then again, is it our job to decide that? Sure, we are educated in all the aspects of what it takes to make "good art," and we certainly wish for something that satisfies our own idea of what "good art" is. But, ultimately, it's not up to us. We'd like that control, but it's the opera-goer that has the final say.

Recently, in remodeling our parents' house, my brother and I had to move our dad's paintings. Dad was a graphic artist by trade, but enjoyed painting watercolors in his spare time. (My brother inherited Dad's ability to draw and, assumedly, paint. Mom's side of the family was the musical one; I got that.) When we started pulling his paintings out of storage, we realized that he had done many paintings that no one else had ever seen before--not even immediate family! All told, there were about 60 paintings, maybe a dozen or so that were new to us. He'd just painted them, taken a look at them, said "Nah, that's not too good." and put them away. And yet they were beautiful! When we donated them to our home church to be auctioned off to raise money for missions programs, people went absolutely nuts! "Oh! Your dad was so talented. I have seen several of his landscapes, but I had no idea he had done seascapes. And this portrait of an old Native American woman is just wonderful." Dad hadn't been satisfied with his output, but the people that mattered, those that saw his art, that consumed it, certainly were.

So bide that jacket that doesn't fit too well, try to keep the dynamics down during the monastery scenes, don't worry too much about how well you can move your feet, and so what if you can't sing that high G absolutely perfectly, you are creating art! And someone out there is listening!

Convoluted Doesn't Begin to Describe It

2008-01-31T12:16:00.000-05:00

I was just rereading the Met's plot synopsis of Forza. Either late-19th-century Italians had masterful memories or the opera houses had scoreboards so that the audience could keep track of the plot and characters. ("So, you say Leonora has already sung three arias and it's not even the end of Act I yet? Incredible!")

I guess, maybe, in our TV-plot-soaked society, we're used to bad writing. We've learned to recognize it. "Sarah Conner Chronicles" on Fox? Yep. Pure drivel. "Survivor IV"? Supposed to be real, but c'mon! They haven't picked regular people to be on that show since the original. "Walker: Texas Ranger" (on Hallmark family channel for some unfathomable reason)? Chuck Norris: Who started in American "B" chop-suey movies and went downhill from there; best acting so far is done in the "Classy, but Strong" Honda commercial where he doesn't say anything. There's a reason "Walker" is on an obscure cable network!

But in the 19th century, most people, if they were able to read at all, didn't have the National Enquirer at the local market. So they had to read books and treatises and things like that from the great classicists of the time. They hadn't read any trash, so a plot like Forza would seem very intriguing, different. There was probably a cultural predisposition, too. Americans don't have a whole lot of banishments in their history. (I vote we start with "W.") But Italians, aside from the fact that they have about 1,000 years more worth of history behind them, are used to hearing about a princess or marquis being turned out, and every family's gone through at least one Hatfields-vs.-McCoys blood feud at one point or another. So maybe opera plots would make more sense to them.

In addition, the world has gradually "sped up" over the years. The last vestige of arts patience was probably with Wagner operas or Mahler symphonies and things begin to get shorter and shorter from there on out. Nowadays, a pop star can't possibly write a 6-minute song and expect it to get any airplay. You can't even find an unabridged version of "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio anymore, despite this or that station's "Classic Rock" moniker. No network with any sense would even dare propose a miniseries in this day and age.

I think about the early American settlers and how they endured months and months and months of hardship and toil just to get where they could find a home; today, I get irritated when I have to go all the way out to Farragut to check on the remodeling my late parents' house. Oh, that Cedar Bluff and Turkey Creek Traffic! I'm certain that any Oregon-bound conestoga wagon driver would be equally vexed at having to drive all of 15 minutes on a well-ordered, extremely smooth and relatively flat interstate highway along with a thousand other wagons... or would he or she? They probably wouldn't enjoy passing convenience stores every two minutes, too. I, likewise, would merely laugh if I saw a snake bite my Honda Accord's tire. It would more than likely kill the snake rather than vice-versa. The to-be Oregonians' horse would be another matter entirely.

So, yes, maybe operas don't make sense to the modern acclimated mind. Think about how little we know about Biblical times, how we struggle to understand why people did what they did in that period. Will Verdi's operas be collected and published a thousand years in the future? Will anyone even begin to understand them then? I imagine people asking things like: Why would Don Carlo want to kill Alvaro? The whole thing was just an accident. Can't he see that? And, after all, Alvaro does make his sister very happy. Why would Don Carlo be so hung up on the color of Alvaro's skin? Why didn't he let the authorities track Alvaro down instead of traipsing all over Europe haphazardly trying to run into his father's murderer? And c'mon! He doesn't even recognize the guy when he next sees him?! Plastic surgery must have been more advanced than was originally thought back then, but Verdi makes no mention of Alvaro's operation. (There is that surgeon character in there, though.) That would be the only way Don Carlo wouldn't recognize him, right? Wonder how many people Don Carlo killed because he thought that they were Alvaro? Seems like that kind of anger and indiscriminant use of a weapon would get him locked away in a Super-max pretty quick.

Ah, well, I just get paid for acting the story out. Not my job to play Roger Ebert... or even Tom Eberts, for that matter... and attempt to understand Verdi's plots.

It's Always the Guys

2008-01-29T17:35:00.000-05:00

Wow! An unexpected (Monday) night off for the guys. As Don said in his email, "A rare occurrence." Normally us guys are there, seems like, 24/7, or at the very least every night. I keep waiting and hoping for an opera, or at least a scene. where the men aren't involved and, thus, get to come late or leave early. I think the last all-x-chromosome scene we had was in Flying Dutchman, way back in 2000. I suppose in an art form that is largely male-dominated it's to be expected. But it would be nice for the guys to occasionally get a night off while the women toil away. Since I don't see Dialogues of the Carmelites being performed in the near future, I guess I'll just have to dream. (Trust me, you thought Salome was a snoozer!)

Here we are in the second week of staging and we haven't even met the full principal cast yet. What kind of opera did Verdi think he was writing? Granted, tons of chorus numbers have been cut to get the show in under the three-hour musician's union "service" time allotment, but this is just plain weird not knowing who your co-performers are. Wouldn't it be strange to not have met a principal until opening night:

"Excuse me, you don't look familiar. Are you hear as someone's guest?"

"Oh, no. I'm so-and-so and I'm playing so-and-so."

Awkwarrrrd!

Ah, well. Hard to believe we'll be moving into the theater and doing the stiz this weekend. I see we're doing the sitz on Sunday at 2:45 and then Teching the first two acts at 8. Waitaminute! The only chorus in the first two acts are the men! Great planning! Superbowl Sunday, perhaps the most masculine holiday (C'mon! It's time we admitted it) of the year, and us guys are going to be at opera while the womenfolk sit at home and attempt to ignore the next to last vestige of football until August (the Pro Bowl being the last). I mean, it's being touted as an incredible mismatch and, statistically, will probably be a rout, but a bad day with an uncompetitive game on the tube is better than a good one without a game.

Besides, as a Vol fan, you gotta feel some kind of genetic kinship for Eli, and even if you're not comfortable with that, he's a former SEC player. Surely Eli won't embarrass himself any worse than he and Peyton (and Archie and Olivia) do in that goofy "Double Stuff (Oreo) Racing League" commercial. (Cooper and the dogs, apparently, were the only family members with enough sense to bail on that one.)

Well, opera time. Gotta go. Sorry about the spazzed-out entry.

A New Year, A New Production

2008-01-27T09:12:00.000-05:00

New Year's. The cold, clean air is cut by cheers from numerous stadiums as college bowl games are played out in a seemingly endless progression of television hype; whereupon, the fans come to the numbing thought that the season is over! The fever pitch of the NFL season, content with Sundays, Monday nights, and an occasional Thursday night, begins to monopolize football fans on now-vacated Saturdays; finally pundits can begin their speculation on Superbowl teams backed up by myriad statistics and not just their "gut instinct." College basketball teams, content to crush hugely inferior teams for the past two months, now turn the season toward the dreaded foes, conference opponents.

And, for those of us involved in Knoxville Opera, there comes the realization that the holidays are over and, yes, our (unmemorized) music is buried somewhere under several hundred Christmas cards and the first rehearsals of the new year are only days away.

Anyway, that was a month ago. Now, we're already a full week into staging. (One would hope that music has been memorized by now, though there are always a few laggards.) And, with the always-active staging of Carroll Freeman, comes the realization that we ate waaaaaaaayyyyy too many Christmas cookies over the holidays and are huffing and puffing about the rehearsal stage, having to make the decision between sucking in sweet oxygen to keep cell in our bodies alive or singing the choruses with appropriate gusto. Oh, well. We didn't need those brain cells anyway. We didn't lose any more than we did with a week of binge drinking our freshman year in college. Eventually, we'll start to drool out of our mouths and wonder why that's happening, but by then we'll believe that it's 1907 and we're singing in the Met chorus, doing Butterfly with Farrar, Homer, and Caruso, with Puccini himself in the audience.

Ah! Madama Butterfly. Now there's a fairly understandable plot, despite all the years that passed during the second intermission. At least Puccini used plot lines that, while rather melodramatic (Duh! It's Puccini!) and trite, were at least plausible. I would like to think that worst screenwriter in Hollywood--that is, the ones that haven't "made it" yet and, thus, are still non-union and writing--could pull together a less complex, believable, and coherent plot than the one Verdi used for Forza. One might posit that Forza's plot line is as, uh... "great" as the music to the Hymn of the Nations. At least we have the amazing plot twists that we've come to expect from Verdi to fall back on. We know, even before the curtain goes up, that the lead character is either going to unknowingly kill a sibling or child or the sibling or child will unknowingly kill them. That's a given, right? M. Knight Shyamalan should write plot twists so well. I suppose that, had UFOs and aliens been a source of discussion in mid-19th-century Italy, we'd probably be watching a Verdiesque adaptation of Signs. We'll leave that up to a future episode of The Twilight Zone or the next incarnation of Jean Cocteau to imagine.

You know, it's kind of nice to be able to work with the same director again and again. You see facets, subtleties in the various productions that you might've missed had we been on the one-opera-one-director treadmill that was previous de rigeur at KO. Carroll is, more or less, a known quantity, which is not to say that Carroll's productions are staid and predictable. I mean, it's like, over the holidays, as you're eating those previously-alluded-to Christmas cookies, you know you're thinking, "Oh, man! I'm going to pay for eating these when Carroll starts staging us at the end of January. I'll be so out of breath." Caveat emptor.

Adio, Luciano

2007-09-06T13:46:00.000-04:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070906/ts_nm/italy_pavarotti_dc_9;_ylt=AkV_RoTJmsDMj1Zedm9K8h0E1vAI

That's the Reuter's article on Pavarotti's death.

What an amazing voice! And his technique was flawless! Can you ever remember his sounding being forced or pushed? It always flowed from his mouth like water. There was energy, there was intensity, but at no time did he ever sound like he was out of control.

I remember watching a Met broadcast on PBS. When they cut to a closeup of Pavarotti, something caught my eye: his jaw. I literally looked like his mouth was just hanging open. How many singers can claim that?

