notes

Minawon

Observations and workbook thoughts for opera singers and singers

Unpublished work © 2008 Lisa Page Weil
All rights reserved.



Yeah, in the Midwest, people believed that they were real; they wrote, played, and sang from their real lives; so everyone bought one or another of them, which is unclear from away from it.  People wanted to believe they were real.  They also liked the pop hybrids that were from there, which were also, somehow, real.  Art was real.  Excitement was real.

I have to think it could have been different afterwards.  It’s a credit to Russ  that it’s not become different; he has his down times and projects and less luminous numbers.  I think everyone will remember him that way, and that it carries over into his style, too.

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Note:  Who is Russ in this set of opinions, ideas and stories?  He is any other part in this singer's life, over the years.  The name represents other people who have a part in the artist stories.  Russ is not one person; he a number of different people, instead of someone in particular. This writing portfolio entry, MInawon, collects thirty-some years of deliberations about singing, music and art.

Note:  What parts?  Siegfried and Siegelinde.  After the millenium,  I've helped prepare a couple of singers for these roles.  Polly Peachum, Pirate Jenny, Lucy Brown, and Mrs. Peachum, also.
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What about the kids that hung out together across state?  That’s smaller than going out and listening to the radio; it’s more alike.

I don’t know; my friends ask me about it because I’m a singer.  For some reason, they do ask, every time, why it wasn’t him.  He has talent. He’s his own end result.  He had to have started with enough ability to get somewhere.  He knows a lot, and benefits from it.  It’s not purely off the record, the way you sell singles.  I don’t think it’s singing, generally.  I was practicing for my recital.

~

After auditioning a song for the Jazz Special, I met the jazz guys who wanted to be in.  They all had to stand around the lobby of the second-floor hotel downtown, until they got their audition times.  They all brought horns with them.  I met this jazz guy at a coffee shop one day, after the special was over, and he sat and talked about art and life to a student for ten minutes.  I was at the next table.  At the audition, there were a few calls; first call was take a picture, an instant photo if you didn’t bring one, fill out forms, and sing a song.  With no one; or they wouldn’t hear you.  They were moving people right through it.  It was acting calls that took all the time.  Musicians came in during a different week.  After the auditions, the signs came off of the hotel within five days.

~

When I was in junior high,  I used to sing at home after school; then I got a radio; then I learned to drive; and by sixteen, I sang in the car as I drove around to my friend’s houses, or to the college campus across town.
My friend, Russ, lived in an apartment with his roommate near the campus.  He was a college student who believed in my career direction.  He played music at a club with some other students, and we talked for hours.
I once went to his apartment and saw his music equipment.  He  loved r & b arrangements.  He was one of the big kids, but he’s drive me around in his car.  I thought he’d be good, and after he graduated, I don’t know where he ended up.

~

Russ hired me to work as a coach after I’d left my resume and an application upstairs at the high school, and the staff had sent them down to his office.  He was looking for a voice instructor.  The one they had was leaving to teach at a school.  He called me for an interview, and he said I could start teaching before the other instructor left. 
I’ve taught academic classes..  I stood in front of a classroom with the answer book.  It’s not standing on a stage, but it’s easier from the desks.

~

Was Russ an influence?  He’s supportive, and he acts the opposite.  He couldn’t figure out influence.  He had other ambitions, until late.  When he started to compile material over the years, he became more positive.
Russ says he’ll write about them if they write; so that it makes sense about people over the years.
I said that the difference is that people participate, and friends exploit.

It’s a century of the less old; the new and diverse.  I suppose performers are thinking that you can do something in a notes-and-music format, and not a conventional one; but I’d suggest that you can have the same type of career and accomplish some of the same things with a conventional format and a catalog.  Both applications are new careers.  I think it’s been obscured that artists determine their career format and change how people are exposed to music.  They invented their format.  It changed the public perception of interpretation, ability and material over the last century.

~

You’re evaluated from the time you go away to school to the time you leave school, and re-evaluated.  The faculty can decide what they think of you.  You can’t be  take yourself out of your chance at going on in your career afterwards with a faculty behind you and your ability.
You have to get grades in first, or you could take yourself out of your chance, the one you can give yourself as a performer on your own.  It’s stressful. You can stay in as yourself one day, but you also could be passed by.

