Fall 2024 Issue

The Team behind your Summer 2024 Issue

Ann Maria Wilcox-Daehn, Editor & contributor

Shelby VanNordstrand, contributor

Linda Lister, contributor

Ann Baltz, contributor

Lynette Pfund, contributor

David Ronis, contributor

Sally Stunkel, contributor

Jourdan Laine Howell, Editorial & Graphics Designer

Welcome to NOA Now!

Working hard toward 2025

A word from NOA's VP for Conferences, Shelby VanNordstrand

Welcome to the November issue of NOA NOW!

Working towards the 2025 “Building Together – Curating Tomorrow” Conference has been a delight, a joint endeavor by the National Opera Association and the National Association of Teachers of Singing. This conference will celebrate collaboration, best practices, innovation, and community. If you have attended a NOA Conference in the past few years, you’ve likely experienced a strong sense of collegiality and a desire to support one another. We hope to escalate this as the NOA and NATS communities join once again.

In anticipation of the conference, Kelly Balmaceda, Kevin Wilson, and I created a “Savannah Sizzler” webinar. The webinar included highlights from the conference schedule, networking opportunities, and things to do in Savannah beyond the conference experience. I hope you will watch the webinar and slides as you prepare to attend the conference.

This is a great year to arrive early and experience the pre-conference events. Our Pre-Conference Workshop with the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) features Savannah Film Studios, the largest and most comprehensive university film studio complex in the nation. Workshop participants will examine a completed musical short film and participate in a panel with music, theatre, and film students and faculty to explore using these technologies in creative ways. Another highlight of our pre-conference events is the world premiere of “The Eleanors”, a new opera set in 1940s Savannah. This swing and American-song book-influenced operatic score tells the story of three women who held down the home front during WWII. Finally, we hope you will join us at the Plant Riverside District Mixer on Sunday evening to meet up with new and old friends and enjoy short musical performances from leading Savannah arts organizations.

As we commence the conference, a familiar conference format will greet our NOA community. We have a plethora of outstanding breakout and plenary sessions this year. I invite you to read the conference schedule draft on the NOA website to learn more about these sessions I’m looking forward to a theme that permeates our plenary sessions this year: the importance of the interdependent and interconnectedness of the voice community and our desire to learn and grow from and with one another.

Some of my favorite events and sessions will again be a part of the conference: The Robert Hansen Collegiate Opera Scenes Competition, the opening luncheon and keynote address, with keynote speaker Tomer Zvulun of Atlanta Opera, and the closing banquet where we celebrate our Legacy Award Winners, Lifetime Honoree, and Carolyn Bailey Argento Vocal Competition winners.

In addition to the conference, we hope you will find time to explore charming Savannah. I hope you can all find time to visit Leopold’s Ice Cream, the iconic squares and parks, take a walk under the Spanish moss-covered oak trees, and enjoy a city known for its amazing scenery, historic landmarks, food, and hospitality.

I can't wait to see you in Savannah!

Shelby VanNordstrand

VP for Conferences

Expert Corner

An Interview with
Mary Henderson-Stucky, Legacy Award Recipient at NOA's 70th National Conference

by Linda Lister

Mezzo-soprano Mary Henderson-Stucky is Professor Emerita of Voice at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.

Photography by Louis Ouzer. Used by courtesy of the Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

LL: Thank you for letting us get to know a little more about you before we convene in Savannah. You earned your BM and MM degrees from the Eastman School of Music, where you played Isabella in L’Italiana in Algeri. Was that your first full operatic role?

MHS: No, my first role was Zita, in Gianni Schicchi. And what a wonderfully energetic, humorful and fun opera it is! This opera was a perfect introduction to the world of singing and acting for an undergraduate like myself. The spontaneity of the operatic characters, the witty text, dynamic staging, and sheer fun of the work were such great aspects of this work!

LL: You have sung operatic roles throughout Europe, in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. How was that experience different from your experience singing opera in the United States?

