Department of Practice

Many of us study or work in schools of music, or departments of music. At McGill, I work in the Department of Performance which is just one department of the larger Schulich School of Music of McGill University.

We call ourselves that, I guess, because we are performing professors who teach about performing to future performers.

Or do we? Is it all performing all the time? Certainly it looks that way with over 600 public performances given each year in our various venues on and off campus. (That's a lot, mind you.) Each of those performances represents hundreds of hours of preparation, score research, listening, active learning, studying with mentors, and - especially this - practice.

"Practice makes perfect" or my favourite (NOT): "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice."

Both of those famous quotes are truly not true. Far from it. Research has shown that too much practice focused on achieving perfection oftentimes does not give one perfection. And really, what's perfection? Totally unattainable outside of a few Olympic gymnasts or divers, (or Julia Child's recipe for boeuf bourguignon.) As well, getting to Carnegie Hall is pretty easy nowadays. Put together some money, gather your forces, and rent the hall. I know lots of people who've performed at Carnegie, but I can tell you honestly that very few got there just by practicing.

But practicing is a huge part of a students' world. When I was a piano major, I never practiced (I've blogged about this probably too much. It sounds like a boast, but it actually is my only regret in life.) There's a famous memoir "I really should be practicing" by the great pianist Gary Graffman. The title speaks deeply to many instrumentalists during their student years, and it really spoke to me as it was my mantra at Simpson. I'd say it late at night while painting a set, or I'd say it later the same night over shared Dominoes Pizza with others who should've been practicing too.

Nowadays, just like in yesteryears passed, students stress out about practicing - either they're risking injury by practicing too much or ignoring the pile of music on their desk. It's stressful just typing about practicing!

I think what might be adding to this stress is that, through social media, we are now teaching young people that learning itself is stressful. Because, you see, stress sits very close to the feeling of being uncomfortable. Stress is now being seen as entirely negative, which is too bad because stress is not always a negative force. Uncomfortable, yes. But not always a negative thing.

"Stress kills!" read the headlines. Then there are all the medical sites, with their "stress and high cholesterol", "stress and depression", "stress and binge eating", etc., etc., etc.

Depending on what motivates a musician to practice, the stress is magnified or lessened. Deadline to memorize a movement of a sonata looming? Good stress. Accepting a gig at the last minute that causes you to have to learn gobs of music overnight? Good stress. Taking on too many gigs while starting a new program of study and a new job bartending at night? Not the best kind of stress. Forgetting to translate your texts until the day before stagings begin? Shame on you!

Practice is not solely a sole activity. Collaborating with others is what most musicians do as the next step beyond their own practice. And collaboration can be difficult. Everyone in the room seems to have done more research than you, prepared more dutifully than you, had more coachings and lessons on their role than you. And they're all skinnier it seems and wearing cooler outfits in order to impress their new colleagues (why did I choose to wear the tight jeans today?) The stress of collaborating, especially with new colleagues, is like the stress of a blind date. You know the name of the restaurant (La Boheme), and the name of your date (Marcello), but you know little else and have to wing it, even though you've prepared for your date simply by living your life. Preparing for the first rehearsal of an opera takes a lot of practicing, a lot of preparation. Everyone is nervous and trying to impress, so everyone is stressed (and don't you hate the person who knows everyone else and is running around kissing everybody on the cheek?!) Why have sweaty palms too?

Collaborating is the big step towards being able to perform in public. It is a courageous act. It is also a joyous and wondrous communal act as well.  Collaborating is the reward for practicing. A lot of times, I think young singers misunderstand that rehearsing is practicing. We even use those two words for the same activity (particularly in high school when your parents would say "how was practice tonight?") But practicing is really something that happens before collaboration and rehearsal, and those two things are continuations of actual practice, to be sure. For most of us who do this long enough, collaboration is usually pure joy.

If one doesn't feel some sort of joy in the activity of practice or feel mostly joy while learning something new, collaborating on it, and then performing it, perhaps one shouldn't be encouraged to study music.  Music schools think they teach performers, but it is a misnomer really. We teach "practicers", because that's what we all do 'till our own song ends.

Practicers are who we are, really, because it's what we spend 98% of our time doing.

Practice doesn't make perfect, but it does make performers.

Nothing Is Original

Nothing Is Original

#RipItOff

I recently saw a tee-shirt on a friend of a friend on Facebook. Very simple “Nothing Is Original” with “#RipItOff” hashtag below.

Simple statement. So very, very true.

The challenge, for us in opera, is to appear original. Most of us know this is not possible and it’s only an illusion. The score is someone else’s (oftentimes many else’s – composer, librettist, editor(s), performance traditions by long-ago dead singers), the staging is derivative of all previous stagings every seen on the stage (even if updated, characters must still tell a story with lights, costumes, and sets), the singers’ ornaments are from the past directly, or heavily borrowed, and the tempi of any conductor is well within most ballparks of what’s come before.

What gives us originality is the ever-new collaborations that are put into place for each new production. New singers, a new design, new ideas on these old ideas, a new venue, new players, new approaches, etc.

To think that many young singers don’t want to listen to recordings, or watch older singers perform to research their repertoire or a new role, is – for me – the height of hubris.

And the height of denying the fact that Nothing Is Original.

All operas are not original. All Art is simply not original.

Opera – all of it – springs from something else. All contain elements found in previous pieces. There’d be no opera without the camerata from Florence’s renaissance, but even those guys were looking way back into time to Greek drama. We have the original castratis to thank for the later 19^th century bel canto renaissance. Mozart begat Rossini who begat Donizetti who begat Verdi who begat Puccini who begat Menotti who begat Heggie. The ties that bind, the degrees of separation, are so tight between all of the operas we work on every year. The dance that happens is a dance between the past and the future. To find the future, one does need knowledge of the past.

When we see or hear something new – say an amazing Robert Wilson production or new ornaments previously not thought of by Bartoli or a conductor flex time in a Mozart ensemble or a new opera by a young composer – we get excited. Wow! Now THIS is original.