It’s how other people think about it.  I’d never heard of Russ or the rest of the band until I thought about becoming a lead singer in a band like theirs, instead of a solo singer on radio hits.  That was the overlap--with hit radio.  It leaves out that you didn’t have enough feeling in common; that you had identities in common and any uncertainty; that there is a relationship between that type of person and that type of life; where people have character and pursue their own initiative, and where they lose their impetus and turn out the required eventualities successfully.

~

Technically, I would think that I ended up where I could.  Technically, anyway.  I don’t have the same catalog, role, or set of statements.

Being a musician can be a hard application for the musician; being a singer may or may not be, and partly has to do with who took you as a teacher.  If no one’s interested in you, you don’t become what you could be.  Alternatively, you can be good on your own, if you want to be, and if you like what’s possible for you; and you can have a great career without outside guidance.

~

So, you know your circumstances from the time you’re young—you learn how to be what you hope by practicing it—but you end up making decisions about who you are and what your material is that have something to do with someone else.  Russ knew I was a singer before then, but not that I’d already made my debut into classical music.

~

I was coached as a young person so that I could grow up and be a voice student.  It doesn’t detract from the people who were picked to be any good one day; a lot of them will be any good.  I think the voice faculty tried to give the best people their best chances.  I was taught every year.

I thought I was rejected, but I was one of the people who was accepted.  I wasn’t rejected, and I went on like other singers did.  Required arias, songs, required languages, to be a voice-typed opera singer in a modern application.  I was taught before then, though.  Instructors, who were fledgling opera singers, spent time training me and otherwise trading tips with me.

~

I’d like to change how people hear and think.  I’d like to change technique.

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You could find yourself at the end of the line at the end of the jazz age, without any identity or ability or circumstance to your side of the relationship that has been from you.

Sure,--you have a theme to develop—instead of ten years of an abstraction to live out.
O.K., so you have a song repertoire to include.  If you have a song set, you’re in a monologue or dialogue with other people.  Why not, if you’re a singer, go out and develop a song catalog, and then talk about what that is?  A listener could find the common themes and decide about each individually.  If you can get a rating as a singer, then what kind of development is it for the artist?

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You can dedicate your song set to someone, and send it to them.

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Because it has to do with how people think about art, and not anything to do with singing or not over a period of time; singing also possibly being a repertoire of a catalog or a set of performances, over the years.

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The numbers and format and catalog.  Yes, Russ pieces it together and understands the words, and is very there.  He’s as sure he can follow it as anyone; that it’s significant, and to life and time.  He doesn’t let anyone change a show or its expression.  He holds his own.  He’s opinionated and stubborn, unique, a giant, and he earned it.

~

The practice rooms are kept colder than the other rooms in that part of the building, so you don’t stay overtime in them.  I’d warm-up and get ready for my lesson.  This serves a constructive purpose.  You end up connecting both realities and trying to get what you can out of your lesson time, even though you’re more warmed up and seem to be accomplishing more on your own time.
For Russ, it depended on theory classes.  The practice rooms were more useful for theory classes.  I wrote my assignments in the practice rooms to get through my theory class; it was a quiet place to compose and arrange then.  You always know how much time you have before you have to get your assignment in.  Even if you were going to rewrite your music for a week, before you liked it enough to turn it in.  Theory class with required piano instruction.

I’d think about Russ and about practicing back in my room instead, and I’d shuffle my papers and get up to leave.  Russ had a contract; he’s cheered up.  He got a contract; I got a contract.  We had them signed and copied for administration, we got one copy, everyone else got one copy.  So we were signed for and filed away at 18, and again at 21.
I think it’s great that so many people ask me about being a singer before they think of other things.  Thanks, I’m pleased that people follow it, because it goes over material that’s worth having considered once through.  I’m also glad they remembered me for how I sound, and asked me to come back.
So, you think it’s coming to terms with point of view, outlook, opinion, and talent?  Or that talent is motivating independently?  I think that environment can influence someone before they find their talents.

