The past 2 weeks… November 28, 2009

The last couple weeks were absolutely insane! Production week was tiring, but went more quickly than I had expected. At the beginning of the week I was scared that there was no way we were going to be able to put the show together in time, but by Thursday I was fairly confident that it would be ok. Saturday’s show was best, although Sunday we had a bigger audience. It was almost packed! That was a nice sight.I went out with Nice Guy after the show on Saturday. I had a good time. Ok, I must admit that although he’s not particularly attractive physically, I am really starting to like him.

Tuesday was the school concerto competition. There were close to 30 competitors. Considering that I was the only singer amongst a bunch of pianists and instrumentalists, I doubt I made it into the finals. I’ll find out in a few days, though. Honestly, part of me hopes I didn’t make it… I’ve got enough stuff on my plate without another round of that competition.

There are only two weeks of classes left before finals, and I have a ton of work to do! I have a 20 page paper to write that I’ve done next to nothing on. Other than that it’s the usual… tests, assignments, small projects, a few more songs to learn and memorize. (Oh shit! I still have to memorize my music from the beginning of the semester that I haven’t looked at since September!)

And suddenly all holiday spirit is gone… I started wrapping a few Christmas presents today. Yesterday I decorated a bit. I put up the tree and set out some of my holiday candles. I have to wait for the rest until my roommates get back from up north. They spent Thanksgiving with their families and I’ve been home most of the break… I did spend the day with my family on Thanksgiving, but I chose to drive back home the same day. I guess I’m just a home body. I don’t get my apartment to myself very often, so when I do I like to enjoy it as much as possible.

Ugh! I guess I better go get to work on some homework. Either that or finish cleaning the apartment… I’ve done quite a bit of cleaning since Wednesday, but the kitchen and dining room are still disastrous.

St. Theresa’s Prayer November 20, 2009

I’m sure I’ve read this before, but I just came across it again and really liked it:

St. Theresa’s Prayer:
May today there be peace within.
May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received and pass on the love that has been given to you.
May you be confident knowing you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.

This somehow seems very poignant right now. I am in the middle of production week for an opera scenes show. I’ve had a full week of classes and work plus long rehearsals every night this week. Last night was tech and tonight is our final dress rehearsal. We open tomorrow! We’re still ironing out problems with costumes and set changes, not to mention the problems that some of our singers are still having with the music. About two weeks ago I was asked to cover two parts for a girl who suddenly had a schedule conflict, so I’ve had to learn her music and staging in a hurry. Can we say stressed! And sleep deprived! Soon I will go get Starbucks for the second time today so that I have enough energy to make it through tonight’s rehearsal…

This morning Nice Guy bought me coffee after our German test. It was very sweet of him. I was really expecting to do poorly on that test, but it was surprisingly easy. The verbs that were asked just happened to be the five (out of about 30) that I actually knew, and the professor didn’t make me do the speaking part of the exam. I suppose I should stop psyching myself out about these tests.

Stupid is also in that class, but being his usual idiotic self, he didn’t show up today. In fact, he’s missed the past couple of weeks. He’s been at school, just not in that class. He knew about the test… I told him about it last week. I don’t understand some people’s mentality.

Hmm…  Now I have an hour and a half before rehearsal. To take a short nap or to go get Starbucks? Decisions…

More Quotes October 30, 2009

“I may not be a first-class composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” -Richard Strauss

“Here rests the honourable and virtuous youth Guntram, singer of love songs who by the symphonic orchestra of his own father was cruelly stricken down. Rest in Peace.” -Richard Strauss

“I won’t do it, I’m a decent woman.” -Marie Wittich, after the first rehearsal of Salome

“He never, I believe, conducted an opera without cuts, and was particularly proud when he could leave out a whole act of a modern opera.” -Richard Strauss on conductor Ernst von Schuch

“The aria, after all, is the soul of opera.” -Richard Straus

“The upshot of that except in the case of abnormally pitched voices, was displacement, fatigue, intolerable strain, shattering tremolo, and finally, not, as could have been wished, total annihilation, but the development of an unnatural trick of making an atrociously disagreeable noise and inflicting it on the public as Italian singing.” -George Bernard Shaw on the high tessituras Verdi set for his baritone parts.

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.” -W. H. Auden

“We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.” -Rebecca West

“Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.” -Claude Lévi-Strauss

“Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.” -Henry Miller

“I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.” -Havelock Ellis on Beethoven

” A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.” -Jean Genet

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.

-Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
“I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn’t. I have always found moralizing intolerable.” -Hermann Hesse

“If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn’t have to go to an osteopath, then there’s something wrong.” -Simon Rattle

“It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites—opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity—where energies flow smoothly in one direction—there will be much doing but no music.” -Eric Hoffer

“It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.” -Samuel Johnson on music

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” -Walter Pater

“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” -Charlie Parker

“Music is spiritual. The music business is not.” -Van Morrison

“Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.” -Frank Zappa

“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.” -Albert Camus

“It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, & everlasting beauty of monotony.” -Benjamin Britten while listening to the last song in Mahler’s song cycle Das Lied von der Erde

“Alas! all music jars when the soul’s out of tune.” -Altisidora in Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.” -Jean Cocteau

“Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.” -Sir Thomas Beecham

“There’s a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don’t know what it is. But I’ve got it.” -Ron Wood

“A nation creates music—the composer only arranges it.” -Mikhail Glinka

“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.” -Frank Zappa

“Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself.” -Erik Satie

“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. . . . The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.” -W.H. Auden

“Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.” -Joseph Addison on Italian opera in 18th century England

“If I weren’t reasonably placid, I don’t think I could cope with this sort of life. To be a diva, you’ve got to be absolutely like a horse.” -Joan Sutherland

“I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.” -Franco Zeffirelli

“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.” -Lord Kenneth Clark

“Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint.” -Georgia O’Keeffe

“This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.” -Horace, Roman poet

Swans sing before they die – ’twere no bad thing
Did certain persons die before they sing.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“To Strauss the composer, I take off my hat. To Strauss the man, I put it back on again.” -Toscanini after Richard Strauss accepted the presidency of the Nazi-established Reichsmusikkammer

“Dear Puccini, if this time you have not succeeded in hitting the nail squarely on the head, I will change my profession and sell salami!” -Giulio Ricordi (Puccini’s publisher) after seeing the score for La Bohème

“I am obliged to write an opera in fourteen days. I give you a week to do your share…But I warn you, we have a German prima donna, a tenor who stutters, a buffo with a voice like a goat, and a worthless French basso. Still, we must cover ourselves with glory.” -Gaetano Donizetti to his librettist, Felice Romani, about L’Elisir d’amore

“Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional musician is unable to understand him.”  -Samuel Butler

“That’s good. It gives the aria some life.” -Giacomo Puccini after the original Tosca, Maria Jeritza, accidentally rolled off a couch right before Vissi d’arte, forcing her to sing the entire aria lying on the floor

“Who sent you to me? God?” -Giacomo Puccini after hearing then-unknown Enrico Caruso sing Recondita armonia for the first time

“Next time I shall write a Mozart opera.” -Richard Strauss after the first performance of Elektra

“There are plenty of good pieces waiting to be written in C major.” -Arnold Schoenberg

“My friend, you’ve a fine turn of speed – you’d have made a good conductor.” -Charles Gounod to a cabbie who gave him a particularly good ride

“You only have time to clamber up a tree and hold on like grim death. Your hair is blown about, your face is streaked with blood, but when the storm dies off and recedes a little, you get down from your shelter, you shake yourself and you enjoy the pleasure of having escaped a great danger. The hurricane, my dear child, is Wagner or Wagnerism. It is fearsome but it passes on. The important thing is not to let yourself be carried away…” -Charles Gounod

“Look, mon petit, I’ve bested you. Faust has made 20,000 francs this week and your Le Cid only 16,000…suicide’s the only thing left for you now…” -Charles Gounod joking his friend Massenet

“Performance is a crucifixion.” -Charles Gounod

“…passionate and romantic in the extreme. The revelation of German music to him is like a bomb falling on a house and it’s possible that it may cause him serious damage.” -Fanny Hensel about Charles Gounod

“I will seize Fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely.” -Ludwig von Beethoven

“When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it had missed the point.” -Maria Callas

“When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I’m slipping.” -Maria Callas

Quotes… the funny, the serious, and the offensive October 30, 2009

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. -W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)

I don’t mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don’t understand. -Sir Edward Appleton (1892 – 1965)

I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland. -Woody Allen (1935 – )

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it. -Sir Thomas Beecham (1879 – 1961)

Brass bands are all very well in their place – outdoors and several miles away. -Sir Thomas Beecham (1879 – 1961)

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish. -Virgil Thomson (1896 – 1989)

Music has charms to soothe the savage breast
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

William Congreve (1670 – 1729), The Mourning Bride, Act 1 Scene 1

When griping grief the heart doth wound,
and doleful dumps the mind opresses,
then music, with her silver sound,
with speedy help doth lend redress.