No. Nothing Is Original

So: RIP IT OFF! Do it with aplomb and acknowledgement for what’s come before. Dare others to find your “inspirations”. But please, please, do not pretend you’re being original. You are combining the same ingredients into a new dish to be served, albeit in hopefully a creative, fresh, and tasty manner that seems beyond brilliant.

And the flip side to that is, dare to be derivative. Learn from all the others who’ve come before you. Working on a Carmen? Have you listened to every single recording that’s out there? Learning a Mozart aria for the first time? Have you watched a video of your aria sung by the great ones?

Technique is an individual thing, but it is the derivative tool that powers opera. You take other’s technical ideas and make them your own.  Do the same with your artistic choices.

Basically, own your own originality. 

Opera B!NGE Fest 2017!

"I've had a great idea." -- PJH about a year ago

This past March, Opera McGill celebrated its 60th anniversary by presenting an entire season of opera - seven operas - in just 24 hours. In order to truly celebrate Montreal's 375th anniversary, Opera McGill set off to present opera not just on our campus, but in Montreal proper. Our first foray actually happened this past January with our production of Die Fledermaus at the wonderful historic theatre Monument National located in the heart of the Quartier des Spectacles. During the 24 hours, in addition to putting on three operas at on-campus venues (Pollack Hall, Redpath Hall, and Wirth Opera Studio), Opera McGill presented a double-bill of French opera at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur and a double-bill of operas by Garner and Bartok at the Theâtre Paradoxe. It stretched us, literally, to be able to figure out the logistics of this project, but wow was it worth doing!

This was an idea that popped into my head while binge watching on Netflix over a year ago. Binge watching - for those who may not know what that is, or who may not do it - is sitting down in front of the telly and watching a season (or two, or three) or a TV series on Netflix in one stretch. Because we live in the country and don't have cable tv channels, only wifi limited internet, our use of the tv is different than many other families. Lots of DVDs and lots of Netflix. Usually we start on a Friday night choosing some show (my wife and I heartily recommend: "Grace and Frankie", "Last Tango in Halifax", and any BBC murder mystery from "Midsomer Murders" to "Death in Paradise") and then getting comfortable and watching show after show after show until we can't take any more of it.

So I thought, could this be a way to take in opera? Create a whole season of opera - in this case 7 one-acts - and then present it in 24 hours in such a way as to bring in audiences. New and old audiences, from across a wider range of Montreal perhaps? Would people take to the idea and join us on an operatic binge of sorts?

The planning phase was huge. Picking operas that would compliment the pool of students usually involved in opera; picking operas that represented something important was also very important to me. It was important for me to show audiences the Past, Present, and Future of opera. I also wanted a variety of production styles - historic, traditional, non-traditional, venue-based, and abstract styles that audiences see nowadays. This Binge Fest was going to try to show our audiences different ways to present operas in 2017.

I chose Dido and Aeneas as the first opera for Friday night because it was the first opera presented 60 years ago in 1957 by Opera McGill. That seemed appropriate, as was the venue: Redpath Hall. We decided to present it with a small baroque orchestra and with beautiful period costumes, sort of a nod to the history of Opera McGill. Stephen Hargreaves conducted and it was directed by Jessica Derventzis, one of two guest directors for the B!NGE. The second opera was to be presented in the morning of the following day. I picked my adaptation of Mozart's The Impresario mostly because it was updated to a NYC "audition space" and Wirth Opera Studio is a perfect audition space as is. In order to entice people to come in early, we offered complimentary Tim's coffee and Timbits with the price of admission. (Huge success, btw). This one was tricky to cast because the two sopranos needed have to have exciting extensions beyond the staff (going up to high F!), and I added two extra sopranos to the show in the adaptation.  Plus the pianist is also an onstage character who has lines, has to act, has to sing, and play the entire Mozart score brilliantly. Boy did we get lucky with Jack O! Both Dido and Impresario sold out days before, (there were actually people posting on FB trying to Dido tix!)

The early afternoon opera I wanted to be for kids. I had tons of great experiences performing for kids on various tours down in the US and one of the great operas written for kids is called "Sid the Serpent Who Wanted to Sing". We presented it in Pollack Hall with a rock-style lighting design and a very colourful set and costume design. I played the piano for this one (I'd played it hundreds of times on tour back in the 90s) and the cast of four delivered the 45 minute piece with tons of energy. At the end, when I invited the kids down to the edge of the stage, we had a rush of hundreds of kids eager to meet the Juggler, Clown, Strongman, and Sid as well as get their pics taken with them. One of the singers said she "felt like a Disney Princess". It was nice to collaborate on the show with my wife, Elizabeth Koch, who helped direct it. (She had performed the role of the clown about a hundred times back in the early 90s on a different tour.) Hopefully, Sid will live again sometime soon for more Montreal children.

The late afternoon show was a double-bill of two lovely French one-acts: Massenet's Le portrait de Manon and Ravel's L'heure espagnole. We presented these two very different pieces in two very different areas of the same venue at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur east of McGill's campus. The Massenet was performed in the regular recital hall venue and then at the intermission the audience was invited to move to the other side, get a complimentary glass of wine (another big hit) and watch the second show in a pseudo-immersive style area. The audience had to stand, sit on the floor, move up to the balcony gallery overlooking the space, or sit in the two dozen or so chairs that were provided. It created a whole different atmosphere to take in an opera. Both were brilliantly performed to sold out audiences, with the amazing Olivier Godin as guest music director and pianist. The inspired direction was by another guest, Jonathan Patterson, who really had a challenge directing the Ravel in the Art Gallery space (check out the video below to see why!)