~

After the high school years, and Saturdays at the record store, the last two years of the ‘seventies were filled with art and ambitions, travel, jobs, practice, and apartments.  Ideal life was just ahead.  Russ and I had ongoing dialogues about songs, performers, performances, and what they said; that continued whenever we saw each other.

~

There isn’t a bad song and they’re each worth hearing every once in a while, so we do a lot of work on the tapes and have to go over the changed material.  Sometimes we’re going to re-do performances or not lose the ones that we’ve decided on.

~

I can teach people to become singers and about twentieth century song; technique and concepts.

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I do all my thinking when I sleep, like a writer.  But I don’t take in all the other elements as well, to add it all in.  So, I would say that, after the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, I’ve had years to decide what I think, from what I take in and relate to.

~

My first music was folk ballads, traditional, and children’s songs played for me on a piano.  Then solo artist contemporary albums, musicals, and piano lessons.  In elementary and junior high school, pop hit albums, and a.m. radio.  Our school had instrumental music appreciation at the symphony for Saturday rehearsals in town, and we had symphonic record albums at home.  I went to the symphony off and on with unused tickets from a subscription through my twenties.  In junior high, ensemble and solos for school performances.  Once I had to play a piano accompaniment for a chorus class.  Then, pop radio, and country-and-western songs.  By the bicentennial, I wanted to be a lead singer in a rock band, and the next year I auditioned and became the lead in a band.  The year after that, I sang country and western hits and rock and pop singles for a reel-to-reel tape recorder.  The summer before ’80, I sang a jazz single.  In high school and college, I had voice instruction, music appreciation, (orchestral and piano works), music theory with an opera composer, and piano lessons.  I was in a voice recital of German art songs at the end of my senior year in high school, where I was also a lead singer in a band.  The material is all specific, unrelated, sometimes foreign, sometimes to its context.

~.

I suppose that is confidence for you, that if you don’t have an idea of your direction, someone else might have a better one.

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When you develop culture and art culture, what culture is determinative?

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For a not location example of environment, culture, art culture, and context; here’s an abstract situation:

You are in an only intellectual environment meeting demands, the demands of rational deduction or induction, logic, and exposition; and you live with a musician and are a singer.  How many sentences in an exposition of an idea or theme, are about what someone wants to find true, as though, finding the words for them will subsequently make the statements or ideas formulated out become true—once they are on the page expressed and sent off to be evaluated or returned?
A few of the themes and some of the conclusions are not logically determined or elucidated out of a framework, they are out of (derived from) the discovery and exposition for the/(an) opinion.  I think that leaves:  the reality of affirmation from an expectation, that you come and go with; that you really don’t find it, the way that you are told that you do.
What about character?  Why wouldn’t you find out what individuates character, and pursue those lines?  You’d have to first agree (or find) that, it’s hard to have individuality, or to crate an impression of a defined character; and during the same time period, to pursue your own ideas as well; which we were discussing; that if you were on a timeline, and you had your circumstance and your themes, you would have that kind of an exposition and context, instead of developing character.  A picture example, of the intellectual environment with a crated set of expectations/incongruity of circumstance abstract example:  an everyman in a red shirt.  What kind of a character does he have?  What kind of a character does he represent?

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Yeah, Russ and I are colleagues.  I admire him.
I don’t feel that it’s me and me.
Sometimes it’s Russ and Russ.  It’s true.
That’s what it leads to, either way, even with everyone saying; good, great, the best.

~

Many people can’t sing.  They think it would be great.

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They figured that he didn’t know you?  Well, love is better than no love; we had the no love era back then; this goes back before then, and it didn’t really leave an element of self-sufficiency, looking back.

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Do you think it’s a type of person, (loving or not loving, for example) (or alike and alike), or a type of misinterpretation (of material)?
I’m not sure that it’s all real, to the performer’s terms of performing; and if it’s instead that all of the differing (and otherwise related) formats make it less possible (not as vicariously implicit) to extend differently, because it’s within everyone’s life experience (within a culture).  I think it’s at times implied that it can be a figment that you can separate out, and not that you hold close to heart and identify with as an inner self. Russ has a friendly and integrated social environment, and he thinks that you could be isolated and separated out, and that he could be affirmed.  Because we have so much between us, because we’re all in communications in our free time, and because we don’t have the same environment each year while pursuing our careers, it sends the message that you can accomplish what you set out to on your own, and that you can get emotional support and outside input from the people who you are close to.

