Curiously Strong Singing and Performing
Not much time to say a lot today – I should be downstairs putting out platters for our Thanksgiving “dinner” (who eats dinner at 2pm?).
It’s been a rough year for me so far – healthwise and somewhat professionally (mostly related to the health issues). But I am thankful for
Have a great Thanksgiving weekend!
I feel like this is my fault, somehow.
Of course, it’s not, but it’s kind of like saying “Beetlejuice/Betelgeuse” 3x in reverse. Instead of him appearing, he… left. I have written a lot about Stephen Sondheim, god knows, and almost a year ago, he died, just a few months short of his 92nd birthday.
And both composers meant a lot to me as an artist. I’m not quite as emotionally devastated by Rorem’s passing as Sondheim’s, but I still reacted with, “well, shit,” when I saw the first “RIP, Ned Rorem” pop up on the socials. (Which is the same way I found out about Stephen.)
As I was thinking about writing an obituary for Ned Rorem, I wondered … did they ever meet?
YEP! (Thanks, Google!)In 2000, Ned Rorem interviewed Stephen Sondheim at the 92nd Street Y. Early on, Rorem asks:
“You and I both write songs. On the face of it, those songs are in the same language – tonal,melodic, prosodically comprehensible. But there is a crucial difference – you’re a Broadway Baby, and I am an effete snob. ”
Sondheim goes on to disprove some of the disparaging and outdated ideas that Rorem had about musical theater – for example, the idea that all songs fall into a structure of a 32-bar melody, which Sondheim told him went out “about the time you [Rorem] went to Paris.”
They also talk about their shared compositional influences, Ravel and Copland. (Not in this interview, but in separate sources, both speak of the tremendous influence Leonard Bernstein had on them.) Rorem seemed to admire Sondheim as a lyricist as well, even asking him if he’d write lyrics for him. (He wouldn’t.)
Another interesting question Rorem asked:
“I wonder if you would agree with this. All music writing [instrumental or vocal] …. is essentially a song expression. It is the singer within us that is trying to get out, with or without. That is how I choose these words and set them in as comprehensible a way as possible. I want to heighten the poetry; I don’t want to broaden it.”
Sondheim’s response was to ask him whether he’d ever set poems he didn’t understand, and did they work? Rorem said that they worked because he set them. (He had a very high opinion of his skills – rightfully so.)
Sondheim asked Rorem if he’d write another opera. Rorem’s response was that he didn’t really consider himself an opera composer; an opera is not a bunch of songs, and a song recital is not a miniature opera. But he said he would consider writing another opera, “(A), if you wrote the libretto.” Sondheim laughed (and again, he didn’t).
Toward the end of the video (and I suspect there’s more, because it ends rather abruptly), Rorem asks:
“You [Sondheim] have become a part of the collective unconscious, which means, at their best, your songs are memorable because the words and music are inextricable.”
Although Rorem didn’t seem to know that much about musical theater (by choice), Sondheim knew quite a bit about classical composers and their oeuvre.
I’m glad I found this interview because it really defines why I was sad about Rorem’s passing – but devastated by Sondheim’s. Both men are clever, intelligent, and articulate. Both could be critical of their peers (see Finishing the Hat). But Rorem’s wit was acerbic; Sondheim’s was self-deprecating. I don’t think anyone would say Sondheim was “an effete snob,” let alone himself. That definition was part of Rorem’s self-identification – it wasn’t self-deprecating. It just was.
Rorem says that he has a “neat mind and can’t improvise.” Sondheim’s writing was dictated by the principles that:
All in the service of clarity. I think that they definitely have that in common.
(The video that came up right afterwards was an episode of Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland interviewing Stephen Sondheim in 1994 – at which point I found out that Sondheim attended a Quaker private school; and Ned Rorem was raised Quaker…. more words colliding!)
This was supposed to be a short obituary, but, as usual, I went somewhere else – because I was curious about whether or not Sondheim and Rorem met. And now here we are.
Watch both the videos, if you can. They’re fascinating.