After a great dinner with some VIP guests at the Pullman (what a wine list!), I traveled to the last venue and got there in the nick of time to do my somewhat lengthy thank-you speech before the start of the last two operas: James Garner's East o' the Sun, West o' the Moon and Bela Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle (sung in the original Hungarian!). I chose these pieces for a couple of reasons. James Garner is a young English composer (24 years old) and I'd been looking for new "voices" in the opera world for quite some time. I've often thought that too many opera composers are a bit long in the tooth by the time they get to writing an opera and I was thrilled to find out that James was already writing numerous operas in his early twenties, plus he's a singer himself so his pieces really showcase voices in a way I've not heard in awhile. He understands voices and that is rare in a composer of opera nowadays. I thought his piece would make a sort of bookend to the Purcell - who wrote the earliest opera we have in the repertoire, Dido. The Bartok is simply my favourite opera written in the 20th century and I've been waiting to do it at Opera McGill until the right singers came along. Luckily, two graduating masters students were a perfect fit and the opera was a great project for both; certainly demanding vocally and musically, but also it's a very dark opera that demands a lot from the singers dramatically. The end result for both pieces was fantastic. The students gave terrific performances, Stephen conducted both with aplomb, the venue itself became part of the set and lighting designs, and I have never been more happy as a stage director.  The venue also came with a bar in the back, beer on draught, and we had the audiences seated "cabaret style" at rounded tables where they could enjoy their drinks and the opera at the same time.

To get a feel for the Festival, simply watch the following wondrous 15 minute documentary made by our videographer, Anne Kostalas. I think the audience interviews are really insightful and there is a palpable excitement about the 24 hours that she captured.

Here's the link: BingeFest Documentary

Anne also did a really cool "trailer" video for the Binge that she and I concocted one afternoon. The idea was to follow Bluebeard and Judith from venue to venue as if they were going to the Binge Festival as a date; in costume, with a soundtrack provided by the two singers and Stephen Hargreaves at the piano. Some people were confused by what it was all about. Perhaps now would be a good time to look back at it and see if we did a good job showing what to expect.

Here' the link: BingeFest Trailer

A huge project like this B!NGE Festival doesn't happen by itself. First off, you have to have the idea and convince others that it is a viable idea. My previous blog touches upon that kind of challenge.

Here's the link: Blog: Creative Conversions!

Then you have to put the right people into place, specifically the one person charged with getting everyone to the right place at the right time. That would be Russell Wustenberg, Opera McGill's production stage manager. He and I have now done over a dozen shows together (12 in the last year) and he has tremendous skills at organizing people. We couldn't have survived without him! The design team had to collaborate with four different directors and find a way to get to 14 tech and dress rehearsals over two days leading up to the Binge. Florence's makeup designs for Bluebeard -- wow! Serge's lighting in the Paradoxe -- wow! Vincent's numerous sets and set pieces that popped up all over Montreal -- wow! Ginette's costumes that ran the gamut from Trojan Aeneas to Steampunk Bluebeard -- wow! Then there were the multiple teams of students recording the operas led by Martha de Francisco (the unsung heroes of Schulich's research and performance departments -- recording hundreds and hundreds of concerts, recitals, and operas every season), the genius George Massenburg who did the video archiving of the actual performances you see on Anne's documentary, and the tireless Maureen Leaman Matulina who coordinated all of the various box offices and ticket requests as well as showing up to the shows themselves. All of these amazing professionals went above and beyond the norm and were the reason the festival succeeded so "effortlessly".

But the biggest kudos have to go to the students themselves. This wasn't your ordinary opera production schedule. We started the week after Fledermaus closed - no rest for the weary. Each show was given only a handful of staging rehearsals and coachings. Because there were seven shows, most of which had separate unique casts with just a few overlaps, we had to start stagings a month and a half before the B!NGE itself. That meant that some shows (like Impresario) got staged in February and weren't looked at again until the week of the Binge. This meant that many students took it upon themselves to continue rehearsing without a creative team -- which frankly is a terrific way to learn and work on your own ideas about character and physicality. They also were singing music written in a wide variety of styles and historical periods as well as in four different languages (English, French, German, and Hungarian).

Creating that schedule was a labor of love and could not have happened without my years of work at Glimmerglass Opera where we rehearsed four operas concurrently as well as running a young artist program with hundreds of added private coachings on top of the MainStage production schedules. When people ask me how the Binge happened, I have a hard time answering them. I smile and say something like "planning is everything." Well, the truth is is that planning actually is everything. But planning takes time and experience and willing participants.

Another question I get asked is "will you be doing it again next year?!" Well, the answer is yes! I've decided that binging on opera is a good thing and a cool way to create a buzz, find new audiences, and gain performance opportunities for the Opera McGill students. So next year, in March of 2018, we will be Binging on Bernstein! To celebrate the 100th birthday of Lennie, Opera McGill will be presenting three performances of Candide in collaboration with Boris Brott and his McGill Chamber Orchestra. Additionally, we will be presenting an afternoon titled "Arias and Barcarolles" which will be scenes from his many theatrical pieces - both opera and musical. It'll be a lovely weekend of Bernstein and I hope all will join us!

By the way, Opera McGill has a Youtube channel. Check out all of our numerous other videos here: Opera McGill YouTube .
As well, Anne Kostalas, videographer, has a blog. Check her out here: DivaFilms

Creative Conversions

When projects are successful, people get congratulated. This just happened to me. Opera McGill's concluding production this past March - usually a series of performances of just one opera - was of a different nature. Far from any regular production, in fact, anywhere.

It was an opera "binge" festival. I believe the first of its kind. Seven operas in twenty-four hours in five different venues (three on campus and two quite off-campus, non-traditional operatic spaces) with forty plus students singing over fifty roles. We called it the "Opera B!NGE Festival!"

It was my idea entirely, I state humbly. The idea came to me last year while binge-watching Game of Thrones. Why not binge on opera, I wondered, since that's how we are all ingesting our entertainment via Netflix. When I texted Russell Wustenberg (Opera McGill's PSM) with the sentence "I've had a great idea", I meant it. When do any of us every feel we've had an idea worth of the word "great", let alone decide to share the idea with others? Sharing is the tricky part!

Like many great ideas (like all ideas, actually), you have to decide to do the work necessary to figure out how to actually make it happen. How to plot what is needed, create the moving parts necessary, put them into place, pay for it, plan for it, balance artistic options, make it exciting. But mostly, you have to sell the idea to others.