In voice lessons, George Bitzas used to make me grab my jaw and move it around while I was singing. I never got good at it. (George, on the other hand, could move his almost halfway to his ears, seemed like.) But, in watching Pavarotti, I realized why I had that tension: lack of breath support. If the breath, the sound is properly supported down in the torso, there's not need to "squeeze out" notes from the mouth. They just flow. (I did get better, BTW. I found out that--and it's a stupid thing that so many of us don't do it--practicing a lot helped develop breath support.)

As singers, we've always heard about the Bel Canto style of singing (I'm speaking of the first Bel Canto school in the Baroque era) and the horror stories about the teaching technique. An examples: students were forced to sing only one tone over and over again for weeks on end until they were able to sing it perfectly before advancing to two notes, three notes, etc. Pretty wild, but I guarantee you that that kind of tedium would motivate you to focus on proper breath support. There's no way around it.

I don't know how Pavarotti learned to sing. According to his bio, both his parents loved to sing, though not professionally. (Did have an autobiography out? Have to check on that.) But somehow he developed a tremendous amount of breath support that allowed him to do amazing things. What was it? Nine high Cs during a performance of Daughter of the Regiment at the Met? Incredible. And I'll bet that none of them sound forced or strained. I can't say that, on the occasions I hear a Met radio broadcast, many singers can claim that kind of sound. You always know when they're pushing like heck to get that note out.

I recall when Joe Wolverton was here doing Tales of Hoffman. That was my first production where I was an actual performer on stage. I had done supertitles for about a year previously, and if memory serves--not that it does so much anymore with me--Joe had done a Pinkerton with us with aplomb. But with Hoffman, it was his first attempt at the role and, as terrific a singer as he was, by the Third Act he was, as Mr. Bitzas used to say, "living on the principal and not the interest." I guess a more well-known addage would be "writing checks his body couldn't cash." But I'm willing to bet that Pavarotti never had a problem. (Though I can't say for certain whether he did the role. Google revealed some arias from the opera on CD but I didn't see a complete work.)

In cielo.

Welcome Back

2007-08-26T16:02:00.000-04:00

Well, that's what all the kids are hearing throughout school these days. For me, it's an apology that I've been "on vacation," as it were. Ironically enough, "school" is the reason I've been in absentia. I've been taking some online classes that are quite challenging. They've required a lot of time. Add to that the past three plus weeks of 95-plus--and for a few days, 100 plus!--degree weather we've been experiencing around here, and you see a great reason for just standing still in front of the AC doing nothing. Then there are things beginning to happen on the house my bro and I are remodeling. Ah, yes! And rehearsals for various thing have already started.

Where did the summer go? I was in shock when I looked on the calendar and noticed it was August 1st. Then, before I knew it, people were talking about football in a non-hypothetical context and some teacher friends of mine were counting down the days to the Labor Day holiday! Geez it! September! Next thing you know, I'll be getting a packet of opera music. (I maybe already have. I don't check my mailbox everyday. Just how many Papa John's coupons and Bed, Bath, and Beyond catalogs do you need?)

Ah, well. If you don't jump on the bandwagon, you get left behind. And so...

Two recent opera-related obituaries came to my attention recently. The first was the tragic suicide of Jerry Hadley. Being an English tenor myself, I've always highly admired Hadley's work. His willingness to do English Sacred Music projects certainly enriched my collection. He was even willing to give modern composers support, premiering Paul McCartney's first major work for chorus and orchestra, Liverpool Oratorio. (I must admit, that's one of my only-listened-to-once CDs.) But his voice--unlike many "English" tenors--was capable of more power and brightness, such that he was able to have an excellent opera career.
But having so many commitments, working long hours through rehearsals, and living out of a suitcase the vast majority of the time can take its toll. Then, when you get older, maybe your voice starts showing a little wear, people stop calling your agent, and you see you career moving into its twilight.

Depression is a terrible, debilitating illness. I can speak from experience. Even with the advancements in pharmacological treatments in recent years and new theories of thought in psychology, it still takes a lot of painful and draining personal work to conquer it... if you ever do! Statistics show that people suffering an episode of depression are highly likely to suffer other episodes in the future. Though I can't name any research done on this topic, it stands to reason that people that are more sensitive emotionally (e.g., artists of any type) could suffer from a more severe form of the illness. So, when things go wrong in life, when negative things add up, sometimes the pain just becomes too great. Hadley's sagging career, financial problems, and apparently difficult divorce, compounded with any depression he may have been suffering from previously, overwhelmed him.

One of the opera choristers I sing with struck up a friendship with Hadley through a mutual acquaintance a few years ago. She had kept in touch with him, attended some of his performances, and visited him on several occasions. I do hope she is doing okay, as I don't have her email.

The second obituary I noted was the passing of Edward Zambara, who transformed a rag-tag southern university's vocal department into a top destination for the finest young singers in America. To drop a few names influenced by Mr. Zambara, try Delores Ziegler and Cheryl Studer on for size. And even though Zambara left UT in 1980 (one year before I first entered the university as a freshman--though, as an instrumental major), his influence is still being felt to this day in the opera apprentice program and his support for the establishment of a professional regional opera company in Knoxville. Even today, there are tales told about past professors in the UT Music Building, and Zambara's famous temper--surely a sign of his commitment to the highest artistic goals and to "encouraging" some students in the only manner that they understood--is legend. For a director to go from UT to Eastman School of Music speaks volumes about his talent and abilities, not to mention involvement with the Met. The word of his death reverberated around the email systems of Knoxville for several weeks.

It will be interesting to see what the KO does this season to honor him.

Stay cool!

A (Short?) Diversion

2007-08-02T17:20:00.000-04:00

We're taking a break from classical music and opera stuff. (It's my blog and I'll, uh... "blog" what I want to.) Instead, we're going to talk about music that is also near and dear to my heart.

BTW, yes, that's a YouTube embed up there. "Viral video" is the generic term for it, an apt moniker, since these little bits of usual-fuzzy, out-of-focus motion pictures have "infected" pop culture. Eh... it's technology, so I should be enthused about it, right? Well, I don't know if enthused is the right word, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

Besides, this video is big news for a number of faithful people that have sweated through over 20 years of obscurity.

I'm talking, of course, about fans of Devo.

Remember Devo? As far as pop music is concerned, they were a one-hit-wonder. Their late 70s hit, "Whip It" got about six months of airplay before glam-pop took over the New Wave scene in the early 80s. (Can you say, Flock of Seagulls?) But they influenced pop music in so many ways. First, they were one of the first bands with a kitschy sub-text, mainly, that man had stopped evolving and was now "devolving;" hence, the band's name. They also embraced modern musical technology, basing much of their sound on early digital synthesizers, something that only mega-rock bands were beginning to use in their big studio and live productions. They and a few other bands created what came to be called "New Wave" music.

In fact, the members of Devo didn't even start off to be rock icons. In the mid 70s, two sets of brothers, some of whom were attending art school in Akron, Ohio, just began composing music as a backdrop for some of their artwork. But their "shows" were so eclectic and off-the-beaten-path, they hooked into an anti-establishmentarianistic movement withing college-age youth of that time. After awhile, some of their music made it into the hands of other pop icons of the time, among them David Bowie and Brian Eno. Eno offered to produce their debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo, and the rest, as they say, is history. The album sold well among its target audience, and the band began appearing on television shows looking for new music to proffer to their viewers, shows like NBC's Saturday Night Live and ABC's short-lived SNL wanna-be, Fridays. (Guess what day it came on? And, a quick note: One of the very talented regular cast members was a lanky, kooky-looking fellow by the name of Michael Richards, who would have to wait another 10 years for the powers-that-be to recognize his brilliantly odd-ball character acting in the guise of Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld.) However, Devo wouldn't receive major airplay of their music until their fourth album, Freedom of Choice, with the aforementioned single from it, "Whip It."

How did I get to be a Devo fan? It was my dad's fault, not because he was "in to" pop music, but because he wasn't. One year, when I was a freshman or sophomore, with my birthday coming up, dad walked into the mall record shop and asked the salesperson what albums were popular at that time. He or she offered several suggestions and dad purchased three. One was Freedom of Choice. Another one was Boston's self-titled debut album, which contained their hit single "More Than a Feeling." I can't remember what the third one was, but I suspect it was a Chuck Mangione album, possibly his concert recording double-album, Live from the Hollywood Bowl. Arrangements of Mangione's jazz fusion music were making the rounds in high school bands and drum corps of that time, and since I was a band geek--and an insecure teenager wanting to be like the cool band people--I was listening to him a lot.

And yes, I still listen to Boston, and to Chuck. But, as an "uncool" social outcast in high school, Devo's music spoke to me. Of course, the fact that they were tinkering with state-of-the-art synthesizers at the time was a big draw for me, too, as was their message that man didn't seem to be moving forward, but stepping back. Vietnam was over, but its repercussions were still being felt. The Cold War was in full swing, and living only a few miles from the Oak Ridge "Y-12" nuclear bomb factory, you were almost certain to become one of the first casualties. The Ayatollah Khomeini had swept to power in Iran, complete with foreign embassy hostages and chants of "Death to America!" And then the American people went and voted a half-senile, half-demented, war-mongering, McCarthy-like-communist-hating, retired second-rate actor and former Governor of California named Ronald Reagan into the White House. Someone had labeled Devo's music as "the sound of things falling apart," and it certainly seemed to me that their sound was relevant to the period.

Okay, Eric, cut to the chase. Bottom line: I was a Devo fan. I stayed a Devo fan. Even through not-even-a-blip-on-the-radar-screen albums. Even through the band's unofficial retirement, with various members going out on their own. Lead singer/composer Mark Mothersbaugh and guitarist Jerry Casale formed their own commercial music business, Mutato Muzika, which became and is still quite successful, writing music for the Rug Rats TV cartoon and movies, Pee Wee's Playhouse (TV and movie), and many critically acclaimed films, to name a few: Rushmore, Royal Tannenbaums, and Bottle Rocket.

But the legend and legacy of Devo lived on. Many of the bands of the 80s, 90s, and 00s paid tribute to Devo's influence, either by covering their songs or copying their sound. There were also a few surprise club appearances. Then, in the early 00s, Devo's name suddenly appeared on a few concerts of the then-famous Lollapalooza circuit. There were also quiet appearances throughout the world, e.g., Tokyo. It seemed that Devo was back, and they didn't appear to have lost any of their eccentricity and anti-establishment message. ("I'll bet you don't know why we're sitting down," said Mothersbaugh in a 1987 appearance at which the band did two relaxed acoustic arrangements of their usually-frenetic songs while seated to begin the concert, "Just to show you we still can after 10 years in this [music] business.")

Then, around 2004, Devo appeared to have sold out! Suddenly, the spud boys were singing "Swiff it, swiff it good!" to a dancing housewife promoting the Swiffer duster. To some, Devo appeared to be just poking tongue-in-cheek fun at the very product they were "promoting." Other fans were completely alienated. (Some were appalled that it was actually Devo performing the shameless spoof; others thought that this was a positive sign. They had kept their own music close to the vest.) Another commercial (little seen?) appearance touting Honda scooters in 2005 was less brash, with the band members back to mocking super-conformity, implying that Honda's scooters were available in a variety of styles to single you out.

