DMA- First Quarter
Dear friends, family and supporters,
Despite my best efforts to write regular updates since my move to Evanston, it seems that my coursework and my priorities have other intentions. My hope now is quarterly updates!
For those who don’t want to read my thousands of words and just want to sift through, here is the condensed covered contents:
Personal growth
Concert with Mary
Coursework, Academic Interests and Mentors
Trip to NYC
Christmas
Phew! Fall quarter was no joke. I worked really hard and learned a lot, both from coursework and in general.I have known for a long time that I can get over-focused on performing, and I don’t mean on the stage. When an expectation is set for me, I have a hard time countering that with my own boundaries and personal needs. This past quarter was a lot of practice fighting against that, especially when all of the things I was “supposed” to be doing were things that I wanted to do: read/decipher interesting articles, study Italian, practice, investigate the library archives… Some things I needed were left behind.
Anyone who has read these updates knows how social I am when left to my own devices. I also thrive having at least one day a week where nothing is structured (the novel idea of a sabbath). I need both some adventure and some inspiration from time to time, often found in the form of art or outings.
These things, unfortunately, suffered under the hand of my expectations of myself. The hard truth about school is that it is impossible to have an adequate balance between studies, social and sleep (or general health and taking care of oneself). Add on top of that budgeting… it’s a lot of fun.
I did make efforts to be more balanced, do a little less work and not hold myself to the standard of needing to ace every class. Honestly, I definitely thought I would get a B in Italian (I almost never did the homework…) and my musicology class (because the standard was set so high), and I had made peace with that. Alas, the only B (B+ mind you) on my academic record continues to be Corradina Capporello’s Italian diction class my first semester at Juilliard. And I still believe that her grading system was flawed. Loved that wonderful woman, though.
Anyway, on to the action! Because despite its challenges, the good and the bad, this past quarter was really fantastic.
Just a few weeks into the quarter, my friend Mary arrived from Nova Scotia to prepare a program we had dreamed of doing together for sometime. The Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community, where my grandparents live, hosts a lecture series each year and had invited me to be a presenter in October. I was thrilled to come up with both a program and a concept and delighted to finally have some funding to bring Mary to do a concert with me in the US again. She flew to Chicago and we had three glorious rehearsal days to work on Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Fauré’s La bonne chanson, two of the great masterpieces of the art song canon.
The weekend Mary arrived also happened to coincide with my step-sister Natalie having a college visit in Indiana, so she and my step-mom Kendra made the quick two-hour drive to Chicago thereafter to see me and get up to some shenanigans in the city. ALSO around that weekend were three of my second cousins, so that Saturday, we had a field day. We did all the Chicago things: got a tire replaced at Costco on a Saturday morning (just kidding, that’s only for the truly courageous), ate deep-dish pizza, walked through Millenium Park, “visited” the Art Institute (does the giftshop count?), took a riverboat architecture tour (I HIGHLY recommend), and went to see a Second City Improv Show (a musical, of course!).
If all that seems a little tame, my friend Charlotte was in town for an audition and I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see her, even though we were already stretched pretty thin with our schedule. She came up to Evanston for dinner (don’t hate me, but yes we did have deep-dish twice in one week. It’s good, but it’s not that good) and then I drove her to the airport.
Mary and I performed an open dress rehearsal on campus the following night and it couldn’t have been more of a success. Our audience was small, but mighty, and the music is just so good. The next day, we flew to Baltimore (the tickets were cheap, but that was a mistake…), where I rented a car to drive to Harrisonburg, VA. The flight had been delayed just enough that we ended up in rush-hour traffic between Baltimore and DC. Let’s just say, I learned my lesson.
The next day was the day of our performance, AND we managed to squeeze in three meals with family over the course of the day. It takes a very special person to do Marie-style concertizing and I have to say, Mary is a queen. We always make it work and we always have fun and make good music. The performance went very well and was pretty well attended by both VMRCers and my family in town. I was sad to fly out immediately the next morning, but this time around we had a much better experience because I had passes to the airport lounge and went for the first time in my life. WOW!! I have never felt so bougie, but it was so nice to sit there all relaxed eating all their delicious and complementary food.
Back to school: one of the things I was most proud of this quarter was writing my first, real adult research paper (with footnotes!), devised from only an assigned archival object. I had never been to the library archive before. One time in Vienna, a teacher took our class to see a Mahler manuscript and explained the kinds of secrets the real object can reveal that a digital reproduction or a physical copy, like a facsimile, cannot: like watermarks or wear and tear. I was assigned an inscribed score of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly from the archive of a prominent early-20th century soprano from the Midwest, Edith Mason. And from that, over the course of the quarter, I constructed an entire research paper that was both interesting to me and relevant to my academic interests. I got to do a ton of research on Puccini and singers of the early 20th-Century, which I had never done before, and I got to read a lot of sources discussing issues about performance practice that I find important. Besides all the stress of doing that on top of the other work I had going on this quarter, it was really a major win.
