What you (we) don't know about rep is a lot!

There's a line in the movie Moonstruck where Olivia Dukakis says, "What you don't know about women is a lot."

What we all collectively don't know about repertoire is a LOT!

I was reminded of this quote just a few days ago while discussing opera and musicals with a friend. As much as I think I might have my finger on the pulse of the giants called Opera and Musicals, there's so much I don't know, rep-wise. There's so much our colleagues don't know. It's not a bad thing, just a human thing. But it isn't the best thing if one stays willfully ignorant of repertoire that young singers should be exploring.

I actually love discussions where I’m confronted with oppositional views. Being challenged makes me think much more deeply about something than before. Recently, I had one of those discussions and dashed off this mini-blog late last night as my mind churned about the subject of pedagogy where rep is concerned.

To start with, some questions that I've been asking over the past year:

1) Why don’t we (the collective we of anyone who says they're a voice teacher or vocal coach) teach a wider range of rep? 2) Why is the opera rep that is taught so exclusive and small? 3) Is it an over-reliance on the Larsen Anthologies? 4) Or is intellectual laziness a part of what’s wrong with academic training for young singers? 5) Who is responsible for discovering rep and trying it out - the teacher or the student (or both?) 6) Does our over-reliance on jury/exam models restrict too tightly a young singer's ability to explore a wider range of repertoire because they must fulfill a school's limited scope deeming certain pieces/languages/composers acceptable?

My opinion? The rep is just too vast to be teaching such a limited range. (Maybe it's easier on some teachers who only teach the stuff they really know?)

Let’s look at just the 19th c Italian bel canto rep: Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi. Together about 150 operas. Let's approximate perhaps six to seven arias per opera (some have more, some have less). That’s almost 1,000 arias by those four composers.

Why are the same handful assigned, taught and coached?

The danger surrounding this kind of intellectual laziness is that it can create artistic laziness. And it’s not like each bel canto aria is fundamentally different from one another. They are actually much more alike than different. So why not explore the other hundreds of arias? Why rely on Norina, Malatesta, Rosina, Figaro, Adina, Nemorino, Alfredo, and Oscar constantly? Yes, those are core operas performed often, but they've also been recorded by the best of the best and carry with them the heavy weight of history and being compared to the great singers. Why not sing Nelly's aria "Dopo l'oscuro nembo" from Bellini's Adelson e Selvini instead of Giulietta's overdone "O quante volte" from his more famous opera?

Now, let’s move to Handel... Some 70 operas and oratorios with 23+ arias in each. (The math is astounding here.) So way over 1,500 arias to choose from! And please don’t tell me that some young singers shouldn’t sing Handel. There’s an aria out there for every voice type or kind of singer. Once you learn the style it can be applied to the whole bunch (much like bel canto style, you don’t need to know each aria, you need to know the style to apply!)

Now to musical theatre… 

The math is astonishing. Kinda like how many galaxies in the universe.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of songs written for thousands of different voices and voice types. Written in a vast array of styles, from German operetta to English music hall to pre-mic’d classically sung shows to mic’d belted shows to Disney mixed techniques to Sondheim, to classical operas by Menotti and Bernstein and Weill, and now all the rock, country, folk and pop music shows (not to mention the Jukebox shows.) It’s not all the same, or kids belting for the sun to come out. It’s a rep subtle and vast that shouldn’t be generically lumped together as this or that, or worse, tossed aside as unworthy. Here, intellectual laziness can get a bit ugly. Dismissing thousands of pieces as "musicals" as if they're all the same.

And a piece of advice – Let’s stop putting Carousel, Candide, Street Scene, A Little Night Music, and a few others into one accepted bunch of musicals-that-are-almost-operas-so-they’re-okay-to-sing, while everything else is Ethel wanting roses to come up now before her voice breaks in half. 