MHS: I sang as an apprentice at Chautauqua, during my graduate study summers. And later, I sang with Opera South in Mississippi. Other than those experiences, my operatic singing experiences were almost entirely European. Though I sang in Belgium and Switzerland as a guest artist in one particular role, I had the great fortune of being a member of a repertory theater in Germany. In the repertory house, it was expected that I sing six different roles per season. (Of course, the performance dates of these operas and operettas were spread throughout the year, and the roles were not all major roles!) I was immediately required to be flexible, yet believable in my different roles. These operas overlapped! Typically, while beginning the nine or ten performance run of the first opera, I would be in staging rehearsals for the second opera. At the same time, I would be attending musical rehearsals for the third show. The challenge, of course, was to be quick, to be a thorough learner and musician, and not to allow characters and gestures for those characters to “bleed” into the next one!

Another very important aspect of repertory theater (or “Fest “work) was that all singers were either state or city employees. This meant, of course, that we received a salary, pension, insurance, etc. We were regarded as artists, but also as working persons!! In the days of the repertory companies, singers often would remain with the same theater for their entire singing lives, moving from one Fach into another more age appropriate one as the years went on.

LL: The NOA + NATS conference theme is “Building Together—Curating Tomorrow." How can we best prepare our students for success in today’s changing music world?

MHS: It has always been necessary for singers to be extraordinarily musical, flexible, and able to portray and inhabit different characters. We are expected to go beyond our (perhaps) favorite styles and genres of singing and become very familiar and adept with various styles and vocal demands. More of today’s composers are requiring vocalisms which have not necessarily been required in the past. Quarter-tone singing, jazz styles, etc. come to mind. Our contemporary composers are using the musical language of contemporary and world societies. Our singers need to be able to turn on a dime and give the role that vocal language which it needs, to be believable. We teachers must continue to challenge our singers to develop vocal excellence, and to be stylistically sophisticated in their choices. So, we must present to them the vocal music of our times. Of course that means we ourselves must be familiar with this repertoire!

LL: What do you think student singers should focus on as they prepare for your master class?

MHS: I hope singers will focus on their healthy technique, beautiful singing, and the story they want to tell. We are musicians who have been given the responsibility and gift of words! When the singers perform in class, I expect them to live through the text….I expect they will tell the story……I expect they will communicate!

Linda Lister

Author, composer, director, singer, and professor at UNLV.

Advice for the Emerging Artist

Creating a Three-Year Plan from Student to Professional

by Ann Baltz, featured presenter at
NOA's 70th National Conference

Every successful businessperson knows that having a well-defined product and a strong business plan is crucial to their success. Most singers have neither. In schools, they are focused on technique, repertoire, theory, history, and recitals. After they graduate with a performance degree there seems to be a general goal of “I want to have an international career.” It is rare to find a student who is aware of what it takes to reach that level of the business or, in general, how to break down goals into smaller viable phases.

It is crucial that we train our students not only musically but also in fundamental business skills. There are a few schools that offer semester-long entrepreneurship courses but, as a guest artist in schools and summer programs, I’ve realized that most music students do not have the basic business knowledge they will need when they graduate. It is for these students that I teach an interactive one- or two-hour career planning session in which they learn to define their product, identify their career goals, break down goals into actionable tasks, and begin a three-year plan to achieve their goals.

When asked, a majority of students will describe their career trajectory like this: “Graduate, get into a young artist program, get management, sing leading roles at big companies, become famous.” Careers, of course, rarely happen like that. In the career planning sessions, I teach in universities and conservatories, I ask probing questions about individual students’ goals to uncover what they really want. For example, what does having an international career or becoming a famous singer mean to them? How important is notoriety to them? Do they like to travel constantly? Are they ok with living in hotels most of the time? How important is having a home, family, and a garden to them? The conversation frequently comes around to the fact that what they may really want is to perform at a high level of music-making with colleagues who are excellent musicians. That is a more specific goal that is readily actionable. Questions like these can offer a dose of reality about what their goal entails. If they determine that having a family and home is important to them, they can adjust their goal to a local, regional, or national performance career that might also include a teaching-artist position. There have been a few cases in which a student realized that they did not want to have a performance career but wished to pursue art, education, or arts management. One student tentatively offered that she wanted to start a music school for disadvantaged children in her home country. The moment she spoke that truth, her energy shifted, and it became clear that this was her passion.