For my doctoral research class, I also had to do some research (shocking, I am sure), but we got to choose a topic to assemble a bibliography around, so I chose the intersection of comedy and opera, with particular interest in Commedia dell’Arte, an Italian theatre form older than opera, but also very connected to it. This proved to also be a very exciting process for me and helped me clarify some of my own interests and direction as far as my degree’s major research document is concerned.
And how apt that while looking into Italian theatre and Italian opera I was also taking Italian (finally)! Well, it will be. My skills after 10 weeks of class are not quite up to reading articles or documents in Italian, though my French and German skills continue to come in handy with a lot of musicological scholarship. But I have committed to a year of this Italian intensive course because I have a goal of doing another year abroad, and am finally ready to commit to Italy. It is also a lot of fun to have a class with mostly freshmen (they are so cute!).
And of course, there is singing! Yes, I still do that. Admittedly, one thing this quarter has also been good for is for me to be reminded that performance is still my priority, despite my academic interests. It is hard, because I think I have just as much to offer the school as the PhD students, but DMAs are given a stipend that is a quarter of what PhDs receive during the school year. Because of this, we cannot focus on scholarship during the summer, nor are we given opportunities to teach and gain valuable experience. It is a shame that performers are treated this way, but it is not a surprise. Society really does not value our contributions as work. It enjoys them, but refuses to acknowledge the time and specialty that it takes for us to do what we do. Being an artist will always require sacrifice.
Besides those frustrations, I couldn’t be more tickled and elated to be studying singing with and receiving mentorship from Steve Smith. I can’t begin to write all of the ways his process and ideas are exceptional and exactly what I need at this point in my career, but I can say that it has been some amount of time since I have felt so optimistic about vocal transformation. And the beauty is that it isn’t about vocal transformation. That is just a tool for expressing the artist within, expressing the heart and expressing truth. Technically the growth and the outlook is remarkable to me. I understand singing in a different way and it has entirely transformed the way I am teaching my students as well. I am starting to explore new repertoire and feeling like I could sing anything well! For those who don’t know, this is exceptional.
Steve is also a fantastic mentor. He is very honest about his role in the school, as a teacher and administrator, and about how his career began, the reality of what the beginning of a job at a music school might look like. And he is endlessly supportive. He believes in me. This is the most valuable thing. And that he doesn’t lie or sugar-coat things and he believes in a standard. Brilliant!
I am also lucky to say that I have been blessed with mentorship from a few others as well: my first teacher at Northwestern who is now retired, Kurt Hansen and Dick Ryan, also retired, but former head of the national Arts Intervarsity organization. All three of these men, Steve, Kurt and Dick, have known me since I was 18-years-old. How about that? I am so grateful for their support, experience and generosity of time and spirit.
I see now that I am 1700 words into this why it might have been better to write installments throughout the quarter. If you can bear with me, I will try to wrap this up without leaving out important details.
As the quarter was coming to a close, I made a long-weekend trip to NYC to perform a house concert and a couple choral gigs with Marble. Thank you to Michael Hey for making that possible. It was impossible to do everything and see everyone as much as I wanted to in that weekend, especially while I was writing my final papers that weekend too, so if you are reading this and feeling left out- I am sorry!! Hopefully next time there will be a little more flexibility for me to see you. But, for all of the social time I lacked during the quarter, being in NYC that weekend refilled my cup to overflowing. And the city doesn’t seem so bad either after some much needed time away :-) So for all of you rooting for me to return to NYC, you can give a little cheer!
After returning to Evanston, it was a sprint to finish my final papers, but I was proud of them by the end. I have never in my life worked until 8pm the last night of finals week. It is kind of exhilarating! I spent a few days “relaxing,” aka designing Christmas cards, making Christmas presents for my family and planning a whole Christmas concert, before driving to Kansas for a week with the whole family. There is never a dull moment with 14 people in the house, and nevertheless, Ken Rodgers and I managed to pull out a relatively novel Christmas concert/show that included all of my siblings, costumes, choreography, improvisation and comic programs. It was very hard for me to keep my Christmas gifts to myself until Christmas day, since I had made everyone matching purple t-shirts (or onesies, for those under 2 years old) with my face on them.
We ate LOTS of good food, played family games: Ticket to Ride, Fishbowl and Things, sang a lot together and played with the babies. It was a good family holiday.
Annnnnd then I rushed home as we all started getting sick. I had a whole week home to recover and am now pretty close to 100% with just a little vestigial mucous and still several days before the Winter quarter begins. I have done lots of organizing the past few days and am feeling fully recovered from the stress-bomb of moving and starting school again as a 31-year-old.
As always, much love!
Almost Dr. Marie
Total word count: 12,268
