Stolen Goods
Last Tuesday was a big day for me. I discovered what to say about the work ahead of me and I had a wonderful time rummaging through my dustbin of memories because Meg Le Fevre invited me to participate in an interview. She is working for The Northeast Group who publishes a magazine, Strictly Business, for which Ms. Le Fevre writes and they intend to produce an arts issue. I guess I fit the profile for inclusion, especially when she asked me if I called myself a singer or a musician. I puffed up my chest, and in my best rendition of self-importance, I declared myself an ARTIST.
It was so much fun to be back in the career saddle again. Tenors are always talking about themselves and enjoying it like no one else can, except a politician. It has been a nice long hiatus for me. I have managed to avoid that interview thing for so long that turning on the entertainer this time was a reminder of how it felt way back when interviews first became part of this singer’s life. Note: I said “singer” and not “artist”. There you have a small diagram of the self-awareness with which I am gifted. In those first days of becoming a professional singer my tenor presumptions included ARTIST status for self, but…… Well, even tenors can develop standards. My memories shook off some dust and I was able to entertain myself while handing out answers to uncharacteristically good questions. Ms. Le Fevre didn’t ask me even one boring question, like,,, you know: “What’s your favorite Opera?”
I’ll let my interviewer put order to the questions and answers in Strictly Business while I tell you that one of her questions really inspired me. Unlike many interviewers I have encountered, she actually did her homework. She read a few pages on this website of mine and printed out a few paragraphs to read back to me. One of them put some old memories into direct contact with present plans. When these thought connections happen in my head I know there is a God.
If you have visited my Master Classes page lately, you know that I am planning to participate in an educational event in my North Country enclave of cold tolerant folk. Making an announcement for that event started troubling my mind the day after Jo Ellen Miano said she was going to try to put it together. I left Tuesday’s interview with this blog just about written in my head. God is good!
As Ms. La Fevre read the second paragraph of ”How I Started” many memories of how I stole so many tricks of the trade from so many Great Artists flooded my thoughts. Those memories of theft and my hopes to help young people on their quest to become ARTISTS coalesced into an idea. Why not call what I have to offer at this Master Class “Stolen Goods”.
Before Tuesday’s sun set (it’s going down later and later up here) I thought to check my email. Ms. Miano informed me that our event had been opened for participants. All I had to do was write down what was already rattling around between my ears to announce this event. So why did it take so long to get this posted? Well…. You know.
Please Come to Plattsburgh and I will do my best to turn my artistic tool box upside down on the floors of Glenn Giltz Auditorium,
beginning on 9 August and I will hand out as much of the contents as you can carry with you, even all the stuff I had to purloin way back when I was only just a singer. That is if you can carry it all.
It is a shame that my idea for a title came too late to offer to Ms. Miano for her use, but then we all know how it goes with tenors.
Read MoreReplacement Pedagogy
I’ve been chewing on a bit of Ha, Ha trivia I received in recent light conversation (Remember, I’m not so young, so “recent” is a relative term given my 63 years of hanging about). I have a friend, well plugged into the World of Opera, who described for me an unbelievable proposal made by a gNATS big wig. I’ll keep my source anonymous because being called a friend by a tenor can be harmful to one’s professional life in some circles. I think I will use the name “Jack” for this Opera Operative.
Jack attended a major gNATS/Singer Employer confab this century. It was also attended by a soprano I worked with back in the day. This soprano was a joy, because she had it all. Good voice, especially good personality and intelligent mind. Let’s use “Jill” to refer to her. I bet she is a card carrying gNATS member who may not like having her name dropped by a tenor taking pot shots at The National Association of Teachers of Singing.
The President of gNATS stood up and spoke…. Tenor moment…. It could have been the President Elect or the Past President, Vice President, Vice President, Vice President, Vice President, yah, there are four of them, or even the Secretary/Treasurer given my tenor memory, but it was someone BIG in the hierarchy. So let’s label this gNATS bigwig “Harry”.
Anyway, now that the players are all described, and named, the play can begin. Harry got up and essentially declared gNATS a consulting business ready to help the non-teachers in the crowd. It is logical to assume that a professional of high standing in gNATS may hold in low esteem the abilities of people who actually get their hands dirty putting together entertainments based on the employment of vocal talent. I believe the membership could support Harry believing that employers need a lot of help to discern good singers, and gNATS membership could applaud being offered as the staff of Harry’s consultancy. However what Harry offered elicited no approval from Jill.