My intent in these conversations is to encourage singers to consider what they want for their lives -- apart from what their parents, teachers, friends, and the social media world thinks they should do – and to be ok with that. Helping singers think for themselves and discover what they would love to do with their lives is a gift we can give them that, hopefully, will lead them to greater clarity, satisfaction and happiness.

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Ann Baltz

Ann Baltz is the creator of OperaWorks™ and as a director and clinician has consistently focused on student development and health. She will be presenting “Creating a 3-year Plan from Student to Professional” at our January conference in Savannah. www.annbaltz.com

Composer Corner

Talking to Creators

by Ann Marie Wilcox-Daehn

In this edition of our column dedicated to composers and compositions, I reached out to some of the presenters who will be featured at our upcoming NOA Convention in Savannah. I asked each two questions (though I have many more). Our January gathering will include so many composers and champions of new and diverse works that I may have to clone myself to get to it all!

See you in Savannah!

Ann Marie

Jerod Impichcha̱achaaha' Tate

Composer of SHELL SHAKER

www.jerodtate.com

What do you want audiences to walk away with from your opera?

I wish for the audience to feel beautifully connected to this universal story, regardless of their personal ethnic or national origin. I also wish for the audience to feel they have witnessed the creation of an artistic monument to the Chickasaw and North American Indian people.

What is a fun fact about the creation of your show?

I created an additional romantic lead, named after my son, Heloha. (Heloha is our Chickasaw word for Thunder.)

It is the very first opera created entirely in an American Indian language.

Rose Freeman

Director and Librettist

www.rosefreeman.org

What is your favorite aria or ensemble by a living composer?

Almera's Aria in Dark Sisters

What is your favorite fun fact or story about directing a new work?

In a recent development of Oroboros' production of Hildegard Von Bingen's Order of the Virtues, we utilized sound mandalas to improvise sonic interludes and storytelling between sections of the virtues, developing a new work entirely honoring the life story of Hildegard through her composed chants. Many magical things happened in this process as we developed text and music to tell her story and perform this piece at the Benedictine Convent in Chicago. Once we were done debating which style of Latin we'd be utilizing in the chants (Germanic Latin-which we of course later regretted), we collaboratively wrote text to tell her story. At one point, we were in the point of her being trapped in the walls of being an anchorite, enraged and lost. We had made so many beautiful sounds and knew we needed to reach into ourselves and find our own rages and sonic wailings when we are at our darkest and know no way out. Ariel Andrew, a formidable soprano, played victory and led the charge. As we played, we collectively discovered and documented how the sound escalated, discovering the rhythms and dynamics as we continued the work. Of course, the full roar of these seven sopranos and mezzos didn't reveal itself until our final run, where the sound of women's rage echoed through the halls of the sanctuary. For a moment after, all we could hear was these singers catching their breath and we knew we had found the sound of something both eternal and new.

Bruce Trinkley

Composer

www.brucetrinkley.com

What is your favorite aria by a living composer?
My favorite aria by a living composer is Ariel’s first aria, “Fear, fear to the sinner” from Act One Scene Three of the Tempest by Thomas Adès. The selection, like the full role, can only be sung by a handful of sopranos. It lies so high in the range that it is mostly impossible to understand the text. I appreciate the audacity of the composer, and applaud his complete devotion to his art. It is a splendid showpiece for the soprano who has the range and dares to sing the role.

What is a fun fact about your compositional process?

Regarding my own work, I have two paramount goals when I compose: to set the text in such a manner that the audience can understand it and to craft music that contributes to the flow of the narrative and life of the character. These goals explain why one of the very first steps in my own compositional process involves getting the text in hardcopy and marking the accents and stresses for the entire piece. Much like we were taught to scan poetry in high school, I scan the text I am about to set to music. This pencil and paper exercise becomes foundational to the rhythmic structure of my finished music. I find that preserving the natural stresses of an English text goes a long way to making the words comprehensible.

Jodi Goble

Composer of MILLER'S DAUGHTER and THE ELEANORS

www.jodigoble.com

What do you want audiences to walk away with from your opera?

The Miller’s Daughter is an operatic retelling of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin that tells the story of the Wanderer and the Miller’s Daughter in a dramatic, all-hands-on-deck way that brings alive the whole community of characters mentioned in Schubert’s original. I’d love it if people left feeling like the new original music blended with Schubert’s iconic tunes and helped to put a new spin on that old story.

