How Much is Too Much?

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.