words

the keyboard

adrian — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:19:00 GMT

so when tuning was developed, the solution to being able to play in all keys with ten fingers was to create fixed strings or pipes of 11 scale degrees, each one tuned to a pitch that was a compromise between all the various shades of pitch that scale degree could have. so for example the major third on the piano... E is a tolerable major third up from C and also a tolerable major second up from D, but not a beautiful third or second. it would be annoying to add more strings or pipes for the other notes, since then you couldn't reach an octave with one hand using our tradition keyboard layout. now that we have electronic keyboards, there is no reason to stick with the one-to-one key to pitch relationship. each degree (keyboard key) of the scale can have several tunings. someone build it, dammit!

burningman is not

adrian — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:18:09 GMT

a retreat a concert a music festival a showdown a parking lot christmas catharsis a museum a conference a horserace woodstock muscle beach the moulin rouge a scene cannes a seminar a be/love/teach/die-in vacation any other religious festival or holiday, maybe holloween plus holi easter summercamp

burningman is

adrian — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:17:35 GMT

a camp meeting a revival the 4th of july a panic a renegade hollywood backlot/soundstage a pickup game in an abandoned lot labor day a tailgate party a rave a monster truck rally altamont a carnival Carnival a release valve for capitalist accumulation (social and material) charismatic religious transformation ecstasy a masked ball a puppet show with stuff (what's that stuff thing from?) the tireswing down by the creek a temporary trailer park the playground a holding environment the junkyard/the dump (for pickers) the freestore a fertility right irrigation farming car camping the county fair an intermezzo a family reunion a parade an imaginary garden with real toads a gated community the galleria a work camp an orgy re-creation

hura geil

adrian — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:41:50 GMT

inspiration is a bitch mother to manage, this is the first time i've planned to practice and then not officially practiced. i just want to listen to this music my friend sent me and dance and try to see how well i can sing fiona apple songs.

directional

adrian — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:42:16 GMT

virginia woolf says "style emerges from what you are trying to say" the story of a film emerges from its images one singer said the character she portrays emerges from the notes of the music love emerges from sex and sex appeal david allen says career emerges from what you spend your time doing

american opus

adrian — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:44:09 GMT

so i wrote a song and it goes really fast, too fast to sing comfortably. so i'm singing it anyway, trying to find ways to meld the syllables so i can flow. i'd been listening to the way roxanne ashante raps so loose, she really blurs her words together beautifully. and what i found was that the easiest way to get all the syllables in was so really get down into my accent. i mean my own new hampshire/east los angeles/brooklyn way of speaking. the words were tasty. i also sang from the pit of my stomach (a tense stomach) the way kurt cobain said he did, and the combination of these techniques made something i can be happy with. can't wait to do this to an aria! so here's my thought: enough of this italian language fascism. all languages are important and tasty, but the route to that experience comes through one's own native language. there are so many accents in this country! ren woods singing "aquarius", or jollie holland singing "lakes of ponchartrain", and if you listen to mathieu chedid singing "belleville rendezvous" in english through his french, he makes the english words so interesting through his intimacy with them. how are you going to dig into some verdi recit. without having done the same in your own vernacular? some american operas make this possible, even if we don't take advantage of it. how many times have you heard an opera singer sing summertime as if it was french? i know i know, it's way up there, that's gershwin's fault. when mozart started writing singspiel, i'm sure his singers felt like they were singing an italian opera in german, which they were, but because of their persistence, wagner was eventually able to write something that took advantage of the german literary and song tradition and was still opera, and even extended the resources of opera. when tchaikovsky wrote evgenii onegin everyone called him an italian, but if you listen to galina vishnevskaya sing tatiana, she sounds like a contemporary russian, not someone singing in a foreign language. i would say bernstein's candide is a european opera with english words, a good start. stephen sondheim, also good. hair and west side story... those don't take full advantage of our opera heritage, much less the developments of modernist orchestral writing, but they're authentic social commentary, which is completely necessary, and they also use many of our american musical resources - electric guitars, native uses of the voice, american dances... what could we do now with the resources that we have?! dj's and banjos!