Which brings us to the video above. Devo is back, and with smart style and the first original material written in years. Granted, they are hocking a Dell laptop computer. But the whole commercial has a natural Devo-esque feel to it, with the highly stylized post-modernist models in clean black, white, and red. Plus, check out the hot Dell XPS 1330 laptop! Fast Intel Core Duo processors, a big 13.3" screen (available with a regular fluorescent backlight LCD or the newer low-power LED backlit screen), highly customizable (as are most Dell computers) to your specifications and needs, and very thin and light at that. And all for a starting price of $1249. Su-weet!

On top of that, Devo just finished a European tour. (If you're interested, there are several video-phone videos of some of the performances.) And rumors are running rampant of a new album--"album" remaining the anachronistic term for a collection of songs published as one. Could we be perched on the brink of a Devo renaissance? Time will tell.

After all, we are living in a "Wiggly World," run by "Blockhead[s]," and we have "Freedom of Choice."

Freedom of choice is what you got. Freedom from choice is what you want.

How Much is Too Much?

2007-07-21T00:52:00.000-04:00

Admit it. Those of you who did Carmen were exhausted by Sunday. Yes, yes, some of us did work the Rossini Festival on Saturday, but even without that, I'll wager everyone was glad when the curtain fell late Sunday afternoon.

Two performances. That doesn't count the weeks of rehearsals required to stage those two performances. "But," you say, "What performances... and what rehearsals!" Yeah, yeah. I hear you. It was grueling.

But, to put things in perspective, check out this NYT article about the Kirov Opera doing two concurrent Ring cycles at the Met this summer. Yes, on consecutive nights! The four Wagner operas! Twice!

Okay, let's just about this for a moment. What kind of forces would be required to do such a feat? Well, you'd probably want two groups to do each cycle, and you certainly wouldn't expect the major roles to be done by the same people on consecutive nights. One analogy I read said you wouldn't ask a soprano to sing Brünnhilde on consecutive nights any more than you'd ask a major league pitcher to start on consecutive nights. So, you'd need two of Brünnhilde and Siegfried, at least. (One might be pressed to find one set of singers for those roles.) Then there's the folks in the pit, which may or may not be interchangeable, not to mention tons of IATSE (production) folk and all appurtenances thereof.

What's amazing to me is that there was only one conductor: Valery Gergiev!

How many people have tried conducting? Show of hands? A few? Maybe you conduct your church choir in an anthem or two Sundays and rehearsals on Wednesdays. Of course, Christmas and Easter presentations require a little more preparation and length of time on the podium--a 45-minute cantata. Or maybe you teach choir in the schools. That's a little more conducting. Daily rehearsals, concerts for PTA and other civic groups, and one or two performances at semester's end.

Now, imagine waving your arms in the air for 4 hours a night for eight nights in a row! (There was a day off in there somewhere.) And people say, "Oh, music! That's a profession for wimps!" Ha! Think you're in shape? Workout at the gym? Free weights, you say? Two or three games of tennis or racquetball a week? (Maybe racquetball is passé nowadays.) Ooo! You're pumped!

Let's get an idea of what Maestro Gergiev had to do. Stand up and just put your arms up in front of you. They don't have to be out all the way, just out from you in a comfortable position. Now, stay that way for, oh, let's just say, 15 minutes. After 5 minutes, you begin to get that burning sensation that means that oxalic acid crystals are building up in the muscles; at 10 minutes, your arms begin trembling; at 15, you're probably on the verge of cramping.

Okay, rest a minute. Now repeat the experiment. This time, flail your arms in the air. Vary the amplitude--sometimes large, grandiose general movements, other times small precise movements. Maybe this time it's not quite as painful, as your muscles are at least getting some variance. If you're feeling fine after 15 minutes, try aiming for 30 minutes. Still going? Try 45, 60... Maybe, if you're lucky and have the biceps of Mr. T., you might get through an hour.

But Gergiev? Four hours! Every night! For 8 days! I would think that, rather than training for a single attempt at your best dead lift, one might take a leaf from marathon runners. You'd probably want to pace yourself, and learning perfect form would certainly be a must. The strength of economy. Still, that's a lot of arm waving.

The moral of this story is, if you see Valery Gergiev anytime soon, I'd refrain from challenging him to any arm wrestling.

Pete Townsend Writes New (Rock) Opera

2007-07-14T11:20:00.000-04:00

Espied this article on my Yahoo portal. (Portal - an opening home page that serves as an aggregate reader for news and information. The 1990s equivalent of RSS feeds.) Yes, I know. You're hardly likely in your lifetime to see the Met do Tommy. But, you have to give credit to a guy that probably has taken every illicit drug there is at any one time and still has enough brain matter to live to old age and compose another rock opera.

I have to admit, I have only seen bits and pieces of Tommy. And it seemed like, as a child of the 70s, Elton John was blasting out a version of "Pinball Wizard" every five minutes. I vaguely remember the "buzz" (as in, a gnat at your ear: something you, and the rest of the world, hardly notice) when Quadrophenia came out, but, again, that was more about who was playing the main character: A guy named Sting, lead singer and bassist from an up-and-coming band named The Police. But, like so many "old" composers, Pete Townsend instills a sense of respect from the musical community. People are willing to listen to whatever the aging composer puts out.

Handel churned out work after work in his old age. He had become famous in England by then, and there was no shortage of royalty during the mid-18th-century willing to pony up the money for whatever he wrote. By then, he had developed all of his formulaic techniques and could just churn out the pages for whomever. I wonder if the phrase "Sold out" existed back then. One could make that argument for Handel, as one might make the argument of any rock band in the 1970s.

Yadda-yadda...

What's that? You know I'm tech-head and gadgeteer and want to know what I think of the iPhone? Well, thanks, but I don't have one and have no plans to purchase one. And from the reading I've done, that's a good thing. Sure, it looks cool, but it's not the vast jump in technology that everyone was hyping it to be. As a matter of fact, as a phone, the general consensus is that it's awful. The sound is bad, it's difficult to dial manually or send text messages on the "virtual" keyboard displayed on the smooth glass face, and said face gets caked with oily fingerprints, making viewing a movie or a web page a less-than-stellar experience. The last complaint has been a continuing complaint about the iPods since they were first released.

Now, you have to understand, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool PC guy. I'm not an Apple-head. My heroes are (well, in some cases, were) Carly Fiorina and Bill Gates. Yes, I know, "artistic" types are supposed to swoon over every word that comes forth from the mouth of Steve Jobs and rush out to buy every product that he sells.

And I have to admit, I did break down and buy an iPod Nano, begrudgingly. And I've been very impressed with it. I probably have it two-thirds full of albums from my own "old" CD collection and have even bought a few things off of iTunes. I think iTunes says that adds up to about 2.2 days worth of music (about 58 hours of constant listening to music). And, though, you'll find quite a bit of rock and stuff, you'll also find a lot of early music, some jazz, and a little opera. To me--a guy who lugged around a 10-pound "boom box" throughout much of the late 70s and early 80s, then a large case of cassettes when the Sony Walkman came out, then a large case of CDs when the CD Walkman came out--the idea of holding two straight days of music in a box smaller and less-hefty than an old-style cigarette lighter, it's a dream come true. (I own a couple of non-iPod MP3 players that are equally amazing in their size but lack the intuitiveness of the iPod.) Yes, I do record the music in a compressed format (as opposed to Apple lossless), but the quality doesn't degrade that much. I love my Nano!

But when it comes to computers, I'm a PC guy. I was much more excited about the release of Windows Vista than I was OS X, and I'll scoff at the people that stand in line to buy Jaguar, the next Apple OS release, coming, well... whenever Apple gets the kinks out of it. (In Apple's defense, they do put out a polished and complete product, as opposed to Microsoft's release-it-and-we'll-work-out-the-bugs-later philosophy.) Part of this bias is that the particular field I work in uses PCs almost exclusively. I make my living off being able to make Microsoft Office stand up and beg for people. And what office productivity suite do most Mac-based-businesses using? Office for the Mac, which is very different from the PC version. Yes, there are alternatives to MS Office, but none of them have yet been developed to the point of overtaking the capabilities of the Microsoft product--this includes Corel's WordPerfect suite.

So, no iPhone for me, thank you. At least, not for the foreseeable future. As a matter of fact, I recently purchased a new Samsung phone which I'm very happy with. It can surf the web, sort of. I can play games on it, should I be so inclined, which isn't very often. And I have a contacts list on it, but just to facilitate dialing numbers. (If I need more in-depth knowledge of names and schedules "in the field," I have my trusty Palm Pilot, which, incidentally, syncs up very well with my copy of Outlook on my home PC.) The call quality on the Samsung is excellent, and it's Bluetooth enabled. So I have a wireless earpiece/mic arrangement which makes me look a bit like a cyborg. And the light on it blinks, which tells everyone around me that, yes, I am that important a person.

2007-07-07T11:42:00.000-04:00

I happened to catch an old video of Beverly Sills singing "The Willow Song" from Ballad of Baby Doe on the ARTS channel yesterday. (I don't know anything about the ARTS channel, except that it broadcasts on the Knox County Schools channel when the school system doesn't have any programming, i.e., at night or during the summer. They show old videos of classical music performances.) It was an old, old video, judging by the look of things, probably the early to mid-1960s. She was on what appeared to be some kind of talk show, with a couple of hosts in director chairs and a small studio audience. That kind of genre of show was popular in the 60s, so that's what made me think it was from then. Anyone who has seen Monty Python lampoons of talk shows from the BBC in the 1960s/early 1970s will know the format I mean.

I wish I'd caught the whole performance instead of the last minute or so. But, c'est la vie. It was wonderful to watch such a consummate singer as Sills. The key to good opera singing is to make it sound--and look--like it's just the easiest thing in the world. The next time you see a video of Pavarotti, check out his jaw. There's absolutely no tension whatsoever. It's just hanging there, even though he's belting out high Cs and Ds. Ditto for the tongue. And, of course, he sounds like, "Why, Cs and Ds are in the middle of my range." And Sills was no exception in this video. The closing high notes--I'm not familiar enough with the opera to know what they were--were just as easy as all the other notes. You could see that her body, the diaphragm, all the torso musculature, was doing all the work. But she didn't look like she was working hard at all.

The only thing I found odd was how much she dropped her jaw on the highest notes. It seems to me that the jaw has a natural range of motion, opening and closing. If you exceed your natural downward extension, you have to exert extra energy in those muscles that pull the jaw down. (Forgive me, Ms. Michaelopolis. I don't remember the names of them from vocal pedagogy.) That's tension. And any tension anywhere in the facial muscles affects the sound... not that Beverly Sills sounded that way at all. It just looked rather odd. I don't think singers today do that. It may have been an affectation peculiar just to Sills, or it may have been the pedagogical thought at the time. (Research on singers via endoscopy was probably just getting revved up in the late-50s/early-60s)

Pedagogy, like any science, changes. Any singers around with the weird, fast vibrato so popular in the 30s and 40s? Nope. Thank goodness! And though everyone reads Enrico Caruso's treatise on singing and the singer in vocal ped., there's a lot of things in it that don't hold water in this day and age. An example would be alcohol consumption, although a) this might be cultural (Italian vs. American), and b) Caruso doesn't say to drink it in excess. In his defense, also, many scientists today agree that a glass of wine a day has an overall positive effect. Other things he says have stood the test of time. He touts a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. (Don T. has related how Pavarotti requested large platters of fresh fruits and vegetables when he was in Knoxville oh-so-many years ago.)