What is your favorite fun fact about the creation of your show?

The Brook is a composite character sung by the treble ensemble, and our premiere cast *loved* how dangerous and morally ambiguous they got to be playing her!

Jennifer Piazza-Pick

Soprano, Educator, Advocate for Women Composers

www.jenniferpiazzapick.com

I know your session is a call to action. What is your favorite aria by a female composer?

My favorite aria by a woman changes almost weekly! But if I have to pick one this week, I would say "Beyond All Price" from The Scarlett Letter by Lori Laitman..

What is your favorite fun fact or story about performing or directing new works?

I love collaborating with the composers! Getting a window into every composer's creative process is so exciting. That is definitely the best part of performing new works! I have a soprano-clarinet duo called “Whistling Hens” that only performs music by women. As you might imagine, there isn't a lot of repertoire for such an interesting instrumentation, so we have to commission a lot of music. Something fun was when Jennifer Stevenson wrote a 5-movement work for us called Musical Invective. The fourth movement uses the music critic's quote that gave us our name: "Women composers are at best whistling hens." After I sing that line, we both whistle, and I just love that!

Ann Marie Daehn

Director of Missouri State University Opera Theatre

Missouri State University

In Review

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant,
a Chamber Opera for family audiences in two Acts

by Lynette Pfund

This opera is a fun fusion of a Sherlock Holmes mystery with the fairytale, Jack and the Beanstalk. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves in the middle of a mystery involving the death of a giant. The suspected killer, young Jack Bale, calls on Holmes to solve the case. Holmes soon finds out that there is more going on than his logical mind can deduce. Magic may be real, and fairytales can come true.

Sherlock Holmes (Andrew Walton) in “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant” at Portland State Opera. Photo: Nina Johnson.

An Opera in Two Acts

Act I: Three locations in London, England

Scene 1: Holmes and Watson’s 221 Baker Street flat

Scene 2: A street in London with Zamir’s cart

Scene 3: Anna Bale’s dilapidated house

Act II: Two locations in the magical land of NorWood

Scene1: Blunderbore and Merilee’s house

Scene 2: The Spring of Life in NorWood Forest

Zamira (March Steiger) takes Dr. Watson (Johnny Derby) aside to sell him some magic while Sherlock (Andrew Walton) watches in “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant” at Portland State Opera.

Photo: Nina Johnson.

Show specs:

Sherlock Holmes and the Case

of the Fallen Giant

Music by Evan Meier

Libretto by E. M. Lewis

Review:

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant was commissioned by American Lyric Theater and premiered in New York City in February 2020. There are two versions of the score: the original with a duration of approximately 90-minutes and an educational version of 60-minutes. It is scored for chamber ensemble and there are piano reductions for both. Musically, the vocal lines are lyrical, and the accompaniment contains most of the dissonance. However, since the show is dramatically strong and moves at a expeditious pace, younger audiences will not be turned off by the slightly modern harmonic language.

There are eight singing roles and no chorus. The role of Jack is labeled for treble voice and previous productions have cast the role with child singers and young professionals. The casting of Zamira, Ann Bale, and Merille is straightforward and is attainable for undergraduate students. If you have young professionals, the roles offer moments to shine. The role of Sherlock Holmes is a traditional tenor range with some high sections in Scene 1, but nothing overwhelming for a young professional. The lower male roles, however, may need to be cast with more mature voices. The roles of Watson and Lastrade call for baritones that are comfortable singing predominately in their upper voices. The bass, Blunderbore, is a small role but has a few higher notes.

For producers and directors:

Here are some creative challenges to keep in mind:

Merlee and Blunderbore are giants. Casting and costumes will need to be considered.
The opera is set in five very different locations: some realistic and some mythical. There are some specified needs for these locations, but overall, they can be managed with some imagination.
Magical elements include, people disappearing and a bean that grows into a beanstalk. Throughout the opera Holmes and Zamira have an ongoing argument of the powers of logic vs. magic, so the moments of magic should feel extraordinary.
A harp player or a keyboardist playing an instrument with a harp effect for the magic harp is needed. The magic harp functions as another character in the opera. The harp performs operatic themes which are clues that assist Holmes in solving the mystery. It plays extensively in both acts and communicates with musical excerpts from Das Rheingold, Tosca, Mefistofele, Rusalka, L'elisir d'amore, and Humperdinck’s Sleeping Beauty. These excerpts could be incorporated into an opera outreach curriculum for music educators.