back after breakup

adrian — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:14:53 GMT

i've been droning. i live in brooklyn in a room like a practice room. i found a mirror on the street and i lost my will to sing schoenberg so i match pitch with songs i used to hear on the schoolbus radio and i sing sa and pa and ni. chris and i broke up. i've been crying for a long time. i'm still trying to figure out the life/work thing. i reread Air Guitar by Dave Hickey, which makes me feel like capitalism, or at least mercantilism can be a field for... transgression? either that or living in new york is making me feel like maybe i could... play along? then again, blasphemy! i guess i'm not suppose to say that i always hear more music coming out of the pj's than out of the conservatories when i bike by. just saying. it just seems like the people who have been creating american culture for the past 100 years have been only marginally associated with capitalism. you know, tony conrad wrote some really beautiful little songs. so weird! http://tonyconrad.net/songs.htm

hibernating a website

adrian — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 23:44:47 GMT

sometimes you have a project, or a challenge, or a relationship, that has so many issues and unformulated problems that you just have to stay in your room for a whole week with alain badiou's recently translated _being and event_ and piles and piles of index cards that are the notes for your new book, and just sort and think and sort and think, until finally the project you're really thinking about, in this case niknaz's new website, figures itself out and floats to the surface. then you wake up in the morning, go for a long walk and imagine what cyberpunk looks like, and get to work!

hair combing

adrian — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 07:00:49 GMT

i find this helps when i'm warming up. relaxes the face? feels good? helps self image and presentation i.e. posture? i have no idea.

bob dylan saved my music

adrian — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 06:41:28 GMT

so, angst and hope, it snowed last night, i read that french peasants used to practically hibernate for 7 months of the year, sleeping next to their pigs. etymonline.com says hibernate is like gheima or zima, winter, also hima, sanskrit for snow as in himalaya. i say there's a bear in there. berlin is suppose to be named for bears. anyway, i finally found a pianist for the hanging gardens cycle. he's very sweet and only every so slightly condescending, but i can deal because he's in it for, get this, the greatness of the work. boy you academics are scarce outside the gates of eden, and it sure is good to meet one of you! by the way in the real estate office in park slope where i work hangs a framed newsweek cover, from like, 1994 or something, showing these two figleaf beclothed people running over the brooklyn bridge beneath a stormy sky and a big hand pointing toward what must have been at the time cheaper real estate. so i've been having more discussions with my friends in and out of universities about the role of the intellectual. i finished das kapital, volume I, i'm taking a class on it at cuny sponsored by the brecht forum. only $75. my one friend, j, current student of composition on the west coast, likes to argue that music is a totally viable career choice, and you can, if you try, make a decent living at it. for me the problem is what "trying" involves. it's not necessarily bad: getting your work written down and organized so it's available to people, forging relationships with potential performers, going to conferences, keeping up with the academic debates. okay. but there are strings attached to all those things. plus you have to represent western culture to the untutored masses of your undergraduates as this monolithic great benificent complicated system of rules and order, when really it was developed by a bunch of people who didn't always take it that seriously, who certainly do not represent all the musicians who ever played, even in europe, who borrowed tons of stuff from people we never talk about, like countless anonymous wedding singers, gypsies, jews, turks, folk musicians, and others, and who learned much of what they knew simply by playing, not by studying. i guess if anyone was to teach in a deeper way, it would be my friend. i say music is not a viable career choice because everyone should have the time and opportunity to make music as well as they want, given our current level of prosperity. we should have none of these crap 9-5 jobs that are really 8-7 by the time you stay late and commute home. none of this insecurity about whether you're going to lose your place in the ladder of employment if you work part time. and there are plenty of resources to allow us all to play music together. there must be a lot more people who want to play music than who can under the current system. and there must be a lot of musicians who wouldn't mind doing something else part of the time but who have to be "professional" so they have to work 80 hours a week whether in grad school or out, making music into a "viable career". i don't want to work 80 hours a week at anything. i want to spend some time digging holes with a shovel and changing lightbulbs, some time solving problems that don't have to do with music, a little time teaching, and some time practising and performing. and if our american system can give me that within the framework of capitalism, along with healthcare, then maybe i will reevaluate my current critique. also i was feeling really depressed about singing opera because i was watching these women on youtube and thinking, there's no way i can care enough about opera to be able to do it "for real" with an orchestra and with other good singers. and then i was watching keyshia cole videos, thinking boy she's a great singer but why does she only get to sing about love, and why do all these singers have to be so pretty? i'm sure there are 10 singers who are unattractive for every attractive one. and then i looked up bob dylan's "a hard rain's gonna fall" the one where he's younger. and i thought you know, this is my vernacular. this touches me deep, i'm singing opera to help me with this. i've been writing songs for a few years and one day i hope they're like this. and this genre allows a level of social critique that i've never seen in opera or indian classical music or most pop music that gets on the radio. and damn he looks sincere.

