Some reflections ( a year late) on NATS 2016

I am having the best summer. The weather is perfect, I'm teaching at home, I closed a show in May (Little Women, as both Marmee and director, debut for both), wrote and put on a cabaret show in less than 4 weeks after that, and am getting into the best physical shape I've been in since I moved out here in 2013. I'm picking up church gigs and so far haven't had to tap into my summer fund, which is usually how I live through the summer.

And last year I had a good summer, as well, but I didn't write anything about it. I tweeted things that caught my fancy, particularly at the NATS2016 conference in Chicago, but I didn't really say anything about how this affected me.

So, from last year's FB posts/tweets, showing up in my On This Day on Facebook:

• "Share who you are. It's not enough to just stand and sing well." -Renée Fleming #NATSinChicago.
  This is all about vulnerability. It is not enough to sing pretty. Lots of people sing pretty. It's about being brave enough to share yourself with people, people who might not like you or what you have to say. The singer who goes to the next level is vulnerable. And vulnerability is not weakness (there's a previous entry on this).
  
  
• "We don't have an art form if we don't have new works. We don't have a relevant art form. We have a historical art form" @reneesmusings #NATSinChicago
  
  Opera - or ballet, or theater - is not stagnant. It is not enough to perform the same piece over and over as a museum piece. It must evolve. There must be new works. And when there are old works, they must be looked at with new eyes. That doesn't necessarily mean they should be updated or turned on their heads. I saw Midsummer Night's Dream last night at Baltimore Shakespeare Factory. Excellent production, relatively traditional - but it was done with such a fresh spin that I got things out of it that I haven't gotten before. Lines that I'd not noticed before were especially funny or touching.
  
  
• W. Stephen Smith on the importance of double consonants in Italian: "if you say 'quindici anni,' you're saying 15 years. If you say 'quindici ani,' you're saying 15 assholes." #VeryDifferent #NATSinChicago
  
  Pay attention!! Details matter!! (And I think we've all met at least quindici ani in our lives by this point, haven't we?)

Decluttering My Space and My Time

When I left Milwaukee 4 years ago, I got rid of a lot of stuff that I didn't feel I needed to take with me. I had thought I'd gotten rid of a lot of stuff the year before, when we started our major remodeling project for what we thought was going to be our "forever" - or at least for ten years - home. But then when we decided to move out east, we realized that we still had a lot of stuff that we didn't need.

And then we moved into what is now our "forever" - or as close to forever as anything really is - home, and discovered that we still had way too much stuff. And we keep accumulating things, despite our best efforts.

So I am taking advantage of this summer to try to keep what "sparks joy" (or at least not "provokes ennui") and get rid of the rest. (This concept is from Marie Kondo's book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.) Yesterday, I bought new workout clothes and I'm going to go through some of the 25+ year old t-shirts that I have prided myself on still being able to fit into - so what if you can see through them - and toss things out. No, they're not going to become rags. We have rags. If you have a t-shirt that you say is going to be a rag, sooner or later, it's going to wind up on your back when you're in a hurry. OUT.

Also going through costume jewelry. Some things I may designate as potential props for studio recitals, future shows, etc., and they will go upstairs, in our prop/costume/workout space.

Of course, this means that I need to organize my upstairs prop/costume/workout space and see what it is I don't need up there.

I suspect that this is going to be harder than I expected.

How does this affect me musically, since that's supposed to be the point of this blog?

I'm also trying to re-do my studio vocalise sheets and toss out the vocalises that I have never used, which just filled space on the page when I first created them for a workshop 10+ years ago.

I have a project in mind for a poster paper to present at NATS in June 2018, and I figure the less clutter I have at hand, the less clutter I have in mind. (The due date for that is December 1, 2017, so I have a bit of time to organize this.)

If I have less stuff taking up space in my place, I will have less stuff taking up space in my mind. And hopefully, that will spark joy.

And I didn't even have to buy the book to get this insight. Huh.

Why I Write.... Or Not

It's more likely why don't I write these days.....

When I was a little girl, I wrote all the time. Usually stories about people escaping from occupied countries in Europe. Sometimes I wrote song parodies, sitcom parodies, and I really loved writing book reports, reading and analyzing things and expressing my response to them.

And then I discovered music and was able to give voice to things in a completely different way. But I still did some writing. I published a few articles in Classical Singer magazine, under a nom de plume, which was Melinda O'Meally. You see, I never thought I'd remarry, and I figured since Melinda was my cat's middle name and O'Meally was my boyfriend's name, no one would be the wiser. And then I remarried, and I took his name. (And that's a whole 'nother blog.)