For protein, Caruso said that he ate primarily lean chicken and fish.

I believe he also mentions taking a brisk walk every morning, though, given the air pollution in most major industrialized cities during the early 20th century, one wonders how the scale would weigh in on if that behavior would be healthy or hazardous. In any case, the plug for daily exercise is there. As I say this, I've been sitting at my computer drinking strong coffee since I got up 3-1/2 hours ago. My chief plan of exercise for the day is walking around my parents' house with the contractor and, possibly, lifting a Blue Coast Burrito or two... not to say that anyone would ever confuse me with either Caruso--or even Mario Lanza--physique or vocal-wise.

But, regardless, Sills treatment of "The Willow Song" is wonderful. And, if I may say, physique-wise, she was pretty much a babe. I don't recall ever seeing her in the media where she didn't look dressed to the nines, always elegant and composed. The paragon of opera sopranodom, or just femininity.

Ahem. I do hope that Britney, Paris, and Nichole will read this and take heed.

Sad Day for Opera

2007-07-02T23:24:00.000-04:00

The Reuters article on Beverly Sills dying today.

Not growing up an opera buff, I remember Beverly Sills as the host (nobody uses "hostess" anymore, right?) of An Evening at the Met, at least, I think that's what it was called, on PBS. On the occasions I watched it, her enthusiasm was infectious. She obviously loved her craft and loved sharing it with others.

I was surprised to read that she was, at one point, on the board of Time Warner. Time Warner! And they say sopranos are airheads!

The last paragraph is so sad. Her husband died last year, which I'm sure took a lot out of her.

It's an all-to-common thing, people dying shortly after their spouse passes away. You hear stories about it all the time. The strain of dealing with living without someone you've spent so much time with just wears the physical body down, which leads to all kinds of opportunistic maladies. My mom had a stroke five months after my dad passed away. She managed to hang on another year, but, at the end, I think she just got tired of being on this earth without dad.

In a way, it's kind of sweet. Even in this day and age, when some psychologists and sociologists proclaim that humans weren't meant to be monogamous throughout their entire lives, it seems that, in so many cases, they're wrong. Homo sapiens seems to mate, literally, for life... or tries to, as the case may be.

It gives those of us that have not found that special someone hope. I have always felt like I had a very naïve concept of love, a viewpoint I attribute to watching too many Disney movies when I was a kid. (Didn't Dean Jones always get Suzanne Pleshette in the end?) What if love is like the early Disney movies and all those learned "experts" are wrong?

I know. I'm a hopeless romantic.

Leaue, me, O loue which reachest but to dust,
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things.
Grow rich in that which neuer taketh rust;
Whateuer fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beames, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedomes be;
Which breakes the clowdes, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine and giue us sight to see.
O take fast hold; let that light be thy guide
In this small course which birth drawes out to death,
And thinke how euill becommeth him to slide,
Who seeketh heau'n, and comes of heau'nly breath.
Then farewell world; thy vttermost I see:
Eternall Loue, maintaine thy life in me.
--Sonnet 150, Astrophel and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Homeowner's Journal for 6/23/07

2007-06-23T11:43:00.000-04:00

I hesitate to mention this yet again, but my brother and I are in the process of renovating our deceased parents' early 1950s rancher. Up to this point, we've been primarily concerned with getting 45+ years of junk thrown/given/sold out of the house and assessing what needs to be done and what we'd like done with the place. Other than dire maintenance (e.g., roof suddenly leaks, get new roof), the house is pretty much what it was when it was built in 1952-53, so there's a lot to think about and dream about.

This is my first experience with property ownership, so I'm just a wide-eyed kid when it comes to deeds, deed restrictions, zoning, permits, etc.. My brother, on the other hand, bought a townhouse 15 or so years ago, but he's never had to do any kind of major remodeling. So we've been floundering about what we want done and what must be done. We've watched enough flip/remodel shows to know that hiring contractors is an absolute crap shoot, so we've floundered in finding someone to do the job.

Thankfully, aid has come to us in a close family friend who renovated/remodels houses, primarily down in Alabama but also one or two in K-town. But he only does oversight. However, he has worked with another family friend who does do the actual contracting work and has agreed to work with us.

I think I had intimated previously that we had met with both friends to talk about possibilities. After that meeting, my brother and I felt like we'd gotten further along on the house in a couple of hours of talking with them than we had in the previous year since our mom died. But it was all preliminary talk, as my brother and I hadn't really nailed down what we wanted, or even if we were going to keep it or sell it. So we had some work to do between ourselves. We've been getting together for the past few weeks to dream about all kinds of wild possibilities for the house.

Well, today we're meeting our newly-hired contractor friend and talking real turkey! Like, what do we want done and when construction can actually start. It's kind of exciting... and scary. But having two friends you trust in the business of contracting has made so much difference in how we look at things.

Actually, three friends! I have a real estate buddy that really helped us get the ball rolling as far as return-on-investment, what buyers look for--though we're not selling in the near-term--and positive things that were already going for the house.

So, as oil landscape painter Bob Ross used to say on his PBS program when he was about to demonstrate a make-or-break brush stroke on the canvas, "This is your bravery test." I'm feeling a little chicken right now, but am more confident every day. I'm sure that, once a few things are redone or added to the house, I'll be much more willing to make my bigger, bolder ideas come true.

Thou Shalt Suffer for Thine Art

2007-06-22T11:29:00.000-04:00

An interesting article in the UK's Guardian online equivalent of a composer suing a reviewer for libel. (Actually, it's about a higher court overturning an earlier decision by a lower court that said the reviewer was libel.) It seems that Keith Burstein's opera, Manifest Destiny, presented in 2005 at Edinburgh, was disparaged by reviewer Veronica Lee in The Guardian. Burstein was incensed enough by some of the things said to take her and The Guardian to court.

The opera is about a young Palestinian woman training to be a suicide bomber (How does one "train" to be a suicide bomber?) whose cell leader falls in love with her and, to save her, turns her over to the Americans. Ms. Lee did not care for the subject matter, saying that the opera was "trite," glorified suicide bombers, and had an anti-American tone to it. Mr. Burstein took this to mean that he was anti-American and sympathetic to suicide bombers and--in this day and age of don't-you-never-be-dissin'-on-America--brought suit. The lower court had allowed the suit to go to trial; the jury found for Mr. Burstein, and he was awarded 8,000 pounds. The higher court overturned the ruling, ordering Burstein to repay the 8,000 plus an additional 80,000 of the defendant's legal costs. The judge said that, though the opera did have an anti-American tone, it was a matter of opinion (apparently, a brief one at that) and, as such, was protected by freedom of speech.

It would be interesting to posit whether here in America such a case would even go to trial. We have the First Amendment that pretty clearly keeps the press out of court, though it does happen. A recent example is the government suing the New York Times for an article leaking what was considered sensitive information. C'mon! How much more frivolous does the case in question seem compared to that?

Besides, composers have always been trying to push the public's buttons. That's the artist dream for ya! To push compositions (be they music or other media) to the cutting edge. To push the craft forward. Beethoven's later symphonies, particularly the Ninth, were much disparaged as being too far out. Stravinksy and Diaghilev caused a riot in Paris with Rite of Spring (but from all accounts they were ecstatic about the reaction). Imagine an almost-but-not-quite post-Victorian-era audience watching Strauss' Elektra and Salome. The Met had to close Salome after one night; Elektra's dissonances garnered cartoons of Strauss directing an orchestra of animals. (Some things don't change. For the record, when KO did Salome a few years back, I think there were more people on stage and in the pit than were in the audience.) Then there's my favorite, Charlie Ives, poor guy. He endured a lifetime of ridicule and was an old man before 20th century music "caught up" to things he'd written in the 1890s.

Don't think that we performers get off easy, either. We have to suffer for our art. While our non-music friends in college were partying on Cumberland Avenue and looking forward to six-figure offers on graduation, we were in dark, dank, dusty practice rooms or pouring over a crumbling score in a two-foot cubicle in the music library. Someday, perhaps, we would find a town that would allow us to eke out a living on a music-derived salary, or perhaps we have another career area we can survive on while plying our craft. "You sing opera?! Amazing! I didn't know Knoxville had an opera company?" could just as easily be "You juggle cats?! Amazing! I didn't know Knoxville had cat jugglers?"

Yet we composers, performers, painters, sculptors, what have you... We continue on unabated.

Take me for example: My senior year in high school I had an extra period open so I took freshman French and did fairly well in it. Upon graduation, I told my mom that I was going to go to UT and pursue a career in music, to which she replied, "But what about your French?" And it wasn't like she was ignorant. Her brother was a famous jazz and classical musician and college band director in Chattanooga! When I got out of school--both times--I could've been a band director or direct a church's music program, but I elected to ply my performance craft and find some kind of job to put food on the table: air conditioner salesman, clerk, word processor, ticket counter, data programmer. One day I had a revelation. What if I just kept on doing what I was doing? Working a regular, full-time, salaried-but-not-high-paying job by day and singing at night and on the weekends? Would my life change significantly? Well, yes. I'd be making enough money to get a car, rent an apartment, and have an occasional dinner at P.F. Chang's. Duh! As the Steve Miller Band opined, "Go on, take the money and run!"

And so it goes. Here I am, at another crossroads of my career, developing a different area of my talents in order to survive. But I don't intend to give up music! If that means working at Sears again, then so be it. You gotta do what you love and you gotta do what you have to. If those things aren't the same, well, then so be it. Oh sure, I've thought about "retiring" from singing--more and more as I get older and those easy high As aren't as easy as they used to be. But that's a ways off, if at all. They'll have to pry the photocopy of the choruses in La Boheme from my cold... dead... hand!

Suffer on.

Annie Karenina Hall?

2007-06-21T22:51:00.000-04:00

Los Angeles Opera's general director, Placido Domingo, announced today that Woody Allen would direct "Gianni Schicchi" in the 2008 production of Puccini's Il Trittico.

William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist and The French Connection, will direct the other two parts of Trittico, "Il Tabarro" and "Suor Angelica."

Perhaps Tom Eberts should begin work on relearning his "role" as the hapless (and dead) Gianni Schicchi. Maybe he could get an audition!

When was it we "Schicchi?" Fall 2001? Wow! That long ago? We did Pagliacci on the second half of the bill. The ridiculous and the sublime. I have pictures. I think it was Frank Graffeo's second year with us. It should be a good fit for Allen. From what I remember, it was really quite funny. And our illustrious opera apprentices at the time did a good job with it.

It's too bad that Puccini didn't write more comedies. I think they would've been good.