Selling creativity. Selling ideas. Selling potential. Did any of us get into the arts thinking we'd have to sell ideas?  And just so I'm being clear about my feelings on the subject: selling your ideas totally sucks.

It's the hardest thing about my life. Walking into an office or meeting and selling my "vision". Sitting with others and talking about plans I've imagined in order to get a critical mass of approval, or at least the thing that hangs in the air most often, the "well, if you think that might work and can pay for it and if it's something that you think might be successful and if it's not going to cause too much difficulty with others and if it's something that won't harm any kittens and if it's something that no one will think is offensive and, and, and, and, and..." is truly a hard thing on most people's psyches.

It's exhausting.

For you see, any great idea that I've had in the last decade has been met with resistance. Sometimes quite a lot of resistance. Oftentimes from surprising areas, oftentimes unbeknownst to me until after the fact when I'm told "I didn't think this one would work, but hey -- congrats!". Only occasionally have I been told "Yes! Excellent idea. Go for it!". Usually it's a struggle to prove that my {brilliant} idea might have merit.

This isn't the case for my regular ideas. You know, the ideas all of us have that help continue our various successes in our varied careers. Those ideas are usually accepted as a matter of course after a little bit of conversation. For me, it'd be ideas like deciding to do a double-bill of Puccini, or bringing in a guest director who's with it and young and fresh, or making casting choices that are common-sensical. I often find that these regular ideas get masqueraded around as "brilliant" ideas usually because they are decidedly not brilliant. They are comforting, and many people mistake comfort with brilliance. 

Brilliant is scary. Brilliant is innovative. Brilliant is the unknown. Brilliance takes a specific kind of creativity.

Creative ideas scare people. They scare creative people, strangely. The path of most resistance usually is found in, or comes from, those people deemed artistic in some way, those actually in the arts. It seems that inspiration is not something many creative-types take to when they are supposed to be the standard bearers of the creative arts. 

And let me be really honest here -- oftentimes, I resist creative or brilliant ideas because I may not fully understand them, or feel they might take something away from my program, or may be beyond my capacity to understand the scope of said idea. Resistance is easily found when it comes time to create something others may not fully understand.

So selling the brilliant idea is about communication. It's about a conversation. It's about conversion. 

My friend and colleague, Paul Yachnin, is in the midst of a huge multi-year research project: Early Modern Conversions. (Check out the site, it is simply an AMAZING project: Early Modern Conversions Site ) He and I have spent some time discussing the ideas of conversion, as well as discussing creativity over the years. Often these discussions involve oysters on the half shell and a bit of vodka, but almost always our conversations end up with me being slightly converted in my thinking to his way of thinking, or at least to a newer hybrid way of thinking about something.

Conversion and Conversation. These words are related. As Paul writes on his site: "The ability to convert is uniquely human. When we awaken to a new faith, join a new political movement, or take on a new identity, we exercise our freedom to reinvent ourselves and also to become who we were always meant to be."

And so we converse with others to convert them to our way of thinking in order to bring about a new idea into our world. For me, that means selling, sorry -- talking -- with others to try to awaken in them the seed of an idea that I discovered inside myself. This is exciting when it all goes well. When you're being misunderstood, or thwarted in some way, this is decidedly not an exciting thing. Luckily for me, my powers of persuasion usually go hand in hand with my level of passion needed to bring the idea into being.

So next time you have an idea, write it down! And then go to someone else - a friend, colleague, family member - and try to have a conversation about your idea. Let the idea live, though. Don't try to shoot holes through it, since every idea is quite vulnerable when first birthed. Ideas need nourishment and community. The brilliant ideas need even more. They especially need time; time to grow, pop through the soil, breathe some air, see some light. All ideas are seedlings that need the various stages of growth in order to really end up being something worthwhile. 

Additionally, creativity needs to convert not just others, but the person who initiated the effort in the first place. We are converted by our ideas. We are awakened by them. And if they are solid ideas worthy of boundless effort, they can convert others, awaken them. And certainly the world needs some awakening, eh?

Art and Freedom of Expression

The line between artistic expression and artistic offence has never been finer. In fact, I think we've reached a point where it is simply not possible to create anything without offending someone, be they an individual or a group of individuals.

This has been the case, let's not forget, throughout most of history. It's clear that to be an artist throughout the ages - from ancient Greece to 2017 - is fraught with tension between how an artist creates, who they create their art for (the state, religion, patrons, public, private, for its own sake, etc.), when/why it is deemed 'art', and how long it survives before being lost, shredded, erased, bombed to oblivion, criticized, re-thought, or celebrated. Art is not - in any way, shape, or form - easy.

Yet, art endures. It is still here and there are many of us out there trying to create art. Be they painters struggling away in a co-operative community studio in Burlington, Iowa or a composer in Ottawa, Ontario, or a filmmaker in Israel, or a director in Boston, or a choreographer in Toronto -- artists are everywhere. There are millions of us all around the world; some quite privileged (i.e. celebrity artists), but most artists out there still struggle to make ends meet. In my case, I understand that my life is a very rare, wonderful, yet strange life. On the good days (I'd say 75% are good days now), my life is truly a gift. During opera rehearsals, coachings, and performances, my life is typically transcendental, communing with long-dead geniuses through direct contact via music and text.

How exceptional is it to sit in a room and play all day in rehearsal (see my blog "The Operatic Playground's Secret" here: LINK ), or wave my hands in front of an orchestra, or sit and design blocking for some masterpiece by Handel? Truly Exceptional. Absolutely. Pretty easy life, frankly.

However, thinking that all we artists do is sit and play all day removes our expertise, ignores our years of training and practice, and it negates all of our sweat and tears and long hours trying to come up with something quite elusive: An Original Idea.

