Riding and Singing

How is singing beautifully compare to riding a bike?  One way is in the importance of balance.  On the bike, balance is used to stay on two wheels.  In singing, to continuously provide tonal colour.

In learning to ride, we learn to:-

1. rely on the sensation of balance and continuous fine control to stay on the bike
2. to hop on a bike and establish balance quickly and
3. combine balance with variations in speed, distance, duration, purpose and style to keep things both pleasurable and interesting.  

The path we ride on the bike is the tune we sing.

The Magic Flute - What a blast!

I once performed in The Magic Flute with Southern Opera as Chorus/Slave. What a lovely experience that was! What made it so? I think it was a whole lot of things, but a lot to do with how everyone got on in this show. There seemed to permeate through the cast a positive, supportive and accepting vibe that brought good out of everyone. There seemed to be very little exclusivity and old style snobbiness and instead a kind of welcoming of everyone's contribution no matter how big or small to the collective effort. And that collective effort brought what seems to have been a good quality result, especially from the chorus in my view :-), but from principals and everyone concerned.

So what would I take from this into future productions?

• All ages can work together to wonderful effect. There was a variety of age groups represented in this cast and although the chorus was mostly 17 to 30, there was little or nothing in the way of age-oriented division. In fact the variety of perspectives, creativity, energy and experience was an important ingredient to its success.
• Mozart is possibly as refreshingly interesting now as ever, especially for the performer. Working with the Magic Flute material closely, you still find it interesting. Perhaps our historical perspective on it moderates our expectation to some degree and makes us generous to the humour, some of which is outdated. But overall, the material and music are fun and triggered many smiles and even laughs even on the final night
• Creativity effects many aspects of the production, some you don't think of. Even contracts and schedules for example. Not just writing the contracts, but working them through requires creativity aplenty and the worst thing we can do for working together happily on a production is to desperately cling to the letter of a day one agreement throughout, or expect someone else to. I think everyone in a truly happy cast has to have an attitude of selfless, creative good intent combined with an acceptance that change is unavoidable at all levels.
• Flattery no, positive expectation of the best in someone and in their intentions yes.Although I believe there are some aspects of life that need and serve to bring out the idiot in us, like voting and advertising, we are all smart, especially all in any opera cast I have been in. Meaningless flattery insults our intelligence, but it has a close cousin, high expectation, and that is essential to teamwork. Cynicism loves the fact that flattery and voiced encouragement often seem so similar.

Of course I learned many other things, but I like these ones.

Creation and Control in Opera

Opera has turned out to be such a significant part of my life (despite my gradual and unremarkable progress in it) that I think it deserves a place in my cyberspace for collecting what I learn. This to clear my thoughts and share my lessons and thoughts as I encounter and process them and as I discover something seemingly worth sharing.

Opera is predominantly about performance to me, but also about music and art. Performance is the giving, as opera doesn't exist for itself, but as a composite gift from one set of people to another. Each receiver receives it uniquely and responds both visibly and invisibly. What they receive is an animated art-work that is a combination of the artistic contributions of a group of people spread out over time and space to please, edify and even enlighten. The music is like an abstraction of the essence of life itself, tying the material pieces together and providing a massive unbounded space in which protagonists and elements move and express themselves.

For all involved, the fuel that drives opera is emotion, with love in many forms dominating: love of music, love of spectacle, love of imagination, love of art, love of love, love of surprise, love of communion, love of bright colour and costume, love of emotion and of course love between lovers. Every performer loves to know that their gift is moving his or her audience and every manager or performer loves to read success on others' faces. Every participant sobs at disappointment and every member of the audience hopes, in presenting themselves to a show, that they will be taken during the opera beyond the often mundane mode of real life to a place where emotions are extreme and colourfully, but safely, explored, so that on leaving the performance at its end, he or she feels enriched and in some way even renewed.

But there is cold hard science in opera too, even engineering. You'll find these in a solid infrastructure of thought and process that support and rein in the emotional fuel, the excitement, the disappointment, the lightening, the eruptions, the erosion and the fireworks. Science and discipline help join all of these volatile ingredients into a cohesive functioning whole that culminates in a successful opening night. The technician at work, the manager, the planner, the singer learning. No one individual's contribution is all art or all science either - every contributor gives both. And beyond opening night rational and disciplined activity and thought remain in place, keeping the creative juggernaught on track like the skeleton in our bodies that holds us firm and upright even as we dance.

Differing perspectives

I remember walking out of a cinema a few years ago at the end of a movie and being amazed at the response of the people with us to the movie we had just watched. I had found it one of the most disappointing movies I had ever seen. In fact, several times through it, I found myself wanting to get up and leave the theatre - something I had only ever done once before at a movie, ever and I was currently entering my forties. The movie was the latest version of Phantom of the Opera, based on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that was released 2004.

As we left the cinema, I was ready to contribute to the inevitable discussion that would result amongst my friends over the movie.  I kept silent though, not wanting to start the negative talk and waiting for someone else to vent the disappointment I expected we were all feeling.  

However, I was in for a rude awakening.  My friends had loved the movie and that was what they quickly began to share.  While I had been sitting there cringing at nearly every song and note sung (it seems now, but I could definitely be exaggerating it in my memory), my friends had been sitting there enjoying not only the music, but also the spectacle of it. While I had focused on the music and singing and how far short it seemed to fall from the starndard of the 1980s album of the musical, they had just enjoyed it thoroughly dramatically and musically.

I wonder why the stark contrast between my response to the movie and that of my friends.  Was it that I had romanticised the old recordings, or their part in my life, so much that I couldn't stand anything else?  Or perhaps had I begun to judge musical performance against a new ideal as a result of studying Vocal Performance at university that no mainstream performance would ever meet, even my own.  Or was it some other thing completely.  

Looking back now, I take an important lesson from this experience about perspectives and how different people respond differently to music and performances.  As the saying goes "one man's trash is another man's treasure" and that applies as much to people receiving a musical performance as to other things.