But, no! He was too involved with jilted Japanese girls, frigid Chinese princesses, sopranos jumping from parapets, and the artsy-but-poor-and-disease-ridden of Paris.

What was it about nineteenth century life (and I think of Puccini as a 19th c. composer) that made everybody that wrote stuff back then so darned depressing? Maybe it was all that coal oil they were breathing. The weltschmertz of the early industrial revolution?

Seriously. We don't call that musical era "Romantic" for nothing. So many people hear that word and think immediately of love. But there's a broader meaning: Webster's says "imbued with or dominated by idealism, a desire for adventure, chivalry, etc." (OK, it also gives a narrower definition pertaining specifically to the musical period.)

Doesn't that sound like music of the 19th c.? A broadening of the harmonic language. New instruments. Improved old instruments. Longer, broader compositions. Programmatic music. More feeling!

Yawn. My apologies on the ADD-ness of this entry. Maybe it's best we just end things here. I'm tired. I worked out in the yard at the house this afternoon. Bad idea. My sinuses are having a conniption.

All Voice, No Looks

2007-06-19T17:24:00.000-04:00

I came across this article (a humorous take) on the winner of Britain's (sort of) version of American Idol, a guy named Paul Potts, who actually sang opera as his talent.

I agree with the author of the article, Rick Coster, completely. Mr. Potts, though a pretty-talented guy, is probably not going to go anywhere. Oh, he'll get his 5 minutes in front of the Queen, but that's going to be the peak of his career. But, in the meantime, way to go, Paul! Let's hear it for the not-beautiful people making some waves!

Now, you must know that that picture of me at right is my "head shot" and, like most singers, it was taken about 15 years ago. (C'mon, admit it! It's true! When was the last time you saw any singer, other than some kid fresh out of college, whose head shot was current?) I wish I looked that good now. If I'd known I'd looked that good back then... but then, I didn't. I'm realistic about my looks, then and now. Especially now that the "blush of youth" has left my cheek. I know that, though I can sing Britten and Handel and Purcell, Covent Garden isn't going to be calling me anytime soon.

But that's the whole point of this article. Looks. This guy, Paul Potts, isn't exactly a handsome fellow. He's overweight, has bad teeth (I can hear the jokes now, "But, don't all Britons have bad teeth?"), and is not exactly a fill-up-a-room-with-his-personality type of guy. Yet he does have a very good voice. (Check out the YouTube video.) I can't even fake my way through "Nessun Dorma."

But he did manage to win Britain's Got Talent, which I suppose is more the equivalent of the eponymous American counterpart than Idol... except instead of a manic Simon Cowell, America's Got Talent has a drunk David Hasselhoff. Potts not only had to beat out singers, one of which was a cute 6-year-old, but jugglers, comedians, etc., which makes it all the more impressive.

But, you say, maybe Britain has more of a "thing" for opera than we do. After all, it is a European country. While there may be some truth to that in the case of older folk, I would imagine that the younger Brits, i.e., those that watch a "reality" series on the telly, could, like their American cousins, care less. They're more about pop culture: Hugh Grant/George Clooney, the White Stripes, and MySpace and/or Facebook.

So what does an average-Joe, portly opera singer in America or Britain, or any other country in the world nowadays do? Everything today is looks, looks, looks. If Pavarotti had been born 20 years later, would he have done as well as he has? "You have an amazing voice, Mr. Pavarotti, but we're really looking a different type, someone who could play the handsome, romantic lead. Thanks for coming in."

Meanwhile, a teenage girl in Kansas is sticking her finger down her throat so that she'll vomit and become as thin--and beautiful--as Kate Moss. Dr. Phil has a family in which the mother and older daughter have had breast implants and now the youngest, 19-year-old daughter wants them, but--get this!--her older sister and mother are against it. Hmmm... A fat kid from Corbin, Kentucky absolutely loves musicals and moves to New York to pursue his dream, only to end up a stock boy in a downtown chain store.

I'm all for technology, but maybe all those guys who are credited with inventing the camera did us a disservice. Look at the pictures of paintings of Beethoven, Bach, Handel, even Mozart. Do you think they really looked that good? (Well, there are some later paintings of Handel that aren't exactly flattering.) With a diet as poor as ours today, a sanitation system that consisted of a rut in the middle of the street, and health care that touted bleeding a person almost dry for "expelling the ill humors from the body"? I seriously doubt that. But composers have it easy, even today. A patron is much more likely to hear a work by a composer and realize its brilliance than to hear a talented singer without looking at his or her head shot. At least, back in the day, they gave you the benefit of a doubt.

But, I hear you, painters made the ugliest people beautiful; then photographers learned certain dark-room tricks that would cast, literally, a favorable light on someone's appearance; the invention of the airbrush brought us further along the path of "retouching"; lots of carbon-arc lamps did wonders for the complexions of Hollywood motion-picture starlets in the 1920s and '30s; and now we have digital--Photoshop (new version CS3!) and its kine--to help us to look our best. People have found ways to not look how they really look for millenia. And, perhaps, someday we'll all have some kind of advanced, light-bending clothing to make us look really good in public.

But, until then, good luck Paul Mott. We're pullin' for ya.

2007-06-17T11:04:00.000-04:00

I took a quiz that attempts to discern which American accent a person has. Not surprisingly, I got this:

What American accent do you have? (Best version so far)

Southern

People used to hate Southern accents but now everyone wants one.

Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

As singers, particularly opera singers, our ears have to know how to hear different languages and reproduce them correctly. Italian, French, German, (The King's) English, Russian, or Ogalala Sioux, it shouldn't matter. Unless you've spent years studying all these other languages, it is often difficult to understand what you're singing word-for-word, so we are reduced to reproducing the appropriate string of sounds--technical name, "phonemes"--and hope for the best. If the particular phoneme doesn't exist in our native tongue, e.g., the French "u"/German "ü," we have to be extra diligent in our practice and attentive in our performance to make our bodies conform themselves to produce that sound. After awhile, it becomes a lot easier. Our brains have linked the symbol with the sound. Even though we don't use it in our everyday language, it sits ready to be used, regardless (with some polishing, ya know). We take pride in that fact. I take pride in that fact.

The thing is, when I speak, I don't hear myself as having a Southern accent. Huh? I'm an opera singer! I'm supposed to hear things like that! What's going on? I don't have a Southern accent! I'd know it if I did... right?

Now, before you go yapping that I do have an accent, I know that. When I was an undergrad doing student teaching, we had to record ourselves in class and then listen to see what we did right, what we did wrong, did we stick to our lesson plan, blah-blah. The thing that amazed me when listening to the tapes was how hard a Southern accent I had. It embarrassed me to listen to the tapes. Part of that is just me: I absolutely can't stand to listen to a recording of me, whether I'm singing solo or in a choir, teaching, or lecturing. But why was my accent so much more pronounced when I was student teaching?

Curious, I did a little research. It turns out that when one gets nervous, their accent usually becomes more pronounced. I can't remember the theory behind it, but it kind of makes sense. Stand up in front of 150 middle or high school students that you don't know that well and attempt to bend them to your will. Can you say "stressful"? And it was, for me, at least. It was intimidating. (That turned out to be the least of my problems in my short student teaching career. But that's an unrelated long and sad story.) I became so focused on other things--hundreds of other things--required for teaching, I didn't even give a thought to how I was saying what I was saying. Hence, my brain relied on what it had stored in its speech pattern buffers since birth. So I sounded more like I was from further up "the holler" than I actually was.

Isn't language an amazing thing?! We take bits of sound that our bodies can produce and string them together into a group of sounds that convey an idea. Whether it's Italian, German, French, English, or Swahili for that matter... and the thousands of dialects within them, we all are able to discern meaning from our grunts and yelps. Even small geographical differences make huge differences in the sounds we use.

Example: When my brother (2 years my junior) and I were seven or eight years old, a family from Middle Tennessee, south of Nashville, moved next door to us. There were three daughters, two of which were approximately our ages. The oldest daughter (my brother's age) was named Sarah, which I pronounced "Seh-ra"; however, her mom, having grown up in a certain area of Middle Tennessee, always pronounced it "Say-ra." Sarah, had had the chance to start school at her former home, so she tended to sound more like her mother in speech. One dialectic affectation that always tickled me was how she and her mother pronounced "our." Now, here in East Tennessee, most people would say that word either as a very pirate-like "arrr" or with a lighter "a" sound, "ah-r." Well, Sarah and her mom said it with a long "a" sound, "A-yerr," or a lighter, more short "e" sound, "Ehr." See the pattern? They tended toward the long "a" sounds in their speech.

The middle sister, was named "Mary Beth." You might conjecture that when Sarah and her mother spoke her name, it might be something like "May-ree Bay-eth," but they pronounced it similar to anyone would in East Tennessee: "Merry Beth," though, oddly enough, when they contracted the name to "Beth" it was long "a," "Bay-eth." Now Beth, being younger than Sarah, hadn't had as much socialization in Middle Tennessee as had Sarah, so her accent was much less affected by the long "a" sounds, though she did call her sister "Say-ra." Overall, Mary Beth ended up with an East Tennessee-styled accent, as did the youngest--probably 10 or 11 years behind us--Amy (her mom's, "Ay-mee").

But then y'all know about that kind of thing already, as we see even tighter geographical dialects. Knoxvillians, for the most part, tend to pronounce a small town to the northeast of the city, Maryville, as "Merry-vul" or "Mehri-vul," whereas folks in and around Maryville, Blount County, nestled right against the Great Smoky Mountains, tend more toward the characteristic East Tennessee hard "r"s, "Murr-vul."

But if you want to study accents and dialects, Oak Ridge is the place to do it. You have to understand, everybody knows Oak Ridge today as a part of the Manhattan Project (development of the atomic bomb) during WWII. But, prior to 1939 or so, Oak Ridge was just that: pretty much a ridge covered in oak trees, a name in small type on a georgraphic map. There was little or no town to speak of. It was all farmland: cows, chickens, horses, and backwoods, Appalachian country folk (which we'll stereotype them for argument's sake, even though the area sits against the Cumberland Mountains more north and west of Knoxville). But, along comes the Manhattan Project! Suddenly people from all over the country--all over the world, even--converge on the poor little valleys in and around Oak Ridge. There was a mass of dialects; there was a mass of different cultures, all tossed in together with the farm-folk (many of whom had had their land forcefully purchased by the government).

I really hope that some sociologists are taking a look at Oak Ridge. As it stands today, it's even a more diverse community. The establishment of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the "Y-12" plant, which still produces nuclear weapon parts to this day, and all the high-tech industries and companies that have sprung up around them(even as far as Knoxville and Maryville), have become havens for the best minds in the world from all countries and cultures. So, we have multi-PhD Nobel Prize winners walking into Walmart (yes, the presence of Walmart indicates that Oak Ridge is a real city) with pig farmers and coal miners that dropped out of grade school to feed their families. You have snake-handling, splinter-sect Baptists from up in the highest "hollers" conversing with Hindi and Muslims. I once temped for a very prosperous technology firm that was started in Oak Ridge by a man who began life as a water buffalo herder in Korea!