When we meet people who don’t know opera or don’t go to opera and they tell us that “opera all sounds the same” we go nuts, right? Or when they ask “isn’t opera just singing super loud with horns on?” we go nuts. So stop, please stop, making generalizations about a huge swath of rep you know very little about. I cringe when it happens in the same way I cringe when some musical theatre child tells me how Les Miz is “just the best!”. Empty chairs at empty tables, indeed. (Not all operas are fantastic masterpieces, same for musicals.) I'm tired of empty heads at MT tables talking about stuff they’ve hardly ever researched or had any first-hand experience with.

Back to the rep.

Why am I passionate about repertoire? Because I believe, as do many of my coaching friends, that rep is an essential component where teaching technique is concerned. Guide and build a voice, that’s a teacher's fundamental job. But a singer truly learns to sing by singing a diverse set of rep and this should happen in tandem as they mature and evolve. I’m not talking about a few weeks of vocalises and then they’re handed “Parto, Parto”, “Pace pace” and “Papers Papers”. (Let’s also stop the jumping to worse case scenarios…) I’m talking about how rep supports the teaching of singing, that’s all. Otherwise it’s all theoretical. A singer must sing, both to learn and to activate their own artistic self!

The combo of intellectual laziness and old biases based on ignorance of rep is not a healthy place to teach from.

It’s gonna kill our art form that is already under a great deal of stress. But worse, it kills off a young singer's possibilities to develop their artistry, and can limit their scope and their potential job market. There are hundreds of opera performances in North America each year, but there are thousands and thousands of performances of musicals in North America - many of them populated onstage with classically trained singers.

So what to do?

1) Toss out the anthologies with their limited rep as the sole source for aria repertoire. Full disclosure, I am one of the assistant editors of the Larsen G. Schirmer Opera Anthologies. Yes, they are better than the old Adler anthologies, but they are not all there is. Singers need to explore beyond these anthologies.

2) Teach young singers that exploration of rep is part of their responsibility as diligent students. (And don't be put off if that exploration means they bring in unknown repertoire to you!)

3) Start to question your own generational biases and ignorance of rep you don’t know, haven’t taught before, or can’t find without an afternoon in a library (remember those?!) I have certainly evolved over the years, so so can we all.

4) Go to an NOA conferences where they celebrate new repertoire, new composers, new operas. You'll see hundreds of colleagues there and can learn from their experiences.

5) Start to learn who the new composers are that others are performing. We're in a renaissance of new music - both in the classical and musical theatre arenas. Do you know who Cecelia Livingston is, or her most recent compositions being premiered across Canada? Do you know that Michael Ching continues to compose operas (as he's been doing for over five decades now)? Have you heard of Michael Mott the composer? Are you aware of Adam Guettel's or Michael Finn's song cycles that blur the lines of "is that a classical song or a musical theatre song" much like many of Jake Heggie's works.

A few concluding thoughts: In today’s exciting renaissance age of new opera, the rep is exploding AS WE SPEAK. It’s hard to keep up, I get it. So trust in your knowledge of technique and style, trust your instincts for styles you’re not an expert with, jettison our mutually taught ideas of the past (like Donizetti is better for young voices than Verdi poppycock, or Handel shouldn’t be sung by dramatic voices, or musicals ruin voices thru belting).

Smile, breathe, flow and open your minds. Jettison generalizations about music. We don’t know everything on the shelves because we can’t know everything. The rep, like humanity, is vast and wondrous and daunting.

It's humbling to admit we know just a corner of the magnificent musical universe we live in, perform in, and teach in. We need to share that humility and wonder with our students by acknowledging our own deficits of knowledge. When a singer wants to coach something I don’t know (it happens 😎), I admit it right off the bat, “Oh I don’t know that one, who wrote it? When was it written?” Then I make best guesses and choices for style based on the historic period it was written in and/or my knowledge of the composer or their contemporary. I kid you not, some of my best coachings have been on rep I didn’t know or had ever heard. 

It’s not rocket science. 

It’s not about having answers.

It’s about exploring the rep with intellectual curiousity, humility, and joy.