Along with a package for music educators, there are ways to assist teachers in supporting literacy in the classroom. In Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant there are numerous literary references. Several fairy tales are mentioned: Pinocchio, Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and four of Sir Collin Davis’ Sherlock Holmes stories: Hound of the Baskervilles, The Disappearance of Lady Carfax, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, and The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone.

Many reading and writing curriculums incorporate the reading, re-imagining, and rewriting of familiar stories. Our postmodern fascination with reworking literature is reflected in popular culture such as Into the Woods, Shrek, The Percy Jackson series (modernized Greek and Roman mythology), The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, etc. Elementary, middle school, and high school audiences will enjoy, understand, and relate to this opera.

Helpful hints:

Here are lessons that can be drawn from the opera:

Logic is helpful, but it is not the only way to perceive the world around you.
Keep an open mind and don’t jump to conclusions.
Things around you may seem large and scary, but many times they just need a little attention and respect.

Lynette Pfund

Opera Theater Production Assistant at the University of Florida College of the Arts and Chair of the Young People's Opera Committee.

Affinity Post

Programs with Graduate Focus

by David Ronis

With the fall semester nearly completed and the NOA conference in Savannah on the horizon, I’m looking forward to another session of our affinity group for schools with graduate programs. Those at our initial meeting last January agreed on the value of the session. Our group of thoughtful and caring colleagues gathered to share our challenges and successes – with students, colleagues, finances, productions – and more. As a director, I’ve come to very much appreciate all kinds of collaboration, whether it’s artistic or academic. And convening this group presented a wonderful opportunity for us to put our heads together and truly help each other.

Although not intended to be a gripe session, we jumped right in and articulated some of our challenges. Most of us expressed a certain amount of frustration with the state of recruitment these days – essentially, that potential graduate students often end up “shopping around” for the best funding offers (who can blame them, with high tuition costs?), and that our “sales” efforts are often stymied by lack of scholarship and assistantship money. But we also shared some very creative strategies for addressing those issues and methods for putting together funding packages.

Switching to productions and repertoire, we noted that, more and more, many of us have been choosing repertoire for smaller forces, as opposed to larger ones. Sure, we’re still doing Figaro and Bohème, but we’re also doing more chamber operas – and not necessarily by choice. Often, issues concerning performance spaces, orchestral personnel, or finances are involved. But there is a terrific silver lining here in that composers understand this and are writing a lot of new material for smaller forces. So, we’ve been able to use that to our advantage, introducing our students and audiences more than ever to new works and cultivating a culture of openness and exploration. All around the room we concurred, reporting many examples of doing smaller scale new works that were wonderful experiences for all involved.

We also shared the strong belief that it’s our responsibility not to just provide education, training, and performance opportunities for our students, but to try to realistically contribute to preparing students for life after school. This is especially important for graduate students. There were some terrific suggestions from those in the group – from creating dedicated courses (or, in some cases modules within courses) on The Business of Performing, to collaborating with arts administration programs at our schools, to holding valuable forums on career expansion for artists. We agreed that the most important term in that last sentence is expansion. Careers in the arts are changing and we are choosing to look at that not in an often-visited negative light (e.g. “there’s just not as much work as there used to be…,” “artist fees at opera companies haven’t increased since I was singing regionally 15 years ago…,” “you can’t make a living as a performer these days…,” etc.). Rather, we see incredible examples of young artist-entrepreneurs who are not only contributing to the development of our art form in exciting ways, but truly expanding what it means to be a performing artist. We are happy to encourage our students to take off their proverbial operatic career blinders, broaden their vision, take a good inward look, and think about possibilities.

Although the group didn’t meet during the year, I’m very much looking forward to checking in with everyone as we continue these important conversations in Savannah. For anyone who has a graduate program at their school, please join us at the Programs with Graduate Focus Affinity Group discussion in Savannah!