Ideas are integral to the continuation of the human race. Innovation is something we usually think about now only in the realm of technology. But artistic innovation, artistic ideas and thoughts, are absolutely essential for our human experiment to continue forward. It is as essential as Climate Change research, the International Space Station, theoretical quantum physics, or new Artificial Intelligence inventions. Artistic Innovation - a viable and important "AI" - should be made a priority for any state, local, or federal funding because without it, there is no need to continue the rest of our society's march into new technologies.

But who is to say what is art? Who is to say what art can or can not encompass? How do we innovate art when it is not clear to many what kind of art is allowable?

But more importantly: Who do we trust to make those decisions?

I trust no one. Everyone sees their world through their own lens and this lens creates their realities. My reality is different and, thank you very much, I don't give a fig about what others might think of my reality. My brain, which creates my thoughts, is my own and not up for control. Any type of control of an artist, outside of the realm of public safety or criminal activity, is dangerous for the society that seeks to put such controls, leashes, or muzzles on their artistic communities.

Control is another word for censorship, because censorship is all about control. Censorship is one of the ugliest human efforts that is easily disguised through other means or phrases. My grandma called it "being polite". Almost all of our great composers were censored, just read up on Verdi or Shostakovich to understand what a nightmare their lives must have been while trying to create the art that we now consider masterpieces. In the first decades of television, censorship was put into place in order to "protect" the public from offensive words/images/themes, or to protect the public from ideas those in power thought hostile to the American Way. Lately, the notion of protecting others from offence has turned into trying to control on-campus speakers from expressing their ideas. Most of the current phrases used in identity politics are more about controlling others' words and speech, i.e. their thoughts, then about progressing the social construct towards a fairer future. To be clear, criticism is not censorship. Criticism is vital and essential to art and society. To critique something means that ideas are being pondered, questioned, ripped apart, agreed with, or at least noticed. To censor is to silence, to not allow ideas to be pondered or questioned or ripped apart or agreed with or to be noticed at all.

Censoring others' artistic expressions simply isn't conducive to a society's health and growth. All cultures, nations, groups need to be in a constant state of evolution and growth. In the natural world, growth happens through destruction. In art, it is the same. One often must remove the status quo in order to see something in a new light or to glimpse something entirely new. Those seeking to curb artistic expression because it might offend someone else or trigger a past trauma can end up pulling the roots out of an artist's intentions to express themselves through their chosen means. The line between curbing and cutting out all artistic expression can be a very blurry line indeed.

This new initiative comes not just from those sometimes described as "politically correct" or from the "progressive left", but also the far right (some would say "alt-right".) Seeking to control people's bodies through the removal of healthcare, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, overturning US citizens' abortion rights, the crazy - almost frenetic - need to regulate straight marriage away from the LGBTQ+ communities, the weird obsession with who can use what toilets, and their new interest in controlling the media by gaslighting it, is a deception to control people's abilities to create their own identities, their own lives and cultures and communities. That's the fast track to destroying art, let's be very clear, as art is oftentimes created on the fringes of society, or in brand new cultures and communities that are far removed from the status quo.

Artists are not normal, I'll go further - we are kinda strange. What do I mean by that? How does this manifest itself?

An example of my life:
When I look out my train window during my early morning commute onto a bleak mid-winter landscape in the middle of a western Quebec birch tree forest, what do I see?

I see music.

I hear poetry, imagine a set design for Samuel Barber's opera Vanessa, I jot down ideas for my new libretto, I contemplate black and white abstract shapes, random pop songs enter my head, or one morning, I wondered whether I'm observing a new version of the colour grey. I feel my own emptiness and loneliness and wonder if anyone else on the train is feeling the same emotions. I feel the motion of the trees flying by - am I that cold, dead tree filled with hidden life waiting to burst forth in a few months? I start to experience time differently. The passing of a tree might be a few seconds, but for me it lasts minutes, maybe the whole morning.

Time opens up for me and I see new realities, hear new music, think new words, and create new life from a simple glance out a window.

I'd venture to say that many others on the train might not go beyond, "gosh it looks bleak out there" or "I hate winter" or "Can't wait to go snowmobiling this weekend." Don't get me wrong, I think those same things too (maybe not the last...) So maybe for some reading this blog, this does not seem strange. For others I've conversed with about their internal monologues, it is a strange thing to be empathetic with a forest of birch trees while sipping a latte on a ViaRail commuter train.

Artistic effort is an endless struggle to imagine and then create new worlds amidst our current world.

I believe that censoring creative effort is then one of the worst sort of crimes in an open society. And no, I've not been outright censored. I've been criticized - in writing, to my face, behind my back - which is totally part of an artist's life. But, like most artists, there have been subtle moments of censorship here and there along the way. Sometimes it's financial - not enough money to fulfill an artistic vision, sometimes it's from committees looking at programming - Mozart is good but Caccini won't sell tickets, or in the rehearsal room - meeting another collaborator and it becomes clear that all of your ideas about their character will have to be tabled in order to just get the singer to walk and talk at the same time, or at a design meeting where firm ideas worked out for months are shot down by others, or perhaps when a general director decides to not pursue a show because it might cause controversy in the community. The dismissal of ideas without dialogue is, for any artist, hard. A part of you kind of dies inside. What you've spent hundreds of hours working on to create, all of a sudden gets erased. Like a magic towel appearing from nowhere to say "nope, this idea isn't what is wanted, sorry!" and then it gets wiped away in a few seconds or a short meeting or, nowadays, via email.

Many others are feeling this dismissal, this silencing of ideas, in a much more profound manner around the world. In their workplaces, in their churches and temples, in their artistic communities, on their stages, among their colleagues, on campuses, or from friends and family members, it's becoming more and more the norm for people to silence others by calling them out for holding ideas that make others uncomfortable or expressing ideas that others think are just downright wrong. 

Dialogue seems to have been replaced with Monologue. 

Innovation can't happen in an environment seeking to snuff out ideas others don't like, don't understand, or find uncomfortable. In the realm of social media, where complex ideas get reduced down to hashtags, a photo, and 140 characters, it can get downright scary: #SomeIsm / look at this photo / here's how we shut them down and call them out!