Singing again after burningman

adrian — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 03:18:37 GMT

Last weekend I road my 150 mi. from New York to Philadelphia with eight other people. It was amazing. I feel nine feet high. And it's beautiful autumn! No such thing in California! At dinner when we arrived I met this amazing guy R who may be another spiritually and musically minded person like so many I met at greenman. I always thought to be religious i had to gulp down traditional services. no! Later he told me I was like a character or a bunch of different attributes and he wondered if I mesh together. At first I thought, of course, for you I will tell the story so that I appear to be one person, pleasing to you. But then I thought, no, we really are all made up of different attributes, and to be perfectly honest we would have to present ourselves that way. And then I thought about my obsession with redrawing my history so that I seem to have been a singer, a Singer, A Singer from childhood. I also have a desire to mesh together all of the parts into one coherent identity. preferably one that can apply for grants. "what do you do?" "I do the karnatic/opera singing with improvisors, have been singing all my life" "I make puppets out of paper mache and moss and silk, my mother is an artist" And then I thought, in a relationship with a person, you try to mesh together two independent and changing human beings, and it takes continuous effort. true love over a long period of time takes intention and effort. so wouldn't it be the same for a single human being trying to mesh together disparate parts of the self? So maybe no one is just a singer, unless they're a Famous Singer, but that's just it, we're commodifying the singer part, but there's a lot more there. in real life, singing has meaning only in what it introduces into other spheres: discipline, connection to the body, awareness of time, communication with other beings... somehow it doesn't seem like the converse is true though. I don't only read marx in order to be a better singer. well, but i do it to understand why i don't get paid to sing... i work in order to sing. i have a boyfriend because i need someone to love me so that i can sing. it's just hard to believe i'm really a singer, even combined with other things. do you ever feel that way? oh yeah and for what i learned singing today: played through rachmaninov while singing at the keyboard (thanks mom!) today. sang one note at a time with chords. realized some notes are louder than others because of the harmonic stacking and the overtones. and Rach knows! He knows, he'll put a decrescendo over a note that is a quieter pitch harmonically. Try it!

"daddy still loves you"

adrian — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:07:06 GMT

said this little five year old girl to her mom today. "on what evidence?" said the mom.

