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.

UT Gets Funding for New Music Building

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

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

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"

"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

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

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.