Our world won't actually progress if we condense difficult, complex, and subtle ideas down to a Tweet or a Hashtag. Good for mob mentalities and mobilizing via Facebook, but not necessarily good for any real dialogue (that old notion where two parties speak and listen to each other) or good for real answers to questions posed by works of art. 

Why did that artist submerge a crucifix upside down in a container of urine? What were Mozart and DaPonte saying about the sexual liberation of women in the music and text of their opera Così fan tutte? Is added violence onstage during the Scottish play simply gratuitous, or is it integral to the storytelling for a contemporary audience? Are the added female characters in Peter Jackson's adaptations of Tolkien's two works important for gender equality issues or are they simple marketing ploys? What was Picasso really saying about war in his "Guernica"? Why are the themes in the film "Breaker Morant" still pertinent in the 21st century? Are the anti-Semitic elements in one of Bach's masterpieces enough to make it a piece of art that should be banned? And speaking of anti-Semitism there's Wagner's output... What about jazz - an art form created by African Americans and taken up by white musicians; is it cultural appropriation involved when white musicians play jazz in public? These are all great questions, and they should be allowed discussion.

My answer to those who want to try to muzzle my artistic endeavours is to continue to create, albeit more carefully, until such time that it becomes clear to more people that artistic expression and innovation is integral to the health of society. Offending others is seldom the point in art. The point is usually to try to nudge people to see another side of a story, get them to think beyond their everyday assumptions. Art creates a more humane human because it opens the mind a wee bit, maybe only for a minute, or an evening, or a week, but still an opening happens and that can allow the mind to unfreeze itself and loosen up a bit and ponder a few new ideas.

It's time to once again push people to have to strive to think and understand something beyond the superficial trappings and images of what they're seeing onstage and on a much more personal level, pushing back a bit where my physical image is concerned. Expect a few more Imeneo type of productions in the near future, a return to the image I adopted during that production, and expect my adeptness with growing interesting facial hair to reflect the feeling that my artistic voice is a bit muzzled in today's climate.

The right to create and to experience art, publicly and privately, is a foundational pillar of all evolved societies. Let's strive to construct artistic societies all around this globe that can help mend humanity's frayed tapestry. Art heals and the world is in dire need of as many artists as possible. So give to a symphony, buy a painting from a local artist, volunteer at a school with no art classes, write some poetry and share it online instead of ranting about the latest craziness in DC, encourage your children to take photos or make up stories, invest in piano lessons for yourself or your kids, but a ticket to a play showing at the local community theatre. There are a thousand things you can do to support the arts.

One thing I would ask is to try to stop judging the art and the artists so harshly. At least for the next bit. Art needs to be celebrated again and, for the moment, it might help to step back and just fucking celebrate that Art Is Still Among Us.

Married for 25 Years?!

Where has time gone?

My wife, Elizabeth, and I are getting ready to celebrate our 25th Wedding Anniversary. She and I both think it's crazy that 25 years has passed by in what seems like a handful of years.

We had had a crazy time leading up to our wedding.

Beyond the seven year dating that led up to our nuptials - which included a few big break ups, long distance bills totalling in the thousands of dollars, multiple cities, and four college degrees - we decided to finally tie the knot mostly because she had "found the dress" while visiting Iowa during the summer of 1991. I was suffering in an internship position in the upper MidWest while waiting to move to New York City to join my on again girlfriend. Elizabeth called me up one day and asked me to marry her. Over the phone. It went like "So, I found the dress..." pause "And..." pause "I think we should get married."So Romantic.

You see, I had asked her to marry me two summers previous, on a very Romantic afternoon on a mountain in Colorado, with a ring and all. She had said yes, but then a year later we were breaking our engagement. Long story. Let's just say it's hard to commit to each other during seven years when you had only been together about 12 months total during those seven years...

But we decided it was now or never! We were going to get married or risk losing each other all over again.

So the plan was for me to move to NYC to start my fellowship at the Juilliard Opera Center (joining Elizabeth who was already a member of the JOC), live "in sin" (as it used to be called) and then get married a few months later. Simple. However, a few too many operatic events tried to prevent that plan from being implemented. First off, the same weekend I moved to NYC, Elizabeth flew to Chicago to audition on the stage for the Lyric Opera of Chicago's young artist program. She signed a 12 month contract with LOC that weekend which began two weeks after our planned December wedding. Oops.

Then she was cast as Vanessa in Barber's Vanessa at Juilliard. It hadn't been performed in NYC since its premiere with Steber and Elias, so everyone came to the performances (two weeks before our wedding, yikes) including the NYTimes (great review), Carol Vaness (rumoured to be among the cast of a never-happened Vanessa at the Met), and many others. In the cast was a young Jay Hunter Morris as Anatol, Jane Gilbert as Erika, and Carlos Conde as the Doctor. Richard Bradshaw conducted and it was directed by Ed Berkeley. Wow. Then just to make things really interesting, two weeks leading up to the premiere, my Dad had a major heart attack (but managed to recuperate and be at our wedding less than 4 weeks later.) Crazy month, eh?!

The night in question, December 28, 1991, was a cold, extremely typical, winter's evening in Burlington, Iowa. We chose the Saturday between Christmas and the New Year in order to accommodate our friends and family who, we'd hoped, were free that week. Outside of disappointing my parents, as their wedding anniversary was December 26th ("Why not just get married Thursday?" my mother would whine during the preceding months), the date was perfect because Bethany Lutheran Church was decorated to the nth degree with Christmas poinsettias, a lovely tree, and that holiday "air".

So many friends came, our relatives (my family: small, hers: ginormous), and our wedding party looked marvellous, from Maid of Honor Lisa to Best Man Rusty and all the rest. We did a very traditional wedding, complete with communion (in order to garner more time for more music), a church reception with requisite punch and the big white cake. The evening, though, ended in a totally unique family potluck party graciously hosted by one of Elizabeth's cousins. A keg was donated and the DJ was also a cousin. Lots of dancing into the wee hours. We honeymooned at a local Bed and Breakfast for two nights.