poto festival, june

adrian — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:38:39 GMT

spent 9 days near grass valley, california with some beautiful artists. there were composers and poets, political to varying degrees, and about half were women. as a singer, it's nice to talk with composers, but it's even better to talk with poets and composers. sometimes i think i started singing because i missed words. with the poets it was easier to talk about visceral beauty - the feeling of words in mouth, than it is with composers. also we had some film makers, talking about beauty with them too. especially a certain young american poet of my generation who used rhythm, you could taste the lines, i guess it hasn't been bred out of her yet. but i was thinking, what does a university job do to an artist? is that life too? is there fertility in that life? is there time? do we idealize that life the way some people's parents idealized the suburbs or going "back to the land"? and what some may say is the opposite of beauty: politics, i remembered while talking to our elder statesman poet that All of the composers we venerate were serious activists. i mean, THROUGH their music, and the film makers too like Godard and the germans, Straub and Huillet. And they had serious emotions related to politics. There are so many images of war in those movies, in tight relation with the avant garde perspective. so why are we so shy now? i'm not sure i got a good answer. there were women at this poto: it is always nice to talk with women, our form of discussion is so different. i feel we were there to support each other and learn about different ways to create art. the men tended to get into how their work fit into the history of art, how and whether they had made advances. i think men and women were concerned with both things, but perhaps we wanted different things from such a gathering. i liked it. felt less defensive. one night we lay down in a circle on the floor with our heads pointed in and sang. i sang a drone for a lot of it. i noticed the more constant my drone, the more wildly everyone could improvise over it. so if pop music is the drone to our musical life, allowing improvisation in art and in other realms, then i wouldn't mind contributing to it. that's what they call a holding function in psychotherapy.

my baby!

adrian — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 05:05:38 GMT

i sold my sitar today, my living room is so much less without it's beautiful warm glow and its strings. i tuned it one last time before i gave it away forever, sympathetic strings, forgot the tuning for the lower strings made of copper wire but tuned them all in unison. and i realized it doesn't matter what the "real tuning" is. for so many years i didn't play the sitar because i was intimidated about doing it right... and i passed on a lot of this fear whenever i did play for other people. but as i was talking about the instrument, about how the frets can be moved and the strings can be tuned in different ways, and even during playing we pull the meend... it's an instrument full of possibilities, every possibility, why should we be concerned with doing it right? my ear hears an interval, as i tune the sympathetic strings i feel like adjusting a fret, that suggests a scale or an idea. why not paint with sound colors? why not be free? how much more adjustable are our voices than this sitar? of course it has been nine years since i first studied indian music, maybe it is finally enough a part of me that i can relax the boundaries. when that will happen with opera, i don't know. performance is tomorrow, wish me luck.

114

adrian — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 02:29:24 GMT

there's this great play http://www.wischik.com/lu/senses/fever.html called "the fever" by wallace shawn, the bad guy in the princess bride movie. so i know some of you are activists or have strong feelings about the current distribution of wealth around the world. and by wealth, i include cultural wealth: knowledge and access to information, in our case, the ability to read music, perform, etc. so how can an american opera singer do something about inequality? can a person justify spending many hours each day working to perfect her art when she ought to be working to make concrete change? even teaching music seems like something that should be done after everyone already has enough to eat and a place to sleep at night. you know? but seeing as how i won't be fully employed as a singer for a number of years yet, there might be time to do something helpful as a day job, but really, how many jobs help shift wealth from those who have it to those who need it? except perhaps teaching - shifting cultural wealth. but here's the thing with teaching: if you work with young people who come from low income households, even if you do a great job, you might just end up training workers to perpetuate the empire. many of them will want the "american dream" and can you blame them? there needs to be a more equitable system for those people to enter, right? and it takes funding to create such a system, or to change our current one. but how many capitalists would like to fund such a change? must that work also be done for free? but then i have three jobs: artist, activist, and another job to feed myself. how will there ever be time? i can't even get myself to practice today for my performance on friday, even though i have no obligations except packing to leave in two weeks, and a whole apartment to myself with plenty of food. if i can't sing under these circumstances, how will i sing with two other jobs? and yet, millions of people take three jobs, tedious and backbreaking, and raise kids besides. so why won't i practice? and i even have the resources to move to new york, or at least try to. practice! practice!