So, it will be interesting to see what kind of dialect comes out of Oak Ridge in a century or so. Welcome to America, melting pot and land of opportunity. I doubt they'll ever write an opera in that dialect, but who knows? That "dead" language Latin is still around with us. Thanks to the Catholic Church, primarily, those of us who sing in sacred music have an additional set of phonemes to memorize. A thousand years from now, distant relatives of Don Townsend may say, "And please! Look at your Oak Ridgian text and work on it."

So, to bring things back around, dear readers, dear singers, be ever watchful of the tricks our brains and attached "ears" play on us. It's not like the French "u"/German "ü" are going anywhere soon.

More Details on UT's New Music Building

2007-06-16T10:10:00.000-04:00

A followup story in the Knoxville News-Sentinel on UT's new music building.

The new $40 million facility ($30 from the state and $10 a gift from Jim and Natalie Haslam) will be built at the current location at the corner of Volunteer Boulevard and Andy Holt Avenue. The old building (Hallelujah!) will be torn down to make way for the new one, with construction slated to start spring of 2009.

But it will be a hassle for everybody, at least for the two years it will take to build it. The choir room would be moved to the (recently renovated, I believe) Panhellenic Building on Cumberland Avenue. UT bands and other large ensembles will get use of a large (hopefully heavily acoustically modified) gym in the Phys. Ed. Building across Andy Holt behind Tom Black Track. Other facilities would be located in Dunford Hall which, if memory serves correctly, is a block off of Cumberland Avenue on Volunteer. (Dunford has become a catch-all for construction-displaced departments, apparently. When I was there it was used as everything from UT Library to office space. It was originally a dorm, so I imagine that the small rooms will make excellent practice rooms.)

The new building sounds like it's going to be sweet! It will have a 600-seat concert hall (current one probably only holds about 300), a 225-seat recital hall (similar to facilities in the newly renovated Alumni Hall), larger rehearsal spaces for choir, band (including the Pride of the Southland), and other large groups, practice rooms, private studios, a recording studio, piano and music technology labs, classrooms, and administrative spaces. As a sacred music grad, I am speculating that the university would relocate the three or four practice pipe organs and reinstall them in the new building. Perhaps best of all, again, as a former student library assistant, I'm very happy to report that the music library will have three times its current space!

It's exciting to see UT finally taking an interest in the School of Music. (Back when I was there, it wasn't called a "school," it was just another liberal arts, uh... that is, arts and humanities--believe that's the current moniker.) The fact that they renovated Alumni Hall into a first-class performance venue, added rehearsal and chamber performance spaces, built a half-million-dollar pipe organ, and now are replacing the past-its-prime main building is evidence enough.

To have the Haslams take such an interest in the music program is not a bad thing, either. The Haslams, owners of Pilot Oil Corporation and parents to our current Knoxville mayor, have been supporting the symphony and opera company for many years. Apparently, they care about what kind of performers, composers, historians, theoreticians, and conductors will be feeding those organizations and those like them around the world.

According to the article, of the 175 students accepted to the music program last year, approximately 80 went elsewhere for their education due to UT's lack of modern music facilities. Kind of sounds like there might have been some financial incentive for the the university to build a new building, eh? C'mon, let's all admit it: UT is all about profit and the bottom line. Having the next Pavoratti not attend your school, or having him come, graduate "make it" in the big time (i.e., ka-ching $$$$), and then ignore his alma mater because he's embarrassed by it--there are real-world examples of this behavior, by the way--is another incentive.

I am so stoked right now! I didn't think I'd ever see the day when a new music building would be built! When I was in grad school, we used to toss around the rumor that the music building was, like, number 5 on the list of campus facilities to be replaced. Apparently, it was a little further down the list, but they did get to it.

Of course, it would be nice to be like the athletic department, that can wish "Hey! It would be cool if we had yet another practice field... or how 'bout some sky boxes!" and it magically appear. But ya gets what'cha can gets.

UT Gets Funding for New Music Building

2007-06-15T12:27:00.000-04:00

Alumni of UT-Knoxville music rejoice! The state has finally set aside funds for a new music building!

According to an article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, "UT's capital budget for next fiscal year includes... $30 million for a new building for the UT School of Music in Knoxville...." How much it will cost in total to build a new building and where that building will be located, I don't know. Also unknown is whether the new building would incorporate all of the music department, including the offices, classrooms, and studios in the newly-renovated Alumni auditorium (I still think of it as "gym"), or just replace the dilapidated current music building.

The old building was designed and built in the early 60s, if memory serves correctly. Back then, George Devine and composer and conductor of the Knoxville Symphony David Van Vactor raised enough cane to get a building that would house an auditorium, band room, classrooms, practice rooms, offices, and a branch of UT Libraries that would be devoted specifically to musical materials. (As a matter of fact, the music library is named after George Devine and, among other things, it houses the David Van Vactor collection) The space would allow instrumental and vocal studios that were spread all over campus (many of them in old houses) to be brought together under one roof, with ample space for performance. Its design would reflect the post-modern style. And while it did this very well, some practical considerations were compromised.

In 70s, when I was in middle and high school band, I remember coming to UT for concert competitions (East Tennessee School Band and Orchestra Association). My impression then was that the building was already antiquated. It was dark, dingy, and dirty. And my impression didn't improve when I became a UT music student and had to live in it for most of the hours of my day. The practice rooms on the ground floor were grottoes in a vast cave hallway system. The only windows in the place were the two small windows in the doors on opposite ends of the main hallway. The rooms weren't very big, maybe 6 feet by 5 feet; add in a medium-sized upright piano and its bench, some kind of dried-seaweed-like acoustical absorption system, and an instrumental or vocal student and accompanist and it was downright tight.

Worse, the lighting was terrible! I think the lighting designer was going for the idea that musicians would want an ambiance similar to what they would encounter on stage. And they did a good job with the concept, for what it was worth. But the phrase "Practice how you play" has its limits. The rooms, originally, had one or two incandescent "can"-style lights. As a result, it was like you were on a darkened stage with spotlighting. They did come in later and put in standard office fluorescent fixtures, but half the time most of the bulbs were burned out, so you ended up with the same amount of illumination as in the past.

The classroom and office spaces on the succeeding floors were somewhat better. To minimize sound-reflecting glass surfaces, the windows were tall and thin and pivoted vertically in the center. They did provide adequate ambient light. On two sides of the room were the aforementioned "seaweed" acoustical treatments, and some of the rooms were actually built out of square to break up the sound.

It's amazing to me, now, to think that UT was able to develop world-famous marching and concert bands, a top-notch jazz program, and--of all things, in Tennessee!--a solid opera studio in such a space. I guess having brilliant people like Dr. W. J. Julian, Jerry Coker, and Donald Brown, on staff overcame many shortcomings in the building.

But, regardless of program or facilities, I really learned an important fact about being a musician when I came back to graduate school at UT in the early 90s: It's not where you've been, but where you're going that counts.

Strauss Heirs Have to Share

2007-06-14T10:19:00.000-04:00

An Associated Press article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel this morning tells of a Munich state court's decision which would force the heirs of Richard Strauss to share royalties from his operas with heirs of his librettist, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, who collaborated on some of Strauss greatest hits, e.g., Rosenkavalier and Elektra.

We tend to think of composers before the 20th century as paragons of virtue. They wrote because their muse told them to. They spread their music all over the world for the betterment of mankind, never worrying about things like royalties and commissions. If someone did commission a work, that person was also virtuous in that he was helping a composer spread the joy of his talents.

In other words, we don't think of composers and averages Joes. They were like characters on our modern TV: static, melodramatic, and never encumbered with going to the bathroom:

Knock-knock. "Jack! Jack Bauer! Are you in there? The evil president is threatening to launch all our nuclear missiles!"

"Uh, well... hold on a second. That chili dog I had for lunch went right through me."

The reality is quite different. Artists had to eat. They had to have a place to stay... and to go to the bathroom. They had to buy clothes and sundries. They had wives and/or ex-wives and/or mistresses, kids, parents, etc. to take care of. So they had to work, hard! If you're amazed at Bach's musical output, consider that he had 17 kids to feed. (Which begs the question, how did he have time to write everything he wrote, teach music at two schools, and oversee the music programs of three churches... or anything for that matter?) Beethoven never married, but he had various "amenuenses"--that was my Masters committee music history prof's $1.75 name for "assistants"--among them Anton Schindler, who wrote a very entertaining if somewhat spruious biography on the classical romanticist's travels and travails ("Or was Beethoven a romantic classicist?" My history prof, again).

So, all those folks you see in oil paintings, they had to get out every day and pound the pavement to find a job to feed themselves and their retinue. And, in those lean times, they scraped by. Some got other jobs. The eccentric composer Charles Ives, who made millions as an insurance agent while composing the greatest American music of the early 20th century, was very adamant about supporting his family: "If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?" Other composers were assisted by more affluent family members (e.g., Mozart's dad). But they all got by, somehow.

The same goes for artists that worked with composers: choreographers, poets, librettists, singers, instrumentalists, etc. Unfortunately, often these people were forgotten when a work they'd done for a composer was a hit and vilified for ruining things if it wasn't. Regardless, they're often cited in a footnote of the 1,000-page biography of a composer.

And so we come back to Herr Hoffmansthal. From the article, it appears that Hoffmansthal talked to Strauss about the problem of his contributions being forgotten and they worked out an equitable and legally-binding agreement. (I wonder when legal documents started coming into commissions and collaborations in music? Probably about the same time that things like honor and personal responsibility began to wane.) And so, nearly 80 years after Hoffmansthal's death, his forebears can still receive the fruits of his labor, the world's way of saying "Thanks for having a great relative. We appreciate his contribution to mankind's brightest and best creations."

Sydney Opera House Website Infected

2007-06-12T22:54:00.000-04:00

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday announced that the Sydney Opera House website was hacked last month. The hacker installed a Trojan horse program that infected visitors to the site with code that could potentially capture sensitive information (e.g., bank account usernames/passwords).

For those unfamiliar with term, a Trojan horse (or simply "Trojan") is a type of malicious computer software (aka "malware") that, like its namesake, disguises itself as a legitimate program and sits silently on a system until activated. A Trojan isn't a virus per se, as a virus infects other files. A Trojan sits in its own file. When a computer accesses an infected website, the Trojan downloads and installs itself and does nasty stuff like steal passwords or render the system vulnerable to an attack. Visitors to the opera house's site that had not applied security updates to their web browsing software (e.g., Internet Explorer) were infected.

The malware was discovered by a good ol' American geek, who notified the SOH information systems folks. The malicious code was promptly removed. The house insisted that no user data (i.e., names and credit card numbers of ticketholders) was stolen.

The moral to this story is, update your software regularly: Internet Explorer, Windows XP, Firefox, even OSX... all of 'em. The only possible excuse you might have is that you're still on a dialup connection and it would take a millenium to download a 50 megabyte file. Even so, you need to try to keep current. Most companies will ship you their latest software patches on CD for a small mailing fee. A corollary to the moral is to use both antivirus and anti-malware software, update it, and scan your system regularly. Anyone on a broadband connection (i.e., cable or DSL) needs to purchase an inexpensive network router or switch to place between their system and the filthy environs of the internet. These boxes contain hardware "firewalls" that drastically reduce your online vulnerablility. And, since you asked, your cable or DSL modem doesn't do this.