We could not have had a more perfect wedding, really. The music was provided by a bunch of our friends from Simpson College singing many favourite madrigals and Christmas Carols. The most memorable one was a totally unique rendition of "Good King W" that had to be heard to be believed! Anne Larson, our voice teacher extraordinaire from Simpson, sang our favourite Sven Lekberg song (look him up - amazing art song and choral composer!) and blew everyone away with her voice and musicality. We wish we had a video of her singing (we could barely afford the photographer).

Speaking of afford - the wedding was really "given" to us by so many others - our parents, yes - but more so by our musician friends, Elizabeth's two amazing cousins who provided the reception space and all of the flowers as their wedding gift, and all of the family that brought food to the second reception. We were unbelievably poor and were getting ready to embark on the next few months with practically no money in our pockets, living in two separate cities (Chicago and NYC). What were we thinking? In fact, we drove home from Iowa to NYC and then a week or so later back to Chicago on the cash we'd made during those many dances at the reception where people would put dollar bills in our wedding finery.

I remember thinking we had it all. We didn't need money, we had each other, we had our futures.

Those futures, at the time, seemed boundless. Elizabeth was at the height of her success as a young artist, going from Santa Fe to Juilliard to Chicago in only a few years. I had finished my masters in KC and had gotten the JOC fellowship, spending the fall playing for Marlena Malas, Frank Corsaro, Nico Castel, and making my collaborative pianist debut at Alice Tully Hall. All was well. I foresaw many years living in NYC, getting onto either the Met or NYCO music staff and just, well, succeeding.

But that was not to happen as I envisioned. A year later, I was on tour with Opera Iowa and getting ready to start my own contract at the Lyric playing for Maestro Palumbo. Elizabeth and I never returned to NYC, except to visit or for auditions. Our careers happened far and away from that city.

Which was totally okay, in the end. I think that it's important to go with the flow, go with what doors open, but especially to not have regrets in life. First off, if you're a fan of the movie About Time, going back to change something in your past typically changes the rest of your life and why in the world would I want to do that?!

So years later, twenty-five in fact, I sit in Alexandria, Ontario typing these words in front of a roaring fireplace as an ice storm rages outside. My wife is listening to "Time after Time" from the movie soundtrack from Julie and Julia sung by Margaret Whiting (it occurs at the end of the movie as Julia finally gets her published cookbook delivered). It's an apt song for us:

"Time after time
I tell myself that I'm
So lucky to be loving you
So lucky to be
The one you run to see
In the evening, when the day is through
I only know what I know
The passing years will show
You've kept my love so young, so new
And time after time
You'll hear me say that I'm
So lucky to be loving you."

Here's a link in case you'd like to listen to her sing it:
Time After Time

My wife and I are a team, something many still don't quite get even after I've blogged about it for years now. She is my muse, my harshest critic, my heartiest fan. Her voice sits in my head whenever I coach Mozart or Puccini or Barber or Schumann or Handel or, let's just admit it, any kind of music. We both come from the same place: southern Iowa (I'm Missouri River coast, she's Mississippi River coast) and that gives us a massive commonality that is our glue. We also have mirrored talents - she's a great singer who could play and I'm a great pianist who could sing; she can teach belting equally with the more refined classical style and I move in and out of opera and musicals with a great deal of ease. She was an amazing actress onstage and I direct my operas thinking that she's playing all the parts (male and female). She is the butter to my bread, and the breath to my life (to quote Julia Child.)

So we sit comfortably together in our living room, and it is now December 26, 2016.

Twenty-five years later. No party plans. No big trip. We want to spend our time together with our sons while they are still at home and so have decided to spend the evening together, maybe go out. We will play it by ear.

If anyone out there is lucky enough to know what it's like to spend 25 years together as a married couple, I tip my hat to you. Looking back, it seems like it was an inevitable journey that I can't imagine making with anyone else.

Here's to 25 more!

The Music Is Not The Music

The Music Is Not The Music?!

My wondrous piano teacher at the Conservatory of Music at University of Missouri - Kansas City, Joanne Baker, taught me many things. Chief among them was to disregard musical scores while playing them.

What?

Yes. You see, all of her students played their pieces from memory during their lessons. All the time. From the very first lesson. No opening up a Beethoven Sonatas book to Op. 109, placing it on the piano, glancing at it to see the key signature (E major) and perhaps to gather your thoughts before entering into Beethoven’s world via the keyboard and your ten fingers. For Jo-Jo (my pet name for her that I shared with only a few other students), learning “the music” happened before the piano lesson. The point of the lesson was to make something OF the musical score, which she would place onto her music stand, coloured pencils in hand, ready to make her markings (all lovingly dated, which now are a sort of nostalgic trip — on November 20, 1990 I neglected Brahms’ bass lines and kept missing the same notes in the same passages, all the while earning exclamation points here and there…)

Initially, this process was maddening. Then one day we had a conversation about it. Jo-Jo lived before hashtags and memes, but if I could put a tag on that conversation (and practically any other interaction with her) it would be: Jo-Jo Convo = Mind Blown.

This insistence on memorization from Day One annoyed me during my first semester studying in her studio. I spent my days ingesting musical scores as quickly as possible so I’d have something to work on in our lessons, at the expense, I strongly felt, of the musical score’s details. A typical lesson might move along the lines of Me playing a movement of a sonata by Haydn, then Jo-Jo would hobble over to the second piano in her studio (she walked with a cane but was incredibly agile for her age) and sit down. She’d say something along the lines of “so, you played the first motive like this”, then she’d play it exactly how I had played it. Pause. Then she’d look at me and say, “is that how you meant to play it?”. Then she’d smile, sweetly. Like a cat playing with a mouse. “Well”, I’d say, “I guess.” Then she’d say something along the lines of, “well, is that what Haydn wrote?”, and smile sweetly again. Ugh. This was EXHAUSTING.