My first entry in this blog was 4/22/2009, in which I talked about writing and singing, and called that entry Why I Sing. I wrote a lot the first few years - 31 times in 2009, 27 in 2010, 13 in 2011, 16 in 2012, and 20 in 2013. And then I moved.....

And in 2014 I wrote twice, 2015 8x, 2016 5x, and this is my 2nd entry of 2017. What the hell happened?

I don't write, I rarely read (Real Simple, InStyle and The Costco Connection do not count).

A lot of the blame can be put on social media, especially in this political climate.

I am directing, I am teaching, I am performing, and I am creating (cabaret show a few weeks ago, to be reprised on November 17 at Germano's, and a reprise of my show with Ryan Cappleman, also at Germano's, on April 13, 2018). But something is missing. And that needs to change.

I still have another month and a half left of summer, and during that time, I think I'm going to have to force myself to write and to read.

I've never read many of the classics .... I forced myself to re-read Little Women when I was getting ready to direct it and it was a chore for the first 100 pages (then it flew). I've read some Bronté (Jane Eyre), but I've never read any Jane Austen.

There are many projects that I have yet to attack this summer, but one of them, as God is my witness, is that I'm going to become a reader again. And then, hopefully, a writer.

And in the meantime, I hope to start finding something to write about. 

What good is sitting alone in your room? Go do a cabaret!

This past Friday night, I performed my first solo cabaret since moving here in 2013. I have done three joint cabaret shows: LoveSICK, with Dyana Neal, Steven Lampredi and Jim Knost, for Valentine's Day 2016 and 2017, and an end of summer show in August 2014, but this was my first solo outing.

In 2006, I produced a cabaret show for 5 of my students, Ryan Cappleman, Maureen Smith, Elyse Wojciechowski, Nate Lewellyn, and Kyle Fowler. After picking out music, and finding that the songs were all about wanting to go somewhere and be not here, we decided to call the program the Not Here Cabaret.

When Fuzz Roark at Spotlighters Theatre asked me a year ago to do a solo cabaret, I decided to resurrect the title, if not the same repertoire, and do something with it. Initially, it was a travel-themed show - about wanting to go out and explore, and not be "here." But it evolved.

The show I wound up doing, with Michael Tan at the piano, was about our shared roots in the Midwest and how we found our homes here in Baltimore. We made a few stops along the way in other places, for entertainment purposes (neither of us have ever, in fact, done a tango with an Eskimo nor have we taken a ride on the Chattanooga Choo-Choo), but in the second half, we did make it a bit more personal. I explored how difficult it was to make the break from my first marriage to move up to Baltimore for grad school ("Leaving on a jet plane" - which sounds more romantic than "driving up 95N"), why going to Europe after grad school would have threatened my new relationship with Bill ("When in Rome"), and ultimately, realizing that "It's not where you start, it's where you finish."

I find the cabaret format to be the most authentic thing I've ever done - except, perhaps, directing a show, which I recently did for the first time and will write about another time.

I was also lucky enough to hit upon an open mic at Germano's this past Wednesday and try out a couple of pieces there, and have been offered the opportunity to reprise "Not Here" and/or one of the shows I did as part of MezzoPiano. Hopefully, this will give me some more opportunities. And perhaps I can pursue doing some things down towards DC?

Life begins at ... however the hell old I am at this moment. 

Why being a singer can suck

When a pianist gets a cold, they can still play (although I did witness a young woman's nose drip onto the keys during her senior recital).

When a violinist gets a cough, he can still play.

When a percussionist - or a brass player, or a woodwind player - gets a sore throat, he can still play.

All these people might be miserable while doing so, but they can still do their job. And depending on the severity of their illness, no one might know they're sick by looking at them.

When a singer gets a cold, all bets are off. We can't teach, we can't perform, we can't practice (yes, we can practice mentally, which is something, but it's small comfort when you have an audition or a performance coming up). All we can do is blow our noses, cough, suck on cough drops, and lose money.

This. Sucks.

I write this from my sick bed. On Saturday morning, I woke up with chest congestion and a slight cough. "What's this?" I thought. "I haven't had any symptoms, and this thing - which feels like bronchitis - is not the usual way I get sick. Perhaps it's a short term thing." It wasn't.

My usual bouts of URIs go like this:

36 hours of a really sore throat (during which I can't sing)
72 hours of a raging head cold, the first 36 of which I can sing, although I sound hyponasal, and the last 36 hours of which I begin coughing and all singing is out of the question.
2000 hours of bronchitis, which began during the last 12 hours of the head cold. That number may be a slight exaggeration.