It was a terrific conference – I’m looking forward to watching the videos of the sessions I didn’t attend, which (I believe) are available to me for the remainder of the calendar year and possibly a little beyond. Some of the ones that I want to see are:
On Thursday, I’ll post about the last full day of the conference – there was one particular topic that I really want to delve into further going forward. Stay tuned!
Takeaways:
(These are from the report I submitted to the MDDC NATS chapter on October 23.)
That was a lot for the first day! Stay tuned for the subsequent days!
My kinda town, Chicago is!
I am a couple of days late with this birthday wish – but I was having a problem with WordPress yesterday.
When I was in undergrad, I had to write a paper for theory that linked a composer with an artist in a different field. I chose Ned Rorem for the composer, and playwright Tennessee Williams. i was working on a piece of Rorem’s for my junior recital, and Williams is my favorite playwright.
It made it easier because Rorem is also a writer, and I was able to draw upon his own words from his New York Diary and his Paris Diary, both of which I found in the library (the Milwaukee Public Library or the Alverno Library? I don’t recall). I remember finding the diaries fascinating, and rather scandalous, because he was very open about his sexuality – as was Tennessee Williams. Did I compare them only because they were gay (and that was exotic to me at the time because no one was out) or because there were some artistic similarities? I don’t recall. I do remember my teacher, Jim Pease, asking me that and my saying, “Of course not!”
If I had waited another 15 years for his Nantucket Diary, I could’ve justified my choice by this quote alone:
“I have been in bed with four Time covers: Lenny Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, and John Cheever.”
I wish I still had the paper – I have some of my college papers and am pleasantly surprised at how well written they were, but not this one. And now I want to delve more deeply into both of their works and write a more thorough analysis. Perhaps another day. Maybe in time for his 100th birthday, next year.
Rorem wrote over 500 songs – Susan Graham recorded 32 of them. Here’s a playlist of all of them – which do you like? I love Lordly Hudson (which received an award for the Best Published Song of 1948 – when he was not even 25), Early in the Morning, and I love singing his Psalm 140 (not on this recording) for church gigs/auditions. But there are so many.
I meant to write about World Opera Day yesterday as well (BTW, Rorem wrote only two full-length operas, Miss Julie in 1965 and Our Town in 2006), but, again, WordPress issues. Plus Canva seemed to have had a hiccup and lost all my graphics (temporarily). So I wrote about that on instagram and my studio FB page, along with a list of the 92 productions I’ve been in (sorted by companies, not chronologically) and 20 pictures. There are more. Maybe next year.
I am doing an opera with WNO that opens this week – Elektra. Backstage chorus, one word, repeated 13x. I call that kind of gig “burps.” It’s actually harder than you think – yes, I “burp” 13 times, but each one is different. Some are short, some are long. And even though we’re backstage, we’re still off book.
We had a chapter meeting for MDDC NATS this past Sunday, and I wrote a report for it on the NATS Conference in Chicago this past July. I had intended to post takeaways from that experience here, but since the biggest takeaway I had to deal with when I got home was COVID, I didn’t quite get to it. But the report has given me some structure from which to expand, so hopefully I will get back on my blogging schedule. I’m particularly excited to share my takeaways from the Laban session.
My biggest priority right now is…. I’m writing a book!
The topic is one that’s dear to my heart, and something I’ve talked about doing for awhile. Right now I’m compiling the info, creating an outline, and jotting down notes. I’m trying to decide if it should be an e-book or a physical book (or both), and if I should self-publish or find a publisher. More information when I feel ready to share it. My hope is to have it finished before my April/May vacation (which we’re also still planning).
With this in in mind, I probably am going to wait till the new year to decide on where the studio is going in terms of recruitment. My hand is better, although I still can’t fully bend my thumb, and my vocal stamina is coming back. (Very glad for the light load in Elektra!) I anticipate another 6-8 weeks of physical therapy, and I’m swearing by my VocalMist™ nebulizer that I purchased a few weeks ago. Perhaps I need this time to regroup and change direction. Plus I’m very involved with programming for MDDC NATS, and I have a few exciting announcements about that as well.
I’m also considering a name change to this blog, which I will debut in December.
