There’s no place like home.
Landing on up country ground again and having a week with my wife, furry kids, flowers and lawn has given my memories from Rome, Romania and Paris a very special patina.
My little Suzy
Teddy
The week of rest was absolutely necessary. Old people know what I’m talking about. Old tenors are no exception. I’m beginning to feel my batteries holding a charge, and I’m up to bringing my mind back to the word processor to get it to spit out some thoughts. They may be a little Jet Lag limp today, but I expect things to get better soon.
I am so encouraged about the state of the human voice. I wish I could say the same about the human mind. Rome and Sibiu were revelations in my exploration of those human attributes. I know my job is the voice, and will stick to that part of the anatomy as much as possible. Every voice I found on my latest quest was worth developing. Each hopeful singer had every material gift necessary to the craft of singing. However, they all sang with the standard technical deficiencies. Many of the singers are seeking work, but the world is not handing them stacks of contracts every time they audition. Is that something new in the world? Shouldn’t everyone expect rejection? I don’t think so. Rejection should be a puzzle to young people. It was to me. (I’m a tenor, right?) No, the committed singer needs to be puzzled by unsuccessful auditions. First, in the realm called the mind, which is “not my job” today, the singer has to get over the disappointment of a fruitless audition on Monday in order to have a positive attitude when planning for what’s next on his calendar, another AUDITION with time and place attached. Getting through these trials is a mind thing that must be addressed, but not by me at least not today. What I want to address is why the singers I met on this trip get the cold shoulder in auditions. They have been sold a bunch of lies.
I’m happy to say that the above accusation: “Liar!!! Liar! Pants on fire!!” is only mostly true. These students, at least, got some truth. They were all told at some point: “You have a voice! You should take voice lessons and make singing the focus of your life!” The lie came when they heard: “Come take lessons with me and I will make you a star.” Or, on the other hand, they may have heard the derivative: “You need to enroll in my University to get ready for a life in music.” The first lie is easy to dispel. No one can make that claim! The full measure of what it takes to attract enough public attention to be able to claim star status is beyond any teacher’s ability to control. Anyone who would claim star maker abilities needs to be avoided, but what are young people to do when they can’t know these things because of their youth? The University track is the same problem wrapped in a prettier package that I already covered in “Factory Made”. If you think I need to say more on that or any other issue, “Please Write”.
The Rome participants cracked my shell of low expectations and hit me with a set of challenges that might be considered individual nightmares by some teachers. They were dream world stuff all right, but they didn’t give me cold sweats. They filled me with energy, caused my days to start with a burst of ideas rushing to my mind directly from Garcia’s writings and made the close of the day an unexpected arrival. It was my first Master Class in which I could honestly raise my glass of mineral water in a toast to the improvements most of these young people made.
Two of these success stories will continue to be written when they come to Plattsburgh next month. These two from Rome who want more truth about how to sing were among the closest to being “Ready for Prime Time”. That’s why Garcia’s success with them was so obvious. The excitement these young people experienced and expressed was fully matched by my own.
My first days in Sibiu set me up for almost the same experience I had in Rome. Great instruments with as many signs of unfortunate instruction as were presented in Rome. Garcia’s teachings worked again and I had a wonderful time watching as these singers absorbed his advice. One of them even took notes… Surprise! It was a tenor. There were some differences between the Rome experience and my Sibiu work. Whereas in Rome those closest to “Prime Time” moved farthest, in Sibiu those farthest from “Prime Time” made the biggest moves. In Sibiu I had no arguments from any of the singers. In Rome there were a few who just couldn’t believe me, and, one by one ceased to attend the classes. Sibiu and Rome were the best master classes I’ve ever had the pleasure to do, and my satisfaction at being able to confirm Garcia’s teachings with the help of these singers is beyond my ability to quantify. I credit the singers who came trusting me to present Garcia’s wisdom to them.
My excitement with these master class experiences has renewed my faith that God is still making wonderful vocal instruments. I joyfully listened to and worked with many more than I expected to find. They are out there. If these young singers want to learn the best way to use their voices, they need the teachings of Garcia. I come home with a renewed commitment to waving his banner.
I left Europe with an invitation to help create a special kind of Master Class in Montisi.
Morning in Montisi
That project is still in the idea phase, but I have high hopes that my friends there will be successful. My week of home rest had not completed before I received an invitation to return to teach another Master Class in Rome. I hope I can go back this coming February/March.
Accademia Musicale Praeneste, Roma
Going out to glorious vocal discoveries in Europe and coming back to our secret corner of beauty gives me an unreal feeling that all I did was switch dreams. 