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’ -Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990)

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. -Dan Rather (1931 – )

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings. -Ed Gardner

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. -Edgar Wilson Nye (1850 – 1896), quoted in Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1924

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to. -Elvis Presley (1935 – 1977)

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. -G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936)

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. -George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950), Man and Superman (1903) act 3

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. -George Santayana (1863 – 1952), Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. -Groucho Marx (1890 – 1977)

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards. -Homer (800 BC – 700 BC), The Odyssey

My music is best understood by children and animals. -Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971), In Observer 8 Oct. 1961

I think everyone should have a Beatles phase in their life. I think it’s part of growing up in the Western world. -Jadelr and Cristina Cordova, Chasing Windmills, 07-24-06

If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience. -John Cage (1912 – 1992)

We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. -Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844-1881)

Why am I stupid? October 17, 2009

Why, oh, why am I stupid? I can’t stand stupid people, so does this mean I must now despise myself?

Let me explain…

I recently met a very nice guy. He’s smart, he’s fun to hang out with, and he’s just an all-around good guy. He’s a very good fit for me. Yet I’m really not all that interested. Why? Probably because he’s nice. I always seem to be attracted to jerks. They don’t seem like jerks at first (because I usually ignore the warning signs), but they always wind up being bad apples. I really think this one is a genuinely nice guy. So again I ask, “Why am I stupid?”

Two hours and $50 later… September 27, 2009

Today my cell phone self destructed. Frustrating, but not all that upseting. I can handle getting a new phone. So I go into the Verizon store and find out that I have an insurance plan on my phone that I rembembered nothing about. New phone for free? Sweet! So I go online to file a claim, but I’m declined. Annoyed. So I go back to the store, where the very nice (and cute) salesman calls in for me, and I find out that yes, the damage to my phone is in fact covered by the insurance plan. I go through the whole process, but my card is declined (there’s a $50 deductable). Wierd. Maybe he typed the number in wrong. So I give him the number again. Declined again. Grr! Try the credit card. Declined yet again! The bastard on the phone starts treating me like I’m an idiot. Now I’m so frustrated that I’m near tears when the cute salesman asks what’s wrong and then tells me, “oh, well I think we can do this here in the store.” What the hell!!!! Why didn’t we just do it that way to begin with???? It took all of about 3 minutes to do it in the store and I got my new phone right away instead of having to wait two days for it to come in the mail. Why do things the hard way? This is why I absolutely HATE doing business over the phone. Two hours wasted, far more stress than I needed, and haven’t gotten anything done yet on the mountain of homework that’s staring at me. What a way to spend a Sunday.

Mmmmmmmmmmm September 14, 2009

I have two loves. The first, of course, is music. Otherwise I’d be some other sort of a wannabe. My second love is cooking. Over the weekend my roommate (K) and I were avoiding being at home due to some problems with our air conditioner, so we went to see the movie Julie & Julia. It was a great movie – I highly recommend it. But then, I like movies about food… Tortilla Soup, No Reservations… Great foodie flicks. Not that I consider myself a foodie. My tastes are far too simple for that. I am middle class American through and through, with a good deal of basil and garlic thrown in to spice things up.

So this morning I woke up to rain. It was fabulous! I think the weather may finally be changing. It made me crave soup. Not just any soup, though – homemade soup. Once you get used to homemade soup you just can’t go back to canned. I said as much to my other roommate (B) and she said she wished she knew someone who knew how to make potato soup. I laughed. It’s so easy! So now there is a pot of potato soup sitting on the stove. If my roommates don’t get home soon they’re going to be eating potato mush rather than potato soup. :/ Oh well. It will still taste good.

I’ve also got a pot of apples simmering on the stove. There’s nothing quite like good, fresh homemade applesauce.

Yay for comfort food!

Obsessions September 13, 2009

I’ve been back in school for a few weeks now, and so far I’m surviving. At the beginning of a new semester I’m always one part excited, one part scared, and three parts stressed. Some days I don’t know how I’ll make it through, but I always do it somehow. And I always somehow manage to pull A’s out of what occasionally seems like thin air.