Jack told me that Jill lost control of her jaw at the moment it became clear that Harry was declaring his faith in technology. Harry let all those non-teacher attendees know that gNATS was ready to point out future stars for the Arts Industry by processing submitted recordings with Voice Analysis Software. All those tiresome, leave the office, travel across the county or down to the auditorium, rent a hall if you don’t own one, organize pianists and spread the word about auditions could be, like, so yesterday. Harry was suggesting that Arts Organization Management stop wasting time, and let gNATS’s computers lead the way to the new Renata Tebaldi, George London, Maria Callas etc.. Jill’s jaw dropped. Jack did not mention applause.
We have seen an early version of the techno helper (Click Here) that Harry seems to regard as a mature technology. Just because they don’t use pen and paper anymore doesn’t really mean that the present “advanced” state of the technology is any better at replacing “Ears“. Silly is as silly does. I wish gNATS’s Consulting every success among the stuck on stupid, but what about the rest of us?
I believe that Jill’s jaw dropped with surprise because of the outright silliness of the proposal. It is one thing to play with computer toys and even create University departments to house them. It is another thing entirely to try to sell the idea that a computer could replace the discernment of casting directors in Opera houses.
If I were a gNATS member, and dependent on teaching voice as a means of paying the mortgage, the rent, for food on my table and keeping the tax man happy, I would feel very uncomfortable with a high official in my trade association suggesting a mechanical or electronic replacement for auditioners. By un-silly extension one need only travel a little to arrive at Harry telling Universities that the same techno- service could replace voice teachers. Last I heard, the standard work load of a Music School voice teacher was a one half hour lesson once a week for each student. If one can replace a few of those sessions with “Voice Lab” under the tutelage of a technician then the staff at the voice department could shrink a lot. Where will all those gNATS members, replaced by Computerized Voice Coaching, go to earn the money necessary to pay their dues? Oh! I forgot. Maybe teaching advanced courses in Vocal Analysis (oops, not at MIT,,,, yet).
By pushing the above silly logic a lot farther down the road, a future “Harry” might suggest that gNATS could populate Opera auditorium seats with the future tech voice terminals that our present “Harry” might expect to see available. They could be programed to applaud the singers who had received training from their sister terminals at major Universities. Given ticket sales trends around the world, there should be plenty of seats available by the time those Voice Appreciation Appliances become objects of admiration of future “Harrys” at gNATS.
I’ve waited a while since I heard about Harry promoting his Opera Star Recognition Software. I just wanted enough time to pass so that I could stop seeing RED when I thought about it, and for the real name of my insider friend to become hard to discover. No one should suffer for talking with a tenor, or even singing with one.
More links for believers:
http://www.nemesysco.com/technology-lvavoiceanalysis.html
http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/fft.html?gclid=COGnud_p7rwCFdJ9OgodymsA7A
Lesson One.001
My mind’s eye view of Garcia’s lessons, which I mentioned in “Lesson One“, started out with visions of this great maestro telling new students about the famous exploits of his father, the glory of the singing of his sisters, the fun he must have had, surrounded by his family in the first Season of Italian Opera ever presented in New York City where he made his Operatic Debut as Figaro in the Barber of Seville, the trial by fire of his debut in Naples where he was unable to prove himself a professional of star quality, and the new, if short lived, freedom from music he discovered when he was able to present his bad reviews of that debut to his daddy. Any ordinary maestro di canto would fit nicely into these images, but, the better I knew the story of Garcia and his father, the more I saw him as a serious professional unlikely to engage in such superficial banter. I now have an idea how he would have sought to guide his newest students toward perfecting the beauty that he recognized in the voices of each of them.
In “Lesson One” I quote Garcia telling us that teachers must deal with many “faults” endemic to untrained voices, and one could be forgiven for misconstruing the negative spin Garcia gives to: “tremulous, nasal, guttural, veiled, harsh, schrill and the “lack of power, range, steadiness, elasticity, or mellowness.” It might seem obvious to some that Garcia was giving us a list of affects that the trained voice must never display, and if one were to fail to read Garcia’s second book, then those so convinced might never find a reason to doubt their conviction. It is in that second book that Garcia describes some of these “faults” as interpretive tools. Yes, they diminish the beauty of the singer’s voice, but they were essential to the interpretive artist of Garcia’s day.