I feel like Dorothy took my hand and clicked her ruby slipper heels together, and there I was confronting gorgeous voices dressed in unfortunate costumes. I reached into my bag of Garcia magic, handed out some new clothes and great things happened. Then Dorothy came back and grabbed my hand, did her clicks and here I am again surrounded by Technicolor Treasures. I know the two realities are not dreams, because I had the “Hurricane” of travel that separated Home from Garcia Wonderland. It is also truly real to me because a few of the people in possession of those voices in Europe still talk to me, and here I am, home again, using Garcia’s teachings to help my students who had to wait for Dorothy to bring me back to the wonders of Technicolor.
Do you have a voice and feel like joining me next year in Italy to explore the teachings of Garcia? “Please Write”
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Vacation Over!
Vacation over, I’m cooling my heals at Rome airport. Looking back at Montisi, that little hill town in the photo, reminds me how much I needed to clear my head and charge my batteries. Now I’m ready to do more in Sibiu.
Nice to have my computer so I can seek confirmation from Garcia’s text. His text and my proximity to my latest teaching activity get the old brain cells working.
Garcia keeps cheering me on as I read and remember the Rome Master class sessions. I spent gobs of time pushing singers to express the emotions and character traits of the person the singer was to impersonate. I was fortunate to have students with the technical preparation sufficient to the task and ready to accept the advice. The results were striking. For bright shining moments there were artists in front of me, not just technically proficient vocalists delivering the notes written by the composer and distinctly pronouncing the words of the librettist so that we could understand them. I saw and heard those distinctly proficient artists rip the dead words and music out of the printed score and put their own lives into them. According to my perception, the singers disappeared and the Opera Characters emerged.
In Part 2 on pages 138 -175, Garcia reminded me of how much more he wants me to teach these young people. The tenor is willing but time is short. Those 38 pages are so full I can’t begin to write about them in this blog, but I can stuff everything into Garcia’s Toolbox.
The new drawer is labeled: Expression.
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Missing Montisi
Two days to go and I am getting nostalgic already. Growing up in a little town in the far north of New York State has conditioned me to grow roots almost instantly. Do I want to leave Montisi? No! Do I want to go home? Yes!! Well, if I don’t want to leave Montisi, but I do want to go home what’s wrong with my head? Tenor excuse set aside; there is nothing wrong with my head. This little hill town has the feel of home already, and moving from here to another adventure in an unknown territory holds less temptation than a beeline to Plattsburgh.
I’ll be heading south to the Big City before I know the bus has left the station. I’ll also be excited at the prospect of discovering even more voices for which the Opera World has a voracious appetite. Yesterday I was happy to see my favorite conductor and his wife. Our conversation centered on our various views of the difficulties the World of Opera faces today, one being a dwindling pool of recognized masters of the Operatic Arts. Given my happy isolation from the day to day affairs of Operatic life, I was more listener than talker at lunch. The quality of the food might have contributed to my minimal participation, but when vocal issues came up I was in there dishing out words with alacrity equal to all three of my table partners. The best part of the day in Firenze was the revelation that my friend wants to write a book…….. Wow!!! I want to be the first to read it. I will certainly need help since my Italian is limited, but I will definitly find, pay for, kidnap or whatever will be necessary to get the help I need to read any book written by Bruno Campanella. He also promoted me to high status in our mutual admiration society by suggesting that we should create a school for singers and musicians of all stripes in the Art of Bell Canto. I smiled big smiles all day long. It doesn’t matter if he was making a serious suggestion or just having a little fun with hyperbole. It made my day.
The evening was something else. Sports have always been a participation issue for me. I loved playing ball. I never liked watching it. My Opera Nut friend, Silvia, does. We went to a small square in Montisi less than a football field away from her front door to participate in a dinner event with large screen view of the Euro Cup match between Italy and Germany. My dinner companions seemed to be half the population of Montisi until I was introduced to the burly man next to me who lives on an altogether different hill in Toscana. Montisi knows how to get the neighbors to come over. If you didn’t know about it already, Italy got the job done. Needless to say there was great celebration. Now I’m going to miss the Italy – Spain match dinner in Montisi. Anyone close enough to catch it, will not be disappointed. The food is good…. I did eat too much. The company is even better.
As I close the few days I have left to play contadino Italiano I begin to wonder if I might find a way to make teaching talented singers something I could do while playing contadino Italiano. Maybe I could kidnap Bruno, drag him south and make him help me teach singers how to get their audiences to applaud and yell bravo as much as the assembled crowd did last night in that little square in Montisi.
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Montisi
Half my work may now be done. Rome is to my south and Florence to my north. I am happily sautéing in Montisi. Rome was a good place to roast and Montisi seems a great place to simmer in or out of the sun. The best part of the place is the family Mannucci. That they will allow a deactivated tenor to claim sanctuary from the rest of the world in the warm embrace of their home here in the Tuscan Hills is a testament to how wonderful the best that Italy has to offer really is.