David Ronis

David Ronis is an Associate Professor and the Karen K. Bishop Director of Opera at the Mead Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Move & Act

Breaking Down the Aria (Part Two)

by Sally Stunkel

In our August edition, Sally helped us apply action verbs and determine goals for arias and songs. In part two, she helps us further break down the aria (or song) and provides exercises you can try on your own or in Opera Workshop.

Voice teachers and coaches must concentrate on the music and the sounds the singer makes to interpret it. If, however, none of the dramatic work has been done, the music will not live up to its full potential. The work described here should happen early in the learning process.

Form and Goals

Once you have established the overall objective of a piece, you can break the aria or song into smaller units. These can be verses or any form sections - modulation and tempi are great indicators of change. Each section requires its own goal. If your song is about convincing yourself that you are happy with your man, you might take the following steps:

Verse 1: Examine someone’s insulting comment about him.

Verse 2: Try to understand their perspective.

Verse 3: Seek the truth of the situation.

Verse 4: Recall what drew you to him in the first place.

Verse 5: Imagine him in front of you and speak to his image.

These intentions can be broken down further into individual lines, which can then be identified by simple verbs: to question, to entice, to accuse, to remember, etc.

Types of Songs

Songs can be placed in larger categories of purpose. I have included musical theatre examples as well as opera because their relevance is readily obvious.

Problem solving songs – The character has a problem or an issue that needs to be worked through and solved. ("Una voce poco fa," "Dove sono," "There’s gotta be something better than this," "If he walked into my Life")

Discovery songs – The character realizes something for the first time about himself, someone, or a situation. (Composer’s aria, "Porgi amor," "Johanna," "Why do I love you?," "Send in the Clowns," "My little girl," "Bill," "Over the rainbow") These are especially revealing because the character is changing in front of us. This is what audiences pay to see.

Justifying songs – The character is defending himself for a belief or action.(Iago’s Credo, "Hai già vinta la causa")

Influencing/Convincing songs – The character is trying to change someone else’s thoughts, beliefs, or point of view to help themselves. ("Parto, parto," "Nothing’s gonna hurt you," "Voi che Sapete," "I’m gonna wash that man right outtamy hair," "O mio Babbino Caro")

Discharging songs – Emotions have built to a point where they explode, and things are said that have never been said before. ("Epiphany," "Would I leave you?," "You’ve got to be taught," "Hai già vinta la causa")

Distracting songs – This type of song is meant to hide what is really going on. ("Were I thy bride," "Roi du Thulé") Pro tip: Play what is being hidden.

Entertainment or Messenger Songs – Storytelling/Information songs ("Monsieur Triquet’s tidbit" from Manon or the glorious Pierrot’s "Tanzlied" from Die Tote Stadt or the Tenor in Rosenkavalier) If your only moment on stage is delivering a message, don’t waste it! Even minor characters have desires and goals. When your character is “entertaining” or delivering a message, ask yourself, is there meaning in this song for me? Will Cleopatra kill me for my message? Have a point of view about it or ask what it means to you!!! If it appears to have no meaning, give it some.

Many songs could belong in more than one category. Let’s examine "Hai già vinta la causa" which could be seen as a justifying song as well as a discharging song.

Be sympathetic. As a discharging song, one could spend the whole aria raging and venting, but it is long and has too many musical changes to sustain five minutes of venting. It would not encourage the audience to have sympathy for the Count. Make choices that encourage the audience’s interest in and sympathy for your journey.
Consider the text. In the recitative preceding the aria, the Count expresses shame at his behavior and dismay at what has happened to his honor. Fearing he may be the dupe in a new Figaro plot, he turns his back on honor and in a recitative that is rich enough to count as an aria itself, vows revenge. The recitative is complete, yet the Count goes on to sing an aria for seven more pages. It would be redundant for him to express the same thing in the recitative and aria, but if he declares his vengeance on Figaro and then the memory of his honor returns, it forces him to examine and justify his behavior, providing an acting choice that allows exploration of his insecurities, jealousy, resentments, and the fear of being ridiculous.
Imagery. The singer can imagine that he sees Figaro in front of him and “speak” directly to him, challenging him, and accusing him, (use active verbs). Most of all, he is trying to find justification for his actions.

The Love

Love is an essential element of any song. “Love” doesn’t necessarily mean romantic love or sex. When I say every aria must have love in it, I mean there must be something you are fighting for that you care about deeply. It could be your pride, honor, ideals, or sense of justice.