Consider yourself "geeked" for the day.

AMA Might Need New Definition for "Brain Dead"

2007-06-09T00:39:00.001-04:00

"In the future, I plan on taking more of an active role in the decisions I make.
--Paris Hilton

You know, 1,000 years from now, people are likely to look back on 20th century Hollywood and say, "Why couldn't they be more like those nice 1st century Romans?"

An Inauspicious Start

2007-06-07T23:56:00.000-04:00

Yet another "nugget" from a stash of historical documents at my parents' house.

Tales of Hoffmann was the first Knoxville Opera production that I actually sang on stage. Previously, I had been operating the supertitles. Actually, the supertitles "gig" I stumbled into accidentally, too. A friend was doing them but was going to be out of town, so I filled in for him. I think he liked being relieved of the responsibility, so he would call on me every production. Eventually, the opera company started calling me directly. Then Don Townsend found out I was a singer... and a tenor! and the rest, as they say, is history.

Below is a transcription of the Knoxville News-Sentinel review, November 21, 1992. Bob Barrett was right. Hoffman was long! And it was a whole lot more work to be on stage than to doing supertitles. With supertitles, I just had to come in during production week, read through the score, and push a button. As a chorus member, I had to study and memorize the score, go to music rehearsals, and then block off two to three weeks for staging and production. It took me awhile to began enjoy doing chorus. I did a few more supertitles, begging off with Don Townsend. But, as I may have mentioned previously, it became easier to just do chorus than to say no to Don everytime he called.

Length, heat sole ills in outstanding opera
by Bob Barrett

The Knoxville Opera Company production of Jaques Offenbach's "The Tales of Hoffmann" gets off to a rousing start but begins to drag before its three-and-a-half hour production ends.

Enjoyment of the opera was not helped by the heat in the Civfic Auditorium that reminded operagoers of the summer production of "Don Quixote." Many of the men in the audience shed their coats and those that remained to the end were in shirtsleeves.

Many others were not able to stay through the entire evening.

It's a pity. The voices were excellent, the staging inventive and the acting well above par for most operas.
Top vocal honors must go to soprano Stella Zambalis, who starred as each of Hoffman's loves, but took the audience by storm in the "Olympia" segment with her comedic talent.

For those unfamiliar with the story line, Hoffmann falls in love with Olympia, unaware that she is only a mechanical doll. Her movements and comic timing as she delivered the starring aria of the scene were without compare.

It's too bad the members of the chorus could not all act the part of automatons as well as the gifted Zambalis.
Their part in the act was adequate for a local product, but that's all.

A deep bow to the one who staged the method for getting "Olympia" to glide so smoothly over the stage while being pushed by servants. (The secret is roller skates--I kid you not.)

Only a hair behind Zambalis in vocal fireworks was Lester Senter. Her role as the muse and Nicklausse was outstandingly done. Had she had as much to sing as Zambalis, it would be a tough call.
Joseph Wolverton, as Hoffmann, had the longest role among the male voices, but, good as his tenor was, he paled before the power and execution of Richard J. Clark's fine bass-baritone.

Clarke played the roles, if you will, of Satan--bringing Hoffmann to the depths with each of his lady loves. He was a convincing evil, with rich body that carried all the overtones of evil he intended to portray.

Cesar Ulloa, was outstanding in his character tenor roles. His comic timing and rubber face only complimented his fine voice. Some may be put off by his hunchback characterization in the final act as an unnecessary cut of those afflicted, but that's the way someone decided to play it.

WUOT's voice of classical music, Daniel Berry, was in fine fettle in several supporting roles. His fine voice was best in solo and duets, but tended to be drowned out in the trio with Wolverton and Clark in the second act.
Scenery, belonging to the Virginia Opera, was oustanding.

"Ancient" Technology

2007-06-06T11:39:00.000-04:00

If you read my previous blog, you know that I've been taking a trip down memory lane to my high school days and before. In cleaning out my parents' house, I've been finding bits and pieces of history: homework assignments, journals, report cards, pictures. With all these "treasures" just waiting to be discovered, it's becoming hard to actual get any throw-out work done at house, as the minute I grab a box, I see some of these trinkets of my past. So, naturally, I have to stop and look at them all. I suppose many people would just go ahead and dump it in the dumpster. Alas! I've been on a quest to "find myself" for the past few years, so finding stuff like old papers, etc. gives me a lot of pleasure, a certain sense of groundedness. As we age, our memories tend to forget the reality we lived in in the past. Finding an artifact from your past--especially something like a journal that you had to keep in English class--is both gratifying ("I was a darned good writer back then.") and somewhat disheartening ("Yikes! I thought I was a better speller!").

So, the other day I'm going through a closet and, lo and behold, here's this book on programming in BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) for the Wang 2200 computer I used in "Computer Math" in high school. The copyright date on the book is 1976; I started taking Computer Math a couple of years after that, and it changed my life forever.

Talk about the memories flowing back. I'd been a science geek kid since I was in kindergarten! During show-and-tell in second grade, I had attempted to explain the three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas) with a candle, Peter Pan peanut butter lid, tongs, and an ice cube. If there was an Apollo mission in space, I was glued to the TV for every moment of the coverage. Mom and dad had always fostered my wonderment with science and technology. They both worked for Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL), dad as a graphic artist and mom as a secretary. The highlight of my year was when Union Carbide would have a "family day" and open up the lab to family and friends so you could see what people did for a living. I distinctly remember standing at a railing looking down into a giant "swimming pool" at the blue-white glow of the High-Flux Isotope Reactor (HiFIR) at ORNL as a kid. (Yes! A nuclear reactor! I know you're incredulous, but the late 60s/early 70s were a different time. Pre-Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Nuclear energy was our friend.) So I was all ready for a career in a white lab coat. And what scientist didn't use a computer, even back then when "microcomputers" were as big as a roll-top desk?

Case in point, the aforementioned Wang 2200. As I was entering high school, the school purchased two Wangs: one for use in keeping library records, the other for classroom use. The models they purchased looked similar to the picture at left, though the CRT (monitor "box") incorporated a cassette data drive and an old IBM Selectric typewriter was hooked up as a printing device. Though computer math was considered a senior course, I was able to weasel my way into it just by hanging around the computer center, talking with friends that were already taking the course, and picking up a few things. I also joined a computer Explorer post during that period. (Explorers was a program set up by the Boy Scouts for young men--and women!--"exploring" a specific career area. For example, other Explorer posts in the area were devoted to law enforcement and firefighting.) Happily, the post was sponsored by the local Wang dealer, so I was already familiar with the hardware and how to operate and program it.

The school's Wang 2200s had a whopping 8 kilobytes of memory--kilobytes (1,000), not megabytes (1,000,000), and certainly not gigabytes (1,000,000,000). The floppy disk drives (the vertical slots in the CPU box, bottom right) were a full 8 inches in diameter. These were true "floppy" disks, as they were composed of a thin, flexible shell enclosing a mylar disk with a magnetic coating that served as the recording media. They held a full megabyte (1,023 kilobytes) of data. At Explorer's, we learned that by cutting a slot at a certain place on the shell would allow to you access "side B" with another megabyte's worth of code, although you couldn't access both sides at once. Like an LP record, you would have to take the disk out and flip it over.

Software for the computer? None. If you wanted a program to do something, you had to write the code yourself, in BASIC. The school could've purchased some programs available commercially, but back then software was almost as expensive as the computer itself. And since the whole purpose of the computer math class was to teach kids how to program themselves... So, when the computers were purchased, everybody had to "roll their own." (The brainiac students ended up writing a cataloging program for the library's Wang.)

Of course, we didn't have Windows' lovely graphical interface; likewise, the first Mac was at least five years off. In the late 70s/early 80s, though, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center--PARC--was beginning to develop a graphical interface using a new input device they called the "mouse." One day a young kid by the name of Steve Jobs visited PARC, and later duplicated Xerox's research and built the second most powerful technology empire in the world. To be fair, at that time Xerox didn't think that the idea had any potential and were merely indulging their researchers. Ironically, at this same time, a nerdy kid named Bill Gates was pulling a similar stunt with IBM.

To use the Wang, you had to use cryptic verbal commands like "SELECT DISK 310" and "LOAD DC F" to get the computer to do what you wanted it to do. And each program ran serially from first line of code to the end. If someone said "event-driven software," they must've been talking about driving a hot babe to a concert. So programming was really and truly a separate "language" you had to learn to speak. Thankfully, BASIC was designed to be very conversational. Commands like "PRINT 'YOU WIN!'" and "LET X = 1" were self-explanatory. So it was a good language for aspiring young programmers to start with before they graduated to more cryptic and powerful languages like PASCAL and FORTRAN.

I spent many an hour on the Wang. I would wheel into the computer lab between classes and, if someone wasn't already using it, jump on. Needless to say, I was tardy to English, French, Economics, etc. Somehow, we did end up with some games someone had written. But the graphics on the Wang were all character based and the only sound it could output was a beep, so you had to use your imagination. A screen shot of "Star Trek," probably one of the most popular games, is at right. But we had to write more serious software, too. I developed a program that would ask a user questions and, based on a scoring system, evaluate his/her risk for a heart attack. I also was instrumental in finding a bug in the library computer's software. I even took a stab at writing a grade recording/computing program. Pretty soon, people were coming to me to ask questions instead of the other way around. Eventually, I was able to work my way up into the elite few in computer math that even the instructor consulted on difficult problems.

Even when, during my senior year, the school purchased two early model Radio Shack TRS-80s (aka "Trash 80s"), I continued to prefer the Wang system. Being developed for big business made it a far more elegant platform to work on, even if the TRS-80s had double the memory and the ability to display more than alphanumeric graphics. The Wang's floppy drives were vastly superior to the TRS-80s storage system, which consisted of a $30 Radio Shack cassette tape player that was unreliable, slow, and highly inefficient. With the cassette system, you would spend all class period loading a program only to have the computer tell you "LOAD ERROR" just as the bell rang. But the TRS-80s were destined to be the future. They were about an eighth the size of the Wang, had the aforementioned 16 K of memory, and cost probably 10% of what the school had paid for one Wang system. So, even back then, we were learning that technological development was moving along at a break-neck pace.

Alas, I didn't go into computer science in college. It would've been fun. However, back then, math skills were critical in programming computers, and my grades in Algebra I and II and Geometry hadn't exactly been stellar. (Trig? Me?! Yeah, if they'd let me stay at high school another year.) So, in assessing my skills my senior year, I decided the only thing I was really good at was music. The rest, as they say, is history.

Or is it? I somewhat kept up with programming. As a music education student, I took a programming language called PILOT (Programmed Inquiry, Learning or Teaching) designed for ease of use so that teachers could develop instructional software for their classes. When I learned WordPerfect, I got tired of doing tedious, repetitive projects and delved into its macro command language. Years later, I did the same with Microsoft Office products. Starting with the 1997 version, Microsoft sought to integrate Office's crude macro language into its Visual Basic (VB) programming language so that developers could take advantage of Word/Excel/Access/etc.'s capabilities for processing words and numbers. The result they called Visual Basic for Applications, and I became very proficient with using it to efficiently manipulate data for reports, tables, graphs, etc. I've also tried to keep up with VB, though only recently, with the 2005 .NET edition, have I done so seriously. I'm currently taking classes in VB 2005 in the hopes of furthering my career.