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Because everyone’s life experience, within the culture, can extend into a culture of character (of an impression of character) or of developing character (or, in the modern, of not developing character), over the duration of a narrative or a set of events; or over a set of statements and self-expressions; and that the expectation is coordinated or integrated with the expectations of an audience within the same cultural context in the same language.  Both the performers and the audience identify with the cultural terms.

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As a matter for introspection, you don’t find the same examples from your life.  That some people value relationship and that some people devalue relationship, is that you find both types of people.

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No, it’s easier understanding what is the context, instead; it’s not from being professionals.  We still have to be able to develop and contribute to our field.

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We didn’t have our contexts integrated, we were living out what we thought we’d be.

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But you can imagine what the early ‘eighties would read like, when you go from audition back to where you came from.

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The faculty did favorably rate the performers, because the applied ratios (application-to-results criteria) are based on the genetic, and every one of us might be different.  Then the faculty chooses all of the exotic and different and mixed type voices because instructors know that those parts will have a following; and then the teachers decide who else might be any good, because other types of parts are everywhere, except for a few.

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I think it looks funny in blue under the lights in a lineup; but, then, it would be very tough to cut my friends out of my environment.  If I ended up defining myself out of the world I live in over the years, I would be successful.

~

It does create a good example of less conventional identities when year after year people are griping about having the same examples at home and at school.  So you could easily choose:
         to be different from your friends
         to be different from your friends one day
         to be different from your family and teachers in school
It’s during a time when people get together and are all looking for the side of themselves that isn’t at all alike.

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Well, I don’t have an opinion, I have a catalog.

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I think I’d learn a lot of identities and expectations, so that they’d always be in deliberation as options.

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Some of the conflicts among would-be artists?  They are all finding themselves; they could have any type of conflict with other ones.

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The catalog continues as an exponent of something else.

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So, of course, we have the closest of relationships, because nothing altered the years going by.

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So, you’re immersed in music culture instead after a few years of relating to someone—and get in a culture role that takes you through the century and is a recognizable part in life.  Yeah, like being a star and living it; everyone becomes a part of that; everyone subscribes to the charismatic appeal of the universal language era.

~

It’s not a culture; it’s related to one; it’s a newer art form.  If you end up in an ideologically based culture, you’d have to evaluate the strengths of the culture.  You end up an exponent, waking and sleeping, and you take it to other people; it’s worth considering whether letter by letter is to be entirely a cultural exponent, before you lose track of the other parts of your environment.  I don’t know whether I’d think I could get consecutive years out of it.  I don’t think I’ve been exposed to an end result without some outside factor in addition. 
If you’re trying to find a direction, you could embrace a culture and identify yourself with it. 
I work on what stays with me, instead of deliberating about life in the world.  I don’t think I’d think differently, yet.

~

If you live in a location, how connected are decisions about artistic expression and role and analysis to the place itself and its demographics?  How connected to the place itself and to its demographics--during one or another period of time--:  to decide, what is the relation of the person or personality to the arts from the region?
I’d expect that, if you were familiar with a region or the culture of a location, that you might be able to demonstrate its terms; but you would not be required to be an exponent of a region or location, if you were as familiar with other regions, cultures, or locations, and were also able to demonstrate those terms.

~

That’s more to a person, instead of a range, but it’s a range.  I thought about becoming a solo singer on radio hits.  Most of the types of music I was influenced by were on the radio; either a.m. or f.m.  Except for some records, which had hits on them that I hadn’t heard on the radio.
I had lessons.  Russ and I had an ongoing exchange.

~

If you serve an ulterior purpose, you end up feeling as important, happy, and adjusted as if you had found your own emotional goals and your separateness realized for an extended period of time.

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The ‘eighties taught me that you don’t want to live one of those no one loves me sets, but you could end up that way by accident, without it being your character, or what you think about things, or what you want yourself.

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Well, the environment is the fiction, and otherwise, it’s all up to real people.