Till… hopefully … next Tuesday.
NAH, it was the Summer of SUCK.
(TLDR: Lots of health issues, a couple of studio issues, but Emma Langford and other folx made it all better)
I thought I had coined this term myself, but then discovered that it was used by other people during the summer of 2020 (height of the pandemic), and I thought – fair. And then when I tried to create a graphic, I found this video by gamer Johnny Chase, so I screenshot and am using it because:
I mentioned in my blogpost of 6/22/2022 that I only intended to write this summer when I had something to say because I was exhausted. I only wound up writing a promo about the Emma Langford House Concert – which I’ll talk a little bit more about later in this post.
I haven’t written about the takeaways from the NATS Conference in Chicago because I returned home from Chicago on 7/6 with COVID. After successfully avoiding it since March 2020 (fully vaxxed, fully boosted), I came home sick. I took Paxlovid and got better, which allowed me to take care of all the house concert details I needed to handle. I tested negative on 7/14 and again on 7/15. A miracle drug! Right?
And then, on 7/16, I got a rebound case. It was so bad. People have said to me, “Oh, I had COVID. It’s just like a bad cold.” Maybe for them it was.
Once I tested negative for COVID (on 7/25 – nearly 3 weeks after my initial test), I was still sick. Then it felt like strep and an ear infection. I went on a Z-pack and then on prednisolone because I had coughed so hard that my vocal folds were totally inflamed and I had a three week case of laryngitis.
Ironic, because on 6/20, I had my VFs scoped and the doctor told me that they were the healthiest ones he would be seeing all day. Here’s what they looked like then:
I don’t want to know what they looked like in mid-August, after three weeks of coughing (three weeks? I’m still coughing!). But my voice has come back. Mostly.
(I also received unexpected news about a student who wasn’t returning in the fall, which was emotionally devastating to me. I try not to take those things personally, but I feel very invested in my students and it was out of the blue, and came right in the middle of the rebound case, so it was especially hard on me.)
Just as I started feeling better and had head voice and chest voice (but no mix), I had an accident and split open my right hand in 3 places and had to have stitches. This was the week of the house concert. Fortunately, I had done the bulk of my house prep, and had help for the other things.
The day of the house concert, I reached for something and my thumb hyperextended and it popped out of place (it had dislocated a couple of days earlier also). The pain was excruciating; but I had a lot to do, so I outsourced a couple of things that I couldn’t do (chopping shallots, moving chairs), and everything was fine.
A few days later I realized I still couldn’t bend my thumb. We were in the car on the way to Milwaukee for Irish Fest, and my MD husband said, “I’ll bet you weakened your hand in the fall and the dislocation tore your flexor tendon.” So I called Curtis National Hand Center in Baltimore to make an appointment. Which had to be after the cataract surgery I was having on my return.
So this is what happened since I returned home and will be happening over the next few days:
YAY.
The high points of this summer were:
Kay-Megan, Vivie, Dissonance, Sela (plus some rando with a tambourine) also reprised their showcase performance of Birdsong at the house concert, only this time the solos were sung by the songwriter herself. Thank you to Emma Langford for agreeing to include my students on this song. At the end of this exhausting diatribe, enjoy Birdsong featuring Emma Langford, cellist Alec Brown, and students from Mezzoid Voice Studio:
While this was, truly, the Summer of Suck, and there were loads of disappointments, moments like this make it (almost) all worthwhile.
I promise my posts going forward will be positive.
Unless, of course, something unexpected happens. Which would
I have talked about Emma in these blogs several times, both in the context of World Voice Weekend and, the first time, about how inspired I was her (“Her voice was broken, so I sing aloud“).
I have room for 50 people and not only will they be enjoying this great artist (and Alec Brown), we will be providing food. The $30 admission includes everything. We aren’t charging for the food or drink – we just want to have a party to celebrate bringing this great artist to Baltimore.
Also, check out this new collaboration that Emma did with the RTE orchestra (the RTE is the Irish TV and radio broadcaster). This is her song, “The winding way down to Kells Bay,” which she dedicated to her grandfather. This just dropped this morning.
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