It is a great plus that Silvia, the Opera Nut of the family, actually liked my singing when I still did that sort of thing. Now we talk about the content of “Factory Made” in the special manner that Silvia has with the Italian language. The great hope, for Silvia and me, is that at some point the art and craft of singing will be picked up in a way that will bring back my desire to attend performances and her excitement at hearing interpretations that lift her spirits.
The work at Rome lifted my spirits and gave me a little more faith that hope is warranted. I was happy to find material. I smiled as if I were a sculptor with a blank check in Carrara. A very young tenor with a lovely sound, one coloratura soprano with rubies for high notes, one lyric soprano with an instrument of great strength, one living, breathing definition of visual beauty carrying a voice that seeks freedom from a tyranny of “Factory” teaching and a mezzo soprano just so close to prime time. All of these singers, every one seeking a path to success in the world of opera, need more than encouragement. I felt like a kid in a candy store at the end of our work, when these singers took to the little stage that had been the lesson venue to put on a little concert. They put my every doubt in the trash can, broke open the candy cases and handed me everything I wanted them to do with the tools I tried to stuff in their pockets.
I am still up in the air about what the next days will bring, but for sure I am happy with the “so far”.
I will have a lot more to say when I have my own line of access to the internet. For now, I am in great company and loath to dedicate much time to much more than having fun with the Mannuccis.
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The Easier “Messa di Voce”
I guess I should get back to the challenge with which I ended Royal Registers. I call the “Messa Di Voce” (M.D.V) the Final Frontier of color management in classical singing. Renata made me explore it. I would love to have recordings of my lessons in which I was told to start the crescendo portion of the exercise by walking away from her piano and at the moment I knew I was at the halfway point to turn around and walk back to her piano in order to put my hands on the cover of her much loved little grand at the softest part of the decrescendo. Having such a recording would make me happy for many reasons, one of which is that I haven’t found a good “You Tube” of M.D.V that I can stick into this blog.
Renata had many ways to get what she wanted from me, and I wish I had a recording of them all because I sure could use them today. What I remember of the inventive challenges that got me motivated, I use today on my students. “Messa Di Voce” is among my Renata memories. Her M.D.V. excercise taught me a lot, and I didn’t appreciate the greater portion until years after Red (Renata) died. I thought it was all about the length of time I could stretch out that infernally slow crescendo followed by the equally torturous diminuendo. I took the challenge and believed the game was, if she would have let me, to paint a marker on her living room floor at the point of my U-turn that first day of doing this crazy thing. Every lesson following, I would have placed a new marker at the more distant point from her piano that I was supposed to achieve with the result of practice. I was encouraged with almost every attempt, and proud to say that my lines of demarcation first reached the limits of her living room, then the dining room and finally penetrated deep into kitchen territory. I was disappointed that I never got to open the door of her kitchen and walk out onto her driveway or enter her garage or just walk off her premises to visit the Corner Store to purchase a Mars Bar while blaring at the cashier at full vocal throttle. It was a nice dream but we all have limits.
I used to think that Renata’s walking “Messa di Voce” thing had given me the best breath control I could have possibly developed, period. But with this exercise, Renata had, in fact, packed my pockets FULL of tools. Many years later I stuck labels on them. I got the stickers from Garcia.
“The need to master all the colors of the voice has caused us to improvise the following exercise; we consider it one of the most useful which our experience has suggested to us. On a single note and with a single breath, pass gradually through all the timbres from the most clear to the most sombre, and then with another breath pass from the sombre timbre to the clear timbre.”
I plant my flag deeply in the process of this Garcia invention. I call this the halfway point on the way to discovering the secrets of vowel adjustment and the use of colors. Is it an easy process that we can just as easily forget about? After all it isn’t “Messa Di Voce”. It does sound like a different game all together doesn’t it? Let me tell you a story.
Quite a few years ago I found myself in a city where a famous singer was giving a Master Class. I will not give you a name or any other definitive information because that famous singer is still walking the face of the Earth. Anyway, one day I passed by the room in which these master classes were being held and found a class in session. I quietly entered and sat in an empty seat in the last row. No one but the famous singer knew I had come in. After a while, that famous singer decided to ask the members of the class if there were any questions that those present might want to ask of the other “mature” singer that seemed to be hiding at the back of the classroom. I was invited to come to the front and stand before the class to field any questions that the class might have. Almost at once, Garcia became the subject of discussion. I wish I had a tape of those proceedings, but I did not have my recorder with me. Tenors are as tenors do. Things got really interesting when clear and dark timber became the subject of discussion, and I spoke of the exercise Garcia documented in the above quote. The result was inevitable. I had to demonstrate that exercise. This is the point at which the question/answer session screeched to a halt. My colleague said to me: “I’ve had a career of “##” years and never knew anything about the things you are discussing.” My impolitic response was: “Having a career does not require this knowledge.” I think the class was dismissed at this point. At any rate, I learned to avoid similar circumstances, but from this experience I have the answer to the question I asked in the previous paragraph: No, the above exercise is not easy, and yes, it can be dispensed with, but at the cost of knowledge undiscovered.