Look for Opposites

Beware of “happy” or “sad” arias – that is too generic. Instead, consider, why an aria is “sad.” It is usually because something joyful has been taken away. If you are singing a “sad” aria, find a place to remember the joy. This becomes especially useful when singing the song out of context, like in an audition. Even in happy arias, one can remember when there wasn’t joy or imagine the joy being taken away. Perhaps the character feels she doesn’t deserve the joy as in Amy’s aria from Little Women.

Go for the Positive

Whether you are singing about dying or killing yourself remember this, when a character gives up, so does the audience. They are not there to watch apathy. An example is Carmen’s Act III aria, "En vain pour éviter." The cards tell Carmen that death is coming for her. If you only play the text, it seems as though she is giving up. However, as is often the case, the text is not consistent with her actions. If I were playing Carmen and read those cards, I would be pissed that fate is trying to take away my power (something I care about deeply i.e. the love) and if fate is going to take me, well, damn it, it’s going to be on my terms!

Repetition

This is a frequent feature in music and text. Repeating the same emotion is a wasted opportunity to develop your character. In daily life, we repeat things because we were not heard the first time, were not satisfied with the outcome of our first declaration, made an external or internal discovery that altered the situation, our feelings about the statement have changed, or because emotions are building. The music will help you find variations. When the music is identical, artists are challenged to create their own differences. This is where subtext is a lifesaver.

Subtext

A voice teacher challenged me once by asking “Why not just play the text?” There are several reasons. The least interesting choice you can make is to limit yourself to playing the text. Miles Davis used to say, “Don't play what's there; play what is not there.” The text is not enough! The composer dictates the pitch, pace, intensity, and rhythm of the text and your job is to justify it. Don’t forget that music includes moments of silence, but that doesn’t mean you can stop thinking or moving your internal life forward. Why did you stop singing? Perhaps this is the time for the character to think.

Why else should we use subtext? In his wonderful book, Auditioning for the Musical Theater, Fred Silver shares several reasons.

The song is overdone, and you need your audience to watch and listen with interest. ("Deh vieni," "Caro nome," etc.)
The lyrics are foreign, vague, or poetic. (French mélodie)
You don’t relate to the song or understand its character. (It may be one-dimensional or a stereotype.)
The lyrics offend you or make you uncomfortable.
The song is simplistic and lacks obvious dramatic content.
Words and phrases repeat excessively.
There is no acting partner to relate to (as in an audition).
Lyrics move slower than speech, so the audience can guess what you’re about to say.
The aria is in a foreign language, so details are lost.

Exercise 1 - Subtext

This allows students to see the variety, depth, and interest they can bring to a song.

Learn and memorize a classic like, "Caro mio ben."
Devise an original situation in which these lyrics might work. (Past scenarios have included yearning for a pair of shoes; berating a beloved dog for peeing in the house; and confronting a drug-using sibling.)
Write out possible subtext – one line per phrase. Include musical intros, interludes, and postludes. Make sure it fits the timing of the sung phrase. Do not rephrase the lyrics! “Caro mio ben” can be subtext as “You son of a bitch,” “Oh no, not again!” etc. but NOT “Oh, my dear” etc.
Practice it (no music, no singing) as a monologue until it is memorized and deeply felt.
Play a recording and practice the monologue with the timing of the song. (no singing)
Sing it, but still play the unspoken monologue.

It is fascinating to watch a class of 20 sing the same song with such variety of interpretation.

Important note: Subtext must be fluid! It should NOT remain exactly the same but should stay alive to the moment, whether in response to another acting partner or your discoveries as a character and singer. This keeps it interesting to the audience, scene partners, and you. Subtext (unlike text) is an ever-developing entity.

Exercise 2 - Active Verbs

In my August article I discussed active verbs and gave you some examples. My main exercise for active verbs is called “Hello, hello” (If you want a comprehensive list, try the book Actions, The Actor’s Thesaurus by Caldarone and Lloyd-Williams).

Get two students up and give them this dialogue:

Student 1 – Hello

Student 2– Hello

Student 1– How are you?

Student 2– How are you?

Student 1– I’m fine

Student 2– I’m fine