Work is going well. I have a beginning voice class, which is kinda fun. It won’t be so fun in two weeks when some dean of something comes to observe my teaching, but even though I’m slightly stressed about it I know it will go fine. I also have nine private voice students. Nine is a HUGE relief after the seventeen I had last semester. But there are still challenges, including one student who is mad at me for giving her Baroque and Classical songs. All she wants to sing is Romantic, and she’s practically throwing a temper tantrum. She hates her music and she keeps asking me to change something, but I’m sticking to my guns! The girl needs to learn rhythm and how to keep a steady tempo, not to mention that she’s far too young to sing the stuff she wants to sing. I also have a student who can’t read a single note. I have to spoon feed her every pitch and rhythm. It’s frustrating because it leaves no time to teach technique. Otherwise I have a good studio this semester.

School is also going fine. So far. I have my first large-ish assignment due on Wednesday, and I’m only about half-way done with it. Damn me and my procrastination! But that brings me back to the title of this post… OBSESSIONS!

Haha! I have two new obsessions. Well, the first isn’t really new so much as revived. Once upon a time I was in love with early music. I have rediscovered that love, but this time in a slightly altered form. Before I was in love with early choral music (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque… generally the earlier, the better). I’m taking a vocal literature class this semester, and in the first couple weeks we were studying early music. We listened to some fantastically beautiful music and I fell in love all over again! Dowland, Morley, Strozzi, Purcell, Monteverdi, the Camerata, Arie Antiche, et al… The first recording we listened to was Christoph Genz singing “It was a lover and his lass.” I have always hated that song! I thought it was utterly annoying. But after hearing this tenor sing it so beautifully, I can’t seem to get it out of my head. And I’m actually enjoying having it stuck there. Go figure. I’ve been so engrossed with listening to early music that I’ve been neglecting the literature I have to learn for the semester. Bad me!

Obsession #2 came about just last night. I was bored, so I went on the Netflix website to find something to watch. I really was wanting to watch some Star Trek Voyager (yes, I’m a “trekkie”), but they don’t have Voyager set up to watch online. So I started poking around to see what else there was. They always have suggestions, of course, based on other movies you’ve rated, and since I absolutely love Jane Austen’s novels and consequently the movies that are based on them, Netflix told me I should watch a BBC miniseries called “North & South.” I honestly wasn’t expecting it to be very good, but I was pleasantly surprised! Very pleasantly surprised. It’s about a girl, Margaret Hale, who’s father decides to switch professions, from pastor to teacher, and uproots his family from the south of England to a mill town in the north, where the whole family has a difficult time of adjusting. I won’t tell the whole story, because I really think you (if anyone is actually reading this) should watch it, but I will say that in true Austen fashion, there is a little bit of scandal, a rather fabulous and at times frustrating romance, and plenty of disapproving family involved. And yes, the gent she falls for is very yummy, indeed. Well, he starts out ok-looking, and then he grows on you until you just want to keep staring at his beautiful face. And I am always pleased when the heroine is not a blonde toothpick with no brains.

So now it’s time to continue procrastinating. I’m going to go watch part of North & South again.

The good, the bad, and the ugly August 7, 2009

It’s been two weeks since I performed Dido, and I finally listened to the recording today. My first thought after the first few chords of the overture was, “Man, I thought the orchestra was in tune that night.” It’s not in tune on the recording. And many of the singers are quite out of tune. My tone is better than I thought it would be – it’s fuller and darker. (I’ve often been told my voice is too bright.) I’m also better in tune than a lot of the other singers, but I’m not entirely happy with everything I did… It sounds like I needed a lot more time with it. But we only had 9 days to put this thing together, and we were putting together another full opera (Gianni Schicchi) at the same time. That’s a lot of work in a very short amount of time. All things considered, I think we did an ok job.

Online dating? July 29, 2009

Last night some friends of mine finally got me to make a profile on one of those silly online dating sites. I was surprised by how many men messaged me, but none of them were particularly interesting. There was one guy that I enjoyed chatting with, but I think my gay friend who was reading over my shoulder was far more smitten that I was.

I’ve always stayed away from those websites because I feel very weird about them. I may want a man, but I’m not desperate… I’d rather find a guy on my own. Aside from that, I find it hard to trust people I haven’t met face to face. It’s far too easy to lie about who you are online.

So, will I log back in? I really don’t know.