The student should need no more encouragement to try Garcia’s exercise than Garcia’s own words. It is in Royal Registers that I quote him challenging us to master “Messa Di Voce” and we will get halfway there by learning to do his exercise invention I quote in the earlier portion of this blog.
Is setting out to “master all the colors of the voice” and study “Messa Di Voce” an idle project? If you say yes, but you are vulnerable to persuasion, keep reading. I can’t guarantee that you will change your mind, but even tenors have been known to do it, and yes, some tenors do have minds.
As compared to “Messa Di Voce” there are some missing components to the above exercise which make it easier to do than M.D.V. The easiest to point out is volume. “Messa di Voce” requires a meticulously controlled crescendo and diminuendo. The above Garcia invention makes no reference to a change of volume. What he doesn’t tell us to change, we don’t have to change and we actually must not change. One vowel, one note/pitch, one volume, one breath and one other unchanging vocal attribute. What is it?
Hint:
It is the one that Garcia came to better understand with his little mirrors.
It is “Glottal Closure”. Garcia, with his un-“Messa Di Voce” color exercise trains our ears to hear all the possible and even the impossibly ridiculous color differences we can make with our instruments. Some might say that it is a precursor to “Extended Vocal Technique”. I know I’ll have to write about this three word modernity at some point, and here I offer an introduction. Garcia and I would say his little exercise is intended to extend the color range of each vowel beyond the limits of the taste and the traditions as well as the requirements of the written music of the period of Garcia’s life. Today we have new stuff written by composers who chafe at any restriction handed down by tradition on their creative talent, but Garcia even covers the requirements of these upstarts. A singer just has to follow Garcia’s teachings and the “Modern Composer” will get whatever he wants. Wagner wanted Garcia to teach the singers that were debuting his music. Why should we think that Garcia would be insufficient for training the singers who will put themselves at the service of composers living with us today?
He titled his book “A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing”. He edited his book to include his discoveries that postdate his original edition. That made his title retain its’ validity. It is a “Complete Treatise” of what we need to know. Garcia put it all together in 1855 and lived for another half Century dispensing the wisdom of his first half Century of life on Earth. I don’t plan to have that long to promote this wisdom, but will do so for as long as I can. I have yet to discover anything that modern research has to add to Garcia’s wisdom that improves or extends our understanding or the function of the human voice.
Even though I still don’t have any examples of M.D.V I am comfortable with, I do have an interesting link on You Tube “Messa di voce: Horne, Pavarotti, Sutherland, Bonynge” that a friend, Jon Chatlos, forwarded to me. What a quartet!!! Richard Bonynge interviewing a trio of the best of the best, and what happens? Richard says:
“Give us a beautiful messa di voce. In other words, a messa di voce starts piano an’ a big crescendo and a big decrescendo.” “And so many singers can do the first half but they can’t do the second half”
Fun isn’t it? No one actually does a full M.D.V but they do a Half M.D.V. My wife tells me that I should embed one of the You Tube videos of me. That’s because she loves me. There are some videos of my work on You Tube that I really like, but I don’t want to make this blog about me. However I am always willing to make my Debbie happy. For you tenors out there, that’s because I love her.
I did propose a Reverse “Messa Di Voce” to decorate the end of my aria in “L’Occasione Fa Il Ladro” when first I sang it in Lausanne, Switzerland. I was blessed to have my favorite conductor ever, Bruno Campanella, there to guide us through the Opera. At our first rehearsal I asked him if I could insert the M.D.V. “embellishment” at the end of the aria. He said: “Let me see it in context of the staging.” So I demonstrated how it would work in Ponnelle’s staging and I was happy to receive a blessing from Bruno after he recovered from his bout of laughter.
I loved working with that man smiling at you in the photo!! The rest is history. Some of that history has been posted to You Tube.
The following video is for Debbie, and serves as an example of the sort of thing Garcia is talking about with “Messa Di Voce”.
Just in case you missed it, the following bit is a full reverse “Messa Di Voce” with a unidirectional Renata walk which I added to the aria at the very end of all the vocal runs and jumps.
I promise I will not put myself up as example again for a long time. Thanks for being patient with me for this bit of self reference.
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