Which brings me to the present. I had this old BASIC programming manual for the Wang 2200 and I got to thinking, "I wonder if other people liked using the Wang as much as I did?" A quick Google turned up Wang2200.org, which had tons of history, documentation, specifications for the old Wang systems. Some programming guru had decrypted the 2200s operating system and written an emulator (a program that "emulates" another computer or programming environment) which I downloaded. The site even has all the old games available for downloading and playing on the emulator. (The Star Trek screenshot is from the emulator.) I've been having been having a lot of fun with "relearning" the Wang's ancient dialect of BASIC. In a way, it's a bit like taking Latin: You know nobody's actually speaking the language anymore, but you see its roots in all the modern languages.

A Remembrance of Things Past

2007-06-04T17:26:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, within the past few years both my parents have passed away, and my brother and I have been trying to deal with the estate, including a somewhat run-down 1950s 2-bedroom, 2-bath rancher with just short of 50 years worth of junk. Since I've had a lot of time on my hands--being unemployed helps a lot with that--I volunteered to do the lion's share of the cleanout and to oversee any renovations and repairs needed.

Last week, in cleaning out some things, I happened upon a big box with folders and papers. I almost threw it out without looking at it, but my bro and I are trying to be very careful and judicious in the cleanup, lest we throw out some priceless 50-plus-year-old vase that looks like a pot-metal flower-holder thing. This comes by hard experience: mom lost her engagement ring and a pretty bluish-stone ring to a thief at the nursing home. We were foolhardy enough to believe that mom's valuables were safe in her room. My brother and I knew that, just by the age of the rings, they were valuable; we didn't know how valuable until we found an insurance policy on them over a year after mom died. Some nursing home employee is now driving a new car thanks to our "contribution." It's a sad thing to happen, but once-bitten, twice shy.

So I started digging through the box to try to discern and evaluate its contents. It turned out it was a huge collection of notebooks, homework, and miscellany from me and my brother's days in school, some going back as far as the second grade! Since I'm currently in a phase of self-exploration, I couldn't help but take the time to examine each item individually. There was my old French notebook (cahier) from my senior year! Yikes! I thought I had done better in that subject than what the quiz, homework, and test scores told. There was a collection of band concert programs and correspondence from the booster club.

Then there were several folders from my English classes. I had always struggled with grades in English. As a matter of fact, I had had to double up on English classes my last spring semester in order to graduate on time, as I'd flunked Prose the previous winter. I somehow managed to tough it out and get two passing grades, though I distinctly remember waking up with panic attacks during that horribly stressful period.

Rather ironic, really, flunking Prose. Especially considering how accomplished a writer I was. Though my grades didn't show it, I enjoyed writing somewhat. Despite my deficiencies, I was able to tell a good tale. It was obvious in looking at some of my earliest work in the box. The "One day..." stories were very original. I was a bit disorganized in my thinking and tended to "write ahead" of my thoughts--not to mention sloppy penmanship--but I had a knack for seeing things in a fresh was. I recall almost fainting one day when my sophmore English teacher, Mrs. Middleton, who was definitely of the "old school," hickory-switch-and-ruler educational era ("A dog can be 'mad'; but humans get 'angry.'"), came up to me unbidden and exclaimed, "Have you ever thought of being a writer?" What? Me?! Are you talkin' to me?! Eric White? Sit over on the side wall? Score low C's on your tests? She was talking to me. I'd apparently written some kind of wonderfully clever entry in my journal--remember those?--a few days before. (Alas, the journal had apparently not been saved in the box.)

But I liked writing. As a matter of fact, during that period in my life, I began keeping a private journal (i.e., one not meant for anyone to see but me... and before you say "diary," let me say, women keep diaries; men keep journals). It wasn't a consistent thing. It started out as a way to remember my thoughts and experiences on various school and church trips, but it came to be a great way for me to clear my head about something that was bothering me, so I started doing more personal entries. I was a shy kid back then, and writing allowed to voice my own feelings and opinions couched in a nonthreatening way. The weird thing was that I began letting people read my journal. It started with me letting people read my "documentation" of whatever school or church trip we happened to be on, but since my personal entries were in the same book, there was nothing to stop them from reading those. People seemed to enjoy reading what I'd written, and it made me feel good that I had made, say, a six-hour bus ride more bearable for someone. There was even a point where I would have to hunt down my journal on the bus in order to continue my thoughts.

Suddenly, I had a voice; I had something to say that mattered. Granted, the people reading it were my friends, people I was close to. But later on in college, it got to where I really didn't care who read it. Someone would ask to see it and I would oblige--most of the time. If you didn't like my opinions and impressions, too bad. They were mine and mine alone. Journaling was a terrific way for me to develop my usually somewhat lacking self-esteem.

I have continued--somewhat irregularly--my journaling to this day. Hmmm... you might say that I was the original blogger! A man before his time. You might say that. You might be wrong, too.

So, getting back to my magical box of goodies. It's quite enlightening to see who you were way back when. There are two tracks of thought in doing this: 1. I wish I were more the person that I was back then now, and 2. I'm glad I'm not the same person I was back then. The final answer to that is, for me, a little of both, I guess. One the one hand, I wouldn't go back to those days in high school and college to save my neck; on the other, that period was a magical part of my life. Bad, a lot. Good, a lot, too.

Suffice it to say, if you had told me back then where I am now, I probably would've laughed my head off. Singing opera? C'mon. Get real, dude. If anyone can't say that you're a different person than you were as a teenager, I'll need to give you the number of my therapist.

A rather odd footnote to the writing:

In 1985, my mother went out with a bunch of her friends to celebrate someone's birthday. As part of the celebration, they all went up to Morristown to see a local "world famous" psychic, Bobby Drinnon. Apparently, the birthday girl visited him regularly and thought "Wouldn't it be fun if..." Now, my mom doesn't believe in all that psychic stuff... at least she didn't think she did at the time. But she went along with the group, as it was just something different and fun to do, like those old machines that you'd put a nickel in and it would give your weight and tell your future. And who doesn't open their fortune cookie after eating Chinese?

So, she saw the psychic... and came away dumbfounded! When she walked in the door, he asked her if her husband was in the military or a policeman or fireman, as he was seeing a uniform. My mom couldn't figure it out... until she realized that he was seeing dad in his scout uniform! Dad was a lifelong scouter: scoutmaster, advisor, leader. Okay, so maybe that could've been a coincidence. But the other stuff he told her about herself and her family was equally uncanny!

"Bless her heart, mom was so amazed with what he said, when she came home she jotted down everything that she could remember him saying for future reference. That piece of paper was in the box I found. Regarding me, he had said (sic):

"Regarding your other son, the musical one, people at the church absolutely love him. He is very talented. I see him making a living as a writer. "

Writer? Me? C'mon, dude. Ah, but life is not over yet. I wonder if Bobby Drinnon has any openings in the near future.

- EW

SF Opera replaces singer after final dress

2007-06-01T11:13:00.000-04:00

I happened upon an Associated Press story this morning in the News-Sentinel about the San Francisco Opera replacing their Donna Anna, Hope Briggs, after the final dress rehearsal of Don Giovanni. (The opera opens tomorrow night.) The original SFO press release is here (Adobe Acrobat format). The gist of the article can be summed up in the phrase "not ultimately suited for the role..."

Ouch. Given the length and intensity of our recent production experience, how would you feel if we got to Wednesday night and Don came up to you and said "[Name], we think you're not ultimately suited for the role of chorister in this production"? All that work, all that sweat, blood, and tears. For nought!

Granted, Briggs will probably get some kind of salary, probably with some kind of good-faith incentive package for keeping her mouth shut about the whole deal. But talk about a career blow! Of course, the press release is mealy mouthed. the words "not ultimately suited" can mean anything from "couldn't hack it vocally" to "was too much of a diva to deal with." But there's that word "suited." That seems to indicate that she just didn't have the chops to do that role. But her agency's bio page says that she performed the role in Frankfurt in 2006 (though it's listed under future engagements.) A little research turned up a review of her performance which seems positive enough... at least, as far as my German and the Google translator goes.

Summertime, and the Livin' is Easy

2007-05-24T19:26:00.000-04:00

As a singer in K-town, summertime is a double-edged sword. The opera company, the symphony, church choirs, and other musical groups--all run their seasons from August or September through May or June. But it's not a specific thing to Knoxville.

During summer school as an undergrad at UT, I was talking to my tuba teacher, Sande MacMorran, one day during a lesson about this very thing. (I strove to distract Sande with off-topic questions during lessons so that he wouldn't have so much time to tell me how bad my playing was... It was!) I was wondering why I was so unmotivated to do things (e.g., practicing) during the warmer months. He pointed out the obvious concept I had missed.

From our earliest days of socialization, our earliest days of day care and kindergarten, we wrap our lives' schedules around school. For most of us, that means from August until June, we're calculating every other event around our schooling, which is by far the lion's share of our time and efforts. And, usually from the second day of classes on, we dream about experiencing those heady days of summer vacation again, those days when we'll have all that time to do the things we want to do rather than being told to do the things we should. And yet, even in the ancient days of my education, summer school existed, but it was and still is rarely attended.

When I was in sixth grade, Knox County Schools tried out a program called ESY--Eextended School Year. The idea was that the calendar year was divided into "quinmesters" (five semesters). Each child was required to attend four of them, but each family could choose which four. Want to take the family on a skiing trip to Colorado? Fine. Skip quinmester two (winter) and make it up during the fifth, summer, quinmester (that bon mot makes me gag to this day). I think the program lasted about two years before being scrapped. The reason? Everybody was going to--gurk!--quinmesters one through four, and there just weren't enough students to justify paying a full-time staff for the summers, not to mention having to reteach material to students that had skipped the previous quin... uh, let's just say, "semester."

Summer school still exists, but in its previous form. The single grading period consists of approximately one month of intensive teaching at the beginning of summer, student attendance is still light, and only a few teachers are needed. You would think that such a "compacted" grading period would be stressful, but both teachers and students report that it feels very different, more relaxed, than the grading periods during the year. This feeling exists even at the college level, where summer school is a more "normal" occurrence.

BTW, I Googled "quinmester," and the word is still used by many school systems.

Which brings us back around. Without the opera and without choir, singers--well, this one, anyway--tend to get out of shape during the summer months. Oh sure, there's the occasional solo gig. (After all, who's taking the place of all that choral music in church services? Solos!) But, increasingly, there are less and less of those. And the Knoxville Choral Society/Knoxville Symphony Chorus do their Independence Day thingy, but that's just one concert for them, and I imagine the rep's pretty staid. Summer could be an opportunity! An opportunity to work on solo rep for next year, maybe take a few voice lessons, or just get an ad hoc group together to sing for the helluvit.

But I doubt it.