In that second book Garcia gives advice for interpretation that relies on the recitation of words separated from melody, and with this advice he makes a full circle return to using some of the very affects he has told us we will discover in the untrained voice. First, he advises that these vocal “faults” should be eliminated, but then, he wants the singer to reintroduce them as expressive tools after the singer is able to successfully avoid them. When strong emotion is not wanted then the singer should avoid those several faults which may have tainted the singer’s voice at the start of training. But Garcia is most emphatic that the singer be free to put them back into the voice when needed on the stage. More than free to use them, the singer must use them when he wants to impart the correct emotional effects of various degrees of personal disaster or delight which one finds written into the greatest music and even some of the modest music a singer might be called upon to interpret.
So what does the above full circle have to do with Lesson One.001? It has to do with how I believe Garcia sought to “discover and develop, among all the qualities of tone which the student’s voice presents, that one which combines to the highest degree all the desirable conditions.”
My daydreams of Garcia’s first lessons are full of his advice intended to carve away the “faults” presented by the student’s voice, just like Michelangelo carved away marble at “fault” for hiding his David from his eyes. What did Garcia want to chip off the voice? His sketch of things to carve off is quoted above. But why do the listed “faults” haunt and obscure the “germ” of beauty in the voices of the singers that Garcia allowed to enter his studio? Where do the faults on his list come from? Vocal faults are all traceable: some to speech patterns, some to pathologies and some to insufficiencies. Garcia was careful to tell us the qualifications necessary in a student, and if he followed his own advice, pathologies and insufficiencies would not have crossed his studio’s threshold. The student’s speech pattern is certainly another matter. The work of purifying the vocal sound, eliminating offensive accretions on even the first vowel “A” makes me think of “My Fair Lady”. The highly entertaining frustration of the elocution master in this musical stands as one of the best examples of what a Student – Teacher relationship should not be. The process I believe Garcia used for instruction was collaborative, not Warlike. Unlike Professor Higgins of the musical, Garcia did not want to make those speech pattern “faults” disappear forever, and so would seek to have the student voluntarily give them up, not avoid them from fear of reprisal.
Garcia Jr. tells us to listen to all the tone/color qualities that the student’s voice presents and guide the singer to promote those positive qualities the voice already presents while guiding the singer away from those tone/color qualities that are detrimental to the “beauty of the voice”. That “beauty” is what Garcia Sr. claims to be the most powerful tool a singer has when, seeking to “command” the attention of an audience.
Garcia Jr. never gets closer to discussing the subject of personal color qualities than the quote in “Lesson One“. I wrote about the distance he maintained from this discussion in “Why Garcia” and “Factory Made”. He does not suggest the use of Clear Timbre or Dark Timbre, and neither does he say that Chest Voice, Falsetto or Head Voice are relevant issues in this voyage of discovery. His advice is that the natural/untrained voice displays all the “qualities of tone” that we are to seek to promote. They are specific and endemic to each voice, present because of the structure of each individual instrument, and, in the case of these qualities being beautiful, they must be nurtured with the greatest of care. Not covered with Dark or Clear timbres.
This lesson is about treating the student with great care. We must understand that the beautiful voice is a rare item, and deserving of the time and effort to purify the striking qualities that it alone possesses. No teacher can create such a voice. Any teacher can destroy it.
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White Christmas
Our Christmas tree is up in our living room again. We exchanged gifts, and we celebrated. I pray everyone has found reasons to celebrate this Christmas season, especially if the Birth of Christ isn’t one of them. His birth has no equal among my list of reasons to celebrate this Christmas and, come to think of it, this is true of every other Christmas I have enjoyed since I signed up to follow Him. Among this long list of other things to celebrate that enlivened our 2013 celebration of Christ’s Birthday is the marking of two years of existence for this blog. I am so happy to have the struggle of putting this little pile of pages together.
Ice Bronzed back yard at dawn.
I believe the reason I have come this far is the Birthday Baby our Christmas celebrations are all about. He has shown me value in things that, without His guidance, would have had little value to me. His promises He keeps and I rely on them. I believe that if you are reading these pages, and find something useful or even just some entertaining things on them, your discoveries validate a small part of my enlistment with Christ. For His part, and it is a very small sliver of what He has promised, every moment of being at a loss to know what to do for a student or lacking something to type into my little computer for this blog, He comes to my rescue. He always comes to my rescue.