this is my boyfriend

adrian — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:55:36 GMT

what do you think about the expression on his face? i'm working on this charles ives piece called "the housatonic at stockbridge" it has a lot of hymn tunes, i always want to sing it really lightly, but my teacher made me support it more, which makes it actually sound less strained than when i try to sing it like a little girl. it's pretty low; i was trying to make it sound like it was in my middle register. i wish i had time to really dig into its interpretation before juries tomorrow. oh well. i'm reading this book, the drama of the gifted child. it's quite a tear jerker for me. it's written by a psychologist, talking about parents who can't give their child a certain kind of emotional support. and how, if you were a child like that, there's nothing you can do about it now. as anne marie says, "there are all kinds of things that can keep a person from expressing his or her true self." and that truth is so necessary for any performance.

art vs. pop

adrian — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 05:13:39 GMT

my mom watched on old tape of Anything Goes today. she said i had good timing and that she thought i could become a good performer. thanks mom my boyfriend and i had a long talk about whether what we're doing is "worth it" and whether or not it helps people. he finally broke me down about the whole money-for-art conundrum. i had been against that. but duh, someone is supporting you if you're not living off your art. like say, a university, or a rich patron. are those things more honorable than selling paintings or poems or "entertaining" people with music? my friend james said something about not taking entertainment gigs anymore because he would rather be practicing. but i wonder: bach was entertaining while he was experimenting, and by entertaining, i mean he was providing a spiritual service and was being paid for it. isn't the ideal something in between pandering to an audience and playing only for yourself? i had this realization that i hadn't really thought of making a career of something besides art. i thought of being a doctor, but i thought i would always have time for art. now i think nothing less than being an artist would give me enough time. so i was lying in bed thinking of all the jobs i've ever had. i thought about following my friend lee around while he tuned pianos in people's houses and once in the mount washington hotel. when i got to college, i asked if there was a way to arrange an internship with a piano tuner, but they sort of brushed me off - too much of a working class question, like, can i have an internship with the janitors? i thought about working at the greenhouse, mixing soil, having a stern boss. the whole place smelled like earth and wet flowers. at the time i thought growing flowers for other people was so frivolous. they could just grow them from seed. now i think flowers are nice, but i still don't respect those particular customers. i thought about how my mother still paints even though she's never earned her living that way. but she sort of earned her keep by baring a child. after all of it i kept thinking, well, if it is possible, i would like to sing, at least right now. i will consider getting a piano to practice tuning. that would be a nice day job. and opening a scissor sharpening and cutting board refinishing shop. because i think when the economy really starts to go, people are going to stop throwing out so many things. oh, but back to "entertainment": one of the reasons i was so turned off of music as a career is that i want to create something that's unequivocally good, right, everyone does. but music can change. sometimes i get sick of music that i used to love! sometimes i hate a composer because people tell me he or she is horrible, but then i really love the music at some time in my life, or in some performance! or sometimes, a composer will have one good work or one good song, but the rest will be junk! or, Or, one person that i might respect a great deal will like a piece of music, but i won't like it at all, or visa versa! how can a person make art that will be so unstable?! soooooo wish me luck getting some kind of job in new york, where i'm moving in a couple weeks, and where, hopefully, i'll have a chance to study voice with my teachers' teacher. i have no idea what will happen there but, as ACB says in theconcert.blogspot.com, come along for the ride! also, mark applebaum just got tenure at stanford, he's a great teacher, and mark, although i was quite skeptical of you at the time, i'm glad you'll be around to puzzle budding composers and show them the affection you showed us when you taught us to improvise.

master class with AB

adrian — Tue, 15 May 2007 04:42:24 GMT

my first master class i sang santuzza, "voi lo sapete". AB works with interpretation, presence, i would say self esteem, and communication. i was pretty nervous since i had only one chance and i didn't Know her. she liked it. she gave me some blank papers and told me they could be anything at all: love letters, bank statements... i should tell you, santuzza, here, sings to her lover's mother about how he has deflowered her and then run off with his former fiancee (who is married). so she's pretty angry and hurt. i didn't realize how angry until i sang with those papers. the most important thing AB said was that no one was in the room with me. she gave me a chair and said i should get on the floor if i had to. that was the trick. before that, i was playing to the audience, or trying to. now i just sang to myself for the first page, only turning to them on "m'amo, m'amai, m'amai!" - "he loved me, i loved him, i loved him!" and when i turned i really wanted their sympathy. then they really came into the act with me, all leaning forward and looking concerned. it was the first time i've felt like i've said something to an audience. and the papers were: love letters from my lover, letters from him to the other woman, pictures of her and of her husband, some i let fall to the floor, some i handed out to members of the audience