This was backwards. I started with bronchitis - on church on Sunday, I arrived at choir to find that my voice was cracking and dry sounding, despite no real sore throat and no significant coughing. I got through it by holding off on the unison singing and saving myself for the anthem and parts on the hymns.

By Monday night, the head cold started, and it's still raging, 3 days later. I had to cancel everyone for T/W/Th, and I was going to go to the Voice Foundation in Philly on Friday (good thing I hadn't registered or bought my bus ticket yet).

The good news is that I have no performances till next weekend (Choral Shabbat Friday, cantoring Sunday) and no auditions till the 18th (Baltimore Theater Alliance), for which I know my material backwards and forwards. It could be worse. It was worse when I got sick like this opening weekend of Man of La Mancha, although that followed the usual progression, and I managed to get through my performances, although not up to my own personal standards.

And there is nothing I can do about this except rest. And cough. And wish I had taken up the marimba.

RIP, Reynaldo Reyes

My husband's piano teacher at Towson University passed away last night. I only met Reynaldo Reyes a handful of times - a few years ago when we came to visit Baltimore and stopped in at his office and Bill introduced me to him, 2 years ago at a recital given by his piano trio, and a little less than a year ago, at his retirement recital and celebration. His musicianship was stellar - I did not have the opportunity to hear him at the peak of his performing career, but the strength and intensity of his playing in the two performances I did see were extremely impressive.  At last year's event, I was struck by the glowing accolades given by his former students and colleagues of his pedagogical brilliance. I wish I had blogged while the insights from that event were still fresh in my mind. I might have journaled them somewhere, but I don't use paper journals anymore. (My journal app has a password and no one has it but me, so if I die suddenly, no one will read any of my secrets or whatever vitriol I may have directed on any particular day.) If I find my notes or suddenly have a vivid recollection of what impressed me the most that day, it will be fodder for another blog entry.

I don't want to make this about ME and say, "I hope my students will speak like that about me when I'm done teaching," because I wrote an obituary about Alfredo Kraus once for Classical Singer magazine, and a very self-indulgent and famous mezzo I contacted to ask for her insights said pretty much that and it struck me as "It's not about YOU, lady!" But at the same time, I do hope that I can have even half the impact on my students, personally and professionally, that Reynaldo Reyes had on his students, from my husband and his peers to his most recent charges, including Will Zellhoffer, who will begin his collegiate collaborative piano studies in the fall at Goucher. (Hopefully Will will be my studio pianist in the future - I'm kind of grooming him to be the Baltimore equivalent of Ryan Cappleman.)

My husband hasn't talked much about his feelings since he got the message that Professor Reyes had passed away last night. He did get to visit him in hospice the day before, so he was able to say goodbye to him. I know that Reynaldo Reyes was a significant influence in his life and many other lives and that he will be missed.

What cabaret means to me

This weekend, I was part of a cabaret performance entitled LoveSICK at An Die Musik on Charles Street in Baltimore. The theme of the show was dysfunctional love songs - whether the songs were inherently dysfunctional or we just performed them with a twist (and believe me, some of them were quite twisted) - and I sang them with Dyana Neal, Steven Lampredi, Jim Knost, and Sean Powell, who also served (brilliantly) as our pianist. We had a full house of wonderful, appreciative folks and it was a great place to sing!


What I like about cabaret is the avenue for self-expression it provides. It's not about being background music, singing songs for people drinking and talking at private tables who really don't care what you're doing. In fact, I will split with the traditional definition that the audience has to be seated at individual tables for it to be considered a cabaret and not a concert. Maybe the former setting is a cabaret setting, but I think cabaret can exist as a genre that is not defined by its setting.


I just read an article that said cabaret "is an overlapping group of constantly mutating forms of performance that can’t be pinned down." It is also referred to "transgressive, upending everyday ideas about art and bodies, politics and sex, provoking as well as pleasing. It loves you but sometimes it likes to see you squirm." This goes along with my friend Michael Tan's post after our show as, "I laughed, I cried, I was scared, it became a part of me." THAT's what cabaret should do. Be funny, be vulnerable, be sexy, be challenging. And I want to do more of it. Here and elsewhere. NYC, Chicago, wherever. 

And maybe next year we'll do another version of LoveSICK. LoveSICKER? LoveSICK, the Relapse? (That last one was Dyana's suggestion - I kind of like LoveSICKER.)