The words I keep adding to these “RockwellBlake.com” pages I think of as little blessings. My blessings, that is. You reading this blog I also count among my blessings. Thanks for coming. If you keep reading, then I have my confirmation that these pages are worth writing.
Celebrations are usually full of interesting tidbits of entertainment. This year we have the best twisted weather.
Global Warming!
No doubt about it. It’s a first for me. The snow that came down all pretty and powdery just a little while ago is now “bronzed” in ice on our roof and in our back yard. Oh yes, we cannot forget the trees. They were not left out of the coating program. For me it is another reminder of just how interesting creation is. When Christ was born, shoes were not for babies and too simple to deserve electroplating . Besides, electroplating didn’t get invented until the 19th Century and didn’t get used on shoes until the 20th Century, but what we have on our roof, backyard and trees sure makes me think that Christ’s Father can remind us in many ways of His Pride and Joy. After all, insurance companies are always talking about the Power of Christ’s Father with the words: “Acts of God”. Why not fulfill my dreams of a “White Christmas” by freezing one into an H2O “bronzed” snow sculpture?
Better than Bronze
If our temperatures stay low enough, the ice will keep, our Christmas season will be white for quite a while, and we could slide across the ice directly into the New Year.
Part of our traditional way to celebrate is to view some of our favorite movies that use Christmas as their central theme. “Holiday Inn” always inspired me to reach for the Kleenex in previous viewings, but, this time I found myself focusing on the singing so much that I was distracted from the emotional flow of the play. Bing Crosby and all his friends have lessons to teach, and I studied so hard that I did everything but take notes….. Tenors don’t take notes.
The Little Ausable River
On the other hand, “White Christmas” came through for me. There is nothing like sniffles and nose blowing to confirm that such a work of art has had the intended effect. Debbie and I, each Christmas time, dust off these old classics as a reminder of what once was seen as really valuable, even by Hollywood. We still have “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street” to visit again this year. I have my big box of Kleenex at the ready.
Up Close Ice at Dawn
Please accept my gratitude for coming to read what I have to say. Two years ago, I didn’t expect anyone to be interested. Wonders really never cease. My prayers are with you that you have blessings to celebrate this “Holiday Season”. Come back, please, and often so that your visits will add to the great number of blessings I have available to help with any attack of insomnia that I may suffer in the New Year coming. I pray that we all sleep well, when we want to, in 2014, and that we all find ourselves enjoying ever more blessings. Bing Crosby will remind me to count them next Christmas.
How to walk on water.
Trick and Treat Part 2
Shiver time is upon us. Temperatures are down to ice forming levels, local candidates are telling us what they want to do to us…… pardon me… for us, if they are elected on November 5th and Halloween is already in our rearview mirror. Scary things are still everywhere to be found if one just looks for them. It makes sense to me that people should shiver at what some of our local politicos say, given the arriving cold temperatures outside. It seems to me that many of them would not mourn to see some of us, as a result of taxation, shiver in our
Town Board of Plattsburgh New York
own homes… that is if we can even afford to keep our little huts. I hope a few of my fellow North Country Citizens will find the signs of these times shivery and get out to vote on 5 November… That’s tomorrow isn’t it? Being out in the cold is a long tradition in Clinton County, and tax auctions are especially shiver inspiring.
My favorite hut – I wear fur so I don’t shiver.
Shivering isn’t fun, but at least it’s not somnolence inspiring. After publication of my previous blog on the trick of talk, I received a note from a reader. In part he wrote:
In those brief minutes of run-throughs of Operas traditionally granted in German/Austria etc. houses, I would often ask a younger singer to not sing but try to recite the text and then sing it as you said. Unfortunately 90% of them were unresponsive and as a result they sang the “telephone book”. But those few exceptions who tried it went from student to artist in a heartbeat.
Rico Saccani via Email
Now, if you think of it, there is no way to imagine the recitation of names and numbers to be much more interesting or entertaining than traffic noise. Take it from me, even traffic noise can promote sleep. At least that was my experience when I spent long periods on Manhattan Island singing at Lincoln Center. Going to bed over Broadway was a special challenge at first, and then little by little the taxis, busses and trash trucks were just as good as the crickets of home for lulling me to sleep. A bedtime story read from the top of the “L” listings in the New York City White Pages would certainly have had the same effect.
Stark wrote some supporting words for my trick:
Despite the disagreements in the pedagogical literature, we cannot ignore the common theme that runs through so many works – namely, that there is something special, perhaps even ‘secret,’ involved in singing according to bel canto principles.
Stark, James (2003-03-28). Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Kindle Locations 346-348). University of Toronto Press. Kindle Edition.
Vocal author Edgar Herbert-Caesari maintained that the foundation of the old Italian school, from Caccini onward, is the ‘completely natural voice … that, without training, is able to articulate, enunciate, and sustain with perfect ease and freedom all vowels on all pitches in its particular compass’ (Herbert-Caesari 1936, 4). These views are unrealistic. Why one may ask, if the techniques of bel canto are so simple and direct, has great singing always been the art of the few and not of the many? Or, if Herbert-Caesari thought bel canto was just natural, untrained singing, why did he bother to write a book about vocal technique?
Stark, James (2003-03-28). Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Kindle Locations 361-369). University of Toronto Press. Kindle Edition.
James Stark tells us there is a bel canto “secret” running around in vocal literature. He further tells us that Edgar Herbert-Caesari did not capture or cage that runner in his theories. It is an interesting tactic that Stark employs to set up Herbert-Caesari as a crazy believer in “Natural Talent”. After all, why do we need voice teachers at all if the theories that Stark says Herbert-Caesari wrote down are true? (I know how to use the open question argument technique, even if I don’t like it much.) Voice Builders of the World should unite under the banner: “Hebert-Caesari – HERATIC” and advocate the burning of his books. That would be honest.
It is a joke, isn’t it?
Garcia had his say just a few years before the trio of Blake, Stark and Herbert-Caesari was born.
The true accent which is communicated to the voice when one speaks without preparation, is the base on which the singing expression is patterned. The chiaroscuro, the accents, the feeling all then take an eloquent and persuasive aspect. The imitation of the natural and instinctive movements should then be, for the student, the object of a very special study; but there is another means which will not serve less to initiate him into the secret of the emotions, and which we recommend to his zeal; here is this means; to isolate himself completely from the character which he is supposed to represent, to place himself face to face with that character in his imagination, and let him then act and sing. By reproducing faithfully the impressions which will have been suggested to him by that creation of fantasy, the artist will obtain much more striking effects than he would attain by beginning work straightway.
A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing Part 2 PAGE 140
As a footnote to the above text:
This advice is precisely that which Talma gave to a young man. This beginner was wearing himself out with vain efforts of declamation in the study of the role of Oreste; “You are deafening yourself: it is impossible for you to know what you are doing, because you do not know yet what you want to do; you have not determined in advance what effect you want to produce. Declaim your role without pronouncing a word.
Place your character before you, and then listen to him: judge his manner of acting and his delivery; finally, when you are satisfied with the performer [t’artiste] which your imagination portrays for you, it is then that you can imitate him and declaim aloud.” This precept of the most capable French tragic actor applies to every point in the art of singing. When the singer has learned an aria, if he wishes to render it with as much expression as he can impart to it and to embellish it with all the ornaments which the melody and the nature of the piece permit, he must concern himself with the conception before thinking of the performance. He must sing mentally, as it were, while his imagination places before him the character he will portray. When he has thus strongly conceived the dramatic situation, when he is well penetrated by the emotion traced by the composer, in short, when he has created for himself an ideal which is as perfect as possible, it is only then that he will put to work all his imitative faculties, that he will display all his means of expression and execution, in order to approach the pattern which his thought has offered to him as a model.
A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing Part 2 PAGE 140, 141 FOOTNOTE
As you can see in Garcia’s text, my trick is not new. The principle underpinning it is one of the “running secrets” Stark would like to capture. Herbert-Caesari may have inflated it into his own “Theory of Singing”, but Stark gives us no theory at all. It’s Garcia who gives us something to work with. See “Expression“
I simplify the Garcia advice down to the bare essentials. How you say what you say can live happily inside how you sing what you sing, and without a lot of magic mystery. The tools you use to make the spoken phonation and the sung phonation are the same tools in both cases. There is no magic here. What you hear you can mimic, and that includes mimicking yourself. These things rest on natural abilities, but they do not replace vocal technique. They can, however, confuse the ignorant….