But this was an invaluable process. It taught me to memorize the SCORE, not just the notes. We had to know — as soon as we knew the notes — when the crescendo started, if there were dots or carrots over notes, if there were slurs tossed in. We also had to know if they were editor markings or composer markings. And, ultimately, her process taught me to really, truly listen to how I was playing the piano and the music, instead of looking into a score to see the notes and markings and be distracted visually. For you see, to really be able to transport our listeners into the worlds created by those geniuses, we need to really concentrate on everything BUT the black dots on the white pages. So why practice doing exactly that during our once a week lessons, and THEN at some point in the future have it “memorized”?

Why indeed. But that didn’t stop me from asking her about it. She had a few things to say in response to me questioning her process. Three of those ideas really stuck with me. I don’t have what she said verbatim in my mind anymore, as I’ve morphed her ideas into my own. The following is my attempt to write about these three notions as I remember them, (the final one being the MIND BLOWN one, fyi.)

Where The Eyes and Ears Meet

Sitting at the piano while playing through any score, causes your head to be up and looking at the music in front of you. Not necessarily conducive to listening. In fact, if the brain is focused on looking at those thousands of notes and the hundreds of musical markings in something like a Chopin Ballade, can the brain also really be focused on listening to those notes and remembering all those markings? Researchers tell us that humans actually can’t multitask. Jo-Jo insisted this to be true as well. She wanted us focused on every sound that was being created by our ten fingers, our wrists and arms, our feet on the pedals, and how our inherent musicality and our intellectual choices influenced those sounds. When one focuses just on sound, without the distraction of the information passing through our eyes and visual cortex, there is a whole other level achieved. Why not practice this way all the time to prepare for your eventual performance of it? I’ve written extensively about “seeing with your ears and hearing with your eyes.” This is where that concept initially came from.

Knowledge Is Memory

How can we just play through a score over and over and over and over and over and over (you can only really get this picture if you’ve practiced the piano for tens of thousands of hours) without trying to actually learn the score. It is so easy to just “play” through a piece, thinking you are practicing it. Yes, there are hard sections that get practiced - big octave passages, fast sections, double trills - and easy sections that are just so pleasant to practice, but all too often pianists are playing through a score without actually committing its details to memory until they actually have to do so. To memorize a piece, from the very first moment, the very first note, is a whole different ball game. I learned to memorize instantaneously, measure by measure. Once this happened (one day, all of a sudden, it became possible after months of struggling), I was able to learn - really learn - at a crazy fast rate. I learned the entire Brahms F minor sonata in about ten days. Mind you, I was never a diligent practicer either. I brought in the first movement after looking at it the day before the lesson. My fingers knew how to play, I just needed the knowledge residing in those black dots on those white pages to be in my mind. Jo-Jo’s genius was also telling me to do this backwards by starting at the end of a piece and memorizing measures backwards. I still do this today when time is tough. As you move forward into a piece, it’s like you’re following a well-trod path in a forest of millions of trees. The further in you go, the clearer the path. 

The Music (Musical Score) Is Not the Music

Jo-Jo wasn’t all that impressed with Urtext scores, critical editions, or editions by some famous so-and-so. She was more interested in interpreting the scores. She told me that those who looked into scores to find the music were “forever deluding themselves”. She hated correctness for correctness’ sake. Music seemed much more apparent to her, particularly the great masterpieces by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, etc. She didn’t understand how anyone could just play the notes and think they’d done something special. “Anyone can play these notes, but only a few of us can make music out these notes” was something I remember her saying. She compared musical scores to churches. “No one goes into a church thinking that God is the actual church. You walk into a church to discover God.” Then she added, “A musical score is not the music. You enter the structure of the musical score to discover the music, to discover the composer’s intentions, wishes, dreams.” Everyone, in her view, entered a church and saw different things, felt different emotions, and found God in different places and times. The same was true for pianists, we entered into a score to gain knowledge and then we moved beyond it to find the music in the music. That’s why Horowitz and Ax are very different pianists, they aren’t the same people but they went searching for the Truth and then put their version of the Truth onto a stage for others to experience. 

Lessons with Jo-Jo were best kind of lessons. Each was an adventure. An act of Discovery. Like we were sailing uncharted waters in familiar ships to find new lands and peoples, to be dumbfounded at the undiscovered countries waiting for us in the works of the great masters. 

At our last lesson, Jo-Jo smiled at me, took my hands in hers, (I can still see her eyes so clearly in my memory!) and told me, “You make so much music out of so many missed notes. Change that last part and you’ll have something real to share.”

But ironically, I never changed that last part, really, but it's led to my success in opera. 

Working in opera is all about missed notes. Rehearsal pianists have to learn to drop tons of them because they are playing only a ten finger version of a score meant to be played by a 50 piece orchestra. That’s mostly impossible unless you drop a bunch of notes practically every measure. When you coach a singer, you should be focused on what they are doing, not on the notes you are playing. Good coaches know when to play all the notes and when to give outlines of the score, what the singer might actually hear coming up from the pit, for instance. As a conductor, it’s about focusing on moments within the present moment; during any given moment a conductor might be focused on a singer’s breath, cueing a chorus entrance, looking over towards the oboe to see if he’s ready to enter at a tricky point, or collaborating with the concert mistress on a final pianissimo ending to an act while watching her bow. Hundreds of thousands of notes dropped in order to concentrate on just a few notes each and every millisecond.

Joanne Baker is no longer on this Earth. But she lives on in all of her students and their music making. She definitely is present in almost every single coaching and lecture I give or rehearsal I might lead. She was an architect of musical sound and she showed me the secret garden where such a vast and rich array of structures to walk into and find the music resounding off the walls. I’ll never be able to thank her now, but I try to thank her through my work with my students, the music I try to make with others, and in my writings on music. She, along with Robert Larsen (my über-mentor), Berneil Hanson (my first piano teacher in Council Bluffs), and R. H. Fanders (my Humanities teacher at T.J.H.S.), give credence to the adage that sprang from Galileo Galilei’s mind: “You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself.”