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Do you think that you are becoming a part of a culture, and ending up a part of a following?

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I didn’t draw the same conclusions from the material.

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It’s true that they’ve got their own contexts that have been continuous and that have their own inner inherent sense.

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I said I’d sing for him, but I had to think about what.
I didn’t write for him, too.

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The numbers and format and catalog.
Yeah, he pieces it together and understands the words.  Yes, he’s as sure that he can follow it as anyone.  I spent years thinking about what I thought of it.

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Seriously, a song’s a song, but why not be true to the original form and add something of your own to it?

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My friends used to come over to my house to listen to me practice, and they listened in the car when I drove over to their houses to visit them or down to the shopping arcade.  I continued practicing hits and vocal arts repertoire when I was in school.  My friends could relate to song lyrics, and I had technical difficulties to learn in the material.  I started to find my own ideas in the lyrics and to come up with my own renditions.  When I went to college, I practiced my songs in the afternoon and evening and recorded tapes.

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You could discuss influence and themes in art as a separate individuality.

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I sang a lot of radio music in junior high school, a.m., and high school, f.m.; and to  records.

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You lived white opera, and recorded pop.

Yeah, very pop; new style and message, new techniques—from it.  I was going to be a singer before then.

I’m working on:  voice-to-tape, phrases, words; not a static identity, a changing one, number by number.  I don’t want to do emotive material the same way.

I spent years stringing beads and making decisions, in case I’m next.

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Sure, at least it’s different from the ones before it; no, it’s a good role, and a new one.

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As a matter of being in the audience for so many consecutive hours; it’s not the same exposition, it’s durational, and it establishes diverse tonalities.  True to form and shape; not densely packed.

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We’ve introduced that we were in school together, where you have to hear what is going on around you, or you don’t get through it with everyone else.

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You have to not get interested in the great ideas that someone has for you, and live the kind of life you set out to, anyway.
Instead of creating one around your own career.
You should see that at each level, or you don’t end up with what you started out in it for.

~

I was taught not to live an identity in all aspects of identifying with it.

~

So, they’re happy and they make people feel better and remember them, in their way.  Remember them for real-life reasons.
So, in answer to a question, instead of being a self-expressionist, singing what I feel, I sing phrases.  It’s not any longer about how I feel; it’s about how I think and feel as a singer who was taught early.

~

Before then, autobiographical experience and expression was in, and a singer could only vicariously live through a repertoire; you only felt when or what you were singing.

I didn’t think that was good.  I thought that not signing the check was better; a better decision for an artistic example.

Re:  away from feeling the words and expressive styling;

As a singer, you could start being a cold singer, which is a cold sound on a record, once you play it back.

Because, you get a role that draws you in and pulls you up, and then you’re expressing that.
So, it’s good material to become a better singer with; you end up thinking about what would be best for you and about what you could do.

~

So, both the, this is how I feel; and what opinions you have of the words added in; and the outright material, are part of learning where you’ll end up on your own afterwards.

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Yeah, because that is how I hear, instead.

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Because it’s unclear if you’re always thinking or hearing instead, but you have to turn out the end results, in any of those ways; it could be in any of those things for the performer.  You have to be able to do those things, and play back the tape later.

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You have to feel your singing and be getting control of a big voice; and relate to the words and their meanings.  You have to feel it; relate to the lyric and its meaning, and be getting control of a big voice.

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It’s not required that you pour your feelings into your numbers, you could say other things for three minutes; although, I still felt what I sang until I was over twenty.

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It’s that, you go into an environment, where people are being developed and scouted to see if they have promise in music, for one thing, not necessarily in identity music, from the start.  People are watched and encouraged and taught.  I had lessons.  I had voice teachers, eventually.
I could sing in tune and had any potential in music from elementary school; afterwards, it’s a matter of practice for the missing years of development until the faculty decides about your voice, which, for me, wasn’t until I was in my mid-to-late teens.  Then you have to continue to keep the same people interested in you as an artist afterwards; so earlier, I had the radio and me, which was my practice time; then I bought records that I took everywhere and sang with.  We recorded because we had a song that Russ liked practiced at home.

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I think he knows that being a singer is singing, so I don’t think he’s been