Read MoreTrick and Treat
Parents are towing kids to cash registers all across America carrying flimsily made scary costumes, some with accessory makeup kits, in preparation for the big haul of chocolate that the little people so look forward to collecting every 31 October. With the way things are going nationally and locally, I can imagine there would be many parents seeking alternative costuming. Take, for example, the organic number displayed in the photos a proud Grandparent is allowing me to embed in this Blog.
By the way, behind those traditional inorganic costume preferring parents at the registers are people like us. You know: the home owners who can pay our land taxes and still have enough in the budget to afford Halloween candy. The Trick/Treat word paring that’s been bouncing around my mind lately has inspired a new thought into the mix of the many echoes in there that won’t go away. I teach a trick that has turned out to be a universal treat.
The treat is that it works. It works in many ways, not the least of which is the liberation of the voice from the tyranny of the thinking part of the brain. The idea of the trick is to put the ears to work, and the calculating part of the brain out of the way. 
I keep repeating a principle in my studio and on the Master Class road so much that I forget to mention it with the same insistence on the blog. Now I shouldn’t forget, because it underpins so much of my understanding of vocal matters and should challenge quite a few of my readers. You cannot think your way to excellent singing or even good singing. Do think “Tenor”. He doesn’t think, he sings. You know: “I sing therefore I am!!!..Uh!….. a tenor.” Oh! Just a minute… For the tenors: I’m plagiarizing a quote: “I think therefore I am”, which is a bastardization of, and plagiarizing the Bible for God’s self-definition: “I Am”. Let’s get past the looming argument over the meaning of “Truth”, and just remember chronology is important. Who wrote what first is all I care about here, because chronology is also an underpinning principal of the trick I want to talk about.
Trick: Recite the words of the song or aria you are seeking to interpret. (My apologies to those who say interpretation cannot be taught.)
The recitation I’m talking about is more than correct pronunciation. I’m talking about speaking the words with every ounce of emotional content you can give them. As if you are reading the words for a radio program. The listener needs to hear in your voice as you recite every bit of character and drama necessary to give the listener everything necessary for understanding and believing what you say and that you mean it. Listen closely to the sound of your voice, and then sing those words intending to drag every inflection of your spoken rendition into the melodic line.
Treat: You will sing those words with at least some of the expressiveness you attain in your recitation. If you are able to appreciate the result, you should be able to bring more and more of the emotional content of your recitation into the song or aria in question. You may also begin to have some cross pollination from your improved singing back into your declamation. 
Now I’ve got to warn you away from the inhibition consultant that might tell you to be careful not to disturb the composer’s music. If you go for the gold and do a great job of recitation, you will certainly have your own rhythm for the words, and if you allow (please do) that personal rhythm to distort the rhythmic structure of the composer’s melodic line, you will have created a unique interpretation, and probably gotten your pianist/vocal coach all upset.
I know that was the effect I had on some of my good friends at the keyboard. Not every pianist I ran into was a stickler for rhythmic purity, but the majority was. Please don’t let injecting a little language inspired jazziness into the note values be the end of the game. Listen carefully to yourself declaim the words. When you do a convincing job. The inflections in your voice are going to be very complicated and the variations are not going to be limited to rhythm. You will hear lots of variables related to volume and color. Volume differences you make among the words will be easier to inventory than the many color differences which your voice will put into each phrase and even each word.
My last bit of advice is to work the song or aria or recitative or duet or trio…….. Ok!!! I know I do run on a bit. Work one sentence at a time. Get each phrase of the words you say as close to your spoken expressiveness as you can. If you feel you are not as successful as you would like to be, work the text one word at a time until you get results. It is beyond difficult to describe with any accuracy or completeness the sonic result of a great recitation of a text. The ability of your brain to retain a memory of it is also beyond measure. 
Lately I have been listening to a lot of success taking place with the implementation of the above trick. One of the participants in this game is so good at the mimic process that he is deluged with requests to put various famous figures on display by mimicry just about any time he finds himself in friendly company. I’ve seen this happen even in the hallway of a public building. “All the World’s a stage.” Forgive the depressing message in Shakespeare’s play, but just imagine getting someone with a great singing voice to sing those words just as the actor declaims them in the clip. 
If Mr. Sandow’s nightmare for the future of classical music doesn’t happen, then my students have a shot at finding a home in Classical Music. If they follow the above trick, they will also stand out in the crowd that mostly seems to be reading the telephone book when singing.
There will be a Part 2.
I hope you will look forward to it.
If I can pull my eyes from the fall foliage, it will come.
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