how to create colors with your voice

adrian — Sun, 06 May 2007 23:59:51 GMT

opera workshop performances went well, especially the presentation of the rose. last week i brought my german vowels forward; that brought the consonants forward so that my tongue didn't have to tense up so much. the day of opening night, my teacher reminded me to open the i's on the high notes. duh. it still sounds like "mir", just prettier. our accompanist gave a brilliant suggestion too: conduct ourselves in rehearsal. that way we moved our lines forward rather than waiting to follow the piano, and the piece took on a real force. i also found out that i had been misinterpreting some of the beats - singing as if they were downbeats when they weren't. it's fabulous that we're putting the movement and rhythm and the consonants back into the singing! i used to conduct myself with my hands, during performance, unconsciously, and i used to sing consonants so forcefully that they locked up my throat. then someone told me to keep still, so i stood rigidly, trying not mark meter, trying not to sing any consonants. now i conduct in my head while standing perfectly still, feeling muscles in the sides and stomach oppose the muscles holding my ribs open while singing consonants very gently but firmly, and with little or no activity in the back of the tongue or throat. um, yes, i mean, when everything's going right. i also drew a picture for my director. it's a shame i'm just learning to sing. i would like to give her colors with my voice. but she conducted the picture. woosh, woosh, i like this, she said

what is a lyrico-spinto

adrian — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 07:07:57 GMT

for now? a person whose voice is damn ugly. Anna Russell, comedian, says, "in order to be a singer, you must have a Gorgeous voice, period." and how would you know if you have a gorgeous voice? people would have told you, right? if you were 25 years old, you would freaking know! and the other shocker: voice teachers lie about how well you're doing! this is true. haven't you wondered why the shitty singer hangs around? wonder why she doesn't get the picture? that's not entirely true. i have seen voice teachers pull the squeeze out of someone's throat, and in a few months, after grueling labor, the singer emerges, new, resonant, able to sing decrescendi on the highest notes. or sometimes it just takes the right piece, or a really important audition. anyway, i conclude from this that i have a really ugly voice and will never become an opera singer. ironically, i came here only wanting to improve my technique in order to become a better composer/improvisor. i've never been interested in opera. too politically backward. but i got the bug and now i'm in tears over a comedy sketch about how you shouldn't sing in your house and bug your neighbors because you're no damn good. just stop. no damn good. but seriously, i enjoy practicing, i really enjoy improvising with people, i love working up a new piece with a composer and a chamber ensemble. so i can't stop, i'm sorry, in twenty years you're just going to have to say, "she has solid technique and really brilliant musical ideas, but god is her voice ugly." it's the last day of spring break tomorrow. thank god! finalmente posso praticare! oh yeah, and Cecilia Bartoli rocks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ojM4fb7HuY

techniques

adrian — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:03:07 GMT

i had this dream, and in the dream someone was teaching me how to sing. she said, push out sound like "uuuuuuuuuuuuh" with a little bit of a nasal sound, and use your body but not too much on the low notes, and keep your throat relaxed, and take a relaxed breath, and point the sound toward the front as you come down, and let it fall down the back as you ascend, and put your hand on your belly so your muscles work, and feel a thread pulling straight up through your neck and head, and relax your shoulders, and sing into an oval as you go through the passaggio... and i was thinking, boy, it's not really one technique that we have to learn, it's like a whole bunch, plus when to use each one, not only which notes need what, but what you need as you slowly exhaust yourself and stretch out in the course of an hour. it constantly changes. they say oboists have to constantly readjust the embouchure as the reed gets wet; it guess singing is like that.

not giving up on her piece

adrian — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:58:47 GMT

i have this friend, she wrote a piece for me before she knew about the passaggio. i didn't know about it either. it made my throat lock up after the third page of e4's (not the e above middle c, the next one up), but i thought, this is what we hardcore new musicians suck up and do, damn it. but then i learned from my voice teacher (who sings new music but also has great bel canto) that too much singing in the passaggio (the place where head voice starts) will kill anyone, even a high soprano, which i am not. see there's a lot of shame and confusion mixed up here. if only i were good enough, if only my voice sat higher. so i said to my friend, look, i learned that your piece is actually impossible but we can fix it! just bring some of the notes down so i can rest for a couple beats. but she said ach! i'm not going to rewrite my piece. it's meant to be that way and i'm sorry it's not possible and i'd rather not change it so let's not do it at all. how can you argue with that? i couldn't. luckily, my boyfriend said to her, hey, you shouldn't give up. and to be fair, she's really tired right now and busy. so i said, give it a few days, and if no solution emerges from your brain, we won't do it. so i'm holding out hope. i've always been one to rewrite people's pieces: rachmaninov, Robert D. Vandall. in college i decided this meant that i was a composer. But i would like to be a performer. Can be a performer who engages with the people who write music, not as a functionary, but as an equal?

a "starving" artist?

adrian — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:41:46 GMT

in the l.a. times, an article, "if the butler does it, you'll pay" about a lady who trains people "with an MA in art history" to serve as butlers, housekeepers, nannies. it's not suppose to be demeaning, she says, it's like, "someone is the giver, someone is the receiver. They're very equal roles." okaaay the number of people earning more than 200,000 a year has increased 45% since 1999 in southern california, and these people need servants! the good news is that for now they're having a lot of trouble filling all of these "household worker" positions. so for the time being, all we art historians, musicologists, COMPOSERS, opera singers, art and music teachers, sculptors and dancers are still walking dogs, playing church gigs, waitressing, waiting, tutoring, fixing bikes, writing reviews, and selling ourselves into various forms of localized serfdom, but not actual serfdom, to put food on the table. i said, it's like la boheme. but then i thought no, those artists were Actually starving. so really, what if i can't afford a car or organic cheese. i need to get out there and dumpster dive with the rest of them/you. the problem is that the art career takes so much Time, there's none left for work. if you became a domestic, how could you also make art?

pop opera

adrian — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 07:39:32 GMT

so i'm trying to learn how to sing more legato these days. listened to a recording of a song i wrote: no problems with legato. why? do you ever wonder why there are tons of italian opera singers? do you think we would have it easier if opera were a bigger part of our culture? it's hard to resurrect dead things. working on "voi lo sapete" and rusalka's song to the moon. thinking about doing the international czech and slovak vocal competition again. will i ever feel comfortable enough singing classical music to want to perform in another competition? don't know. it would be nice if we could improvise like they used to. there's a great song "ogni pena piu spietata" - it sits pretty low, and it's baroque so it invites improvisation. it's fun to sing arias as if you were performing in a coffee shop.

opera singing

adrian — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 06:29:31 GMT

reading theconcert.blogspot.com, nice words of a singer - human being who sings? listening to my friend perform with the guy obrecht duo at the somedaylounge.com, streaming! his offstage laughter filtering in from 1000 miles away. my mom called. a parent who contacts infrequently. it was normal all of the sudden. i guess there's too much intimacy for four years of semi-silence to erase. so, singing, been at pasadena city college for ! 2 years now after graduating from real college, singing opera! but i'm an improvisor (http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jrobfox/sic/sic.html - cobra; something irrelevent) and composer, undercover!. singing gestures: open up and down at the same time don't stay up too late focus, but keep mind open (hardest) let the music tell you how to sing it record rehearsals forget mistakes until later relaxed breath relaxed jaw and tongue expect it to sound like crap, let it so far... it has felt like improvising once? twice? in two years. i have internalized the desire for opera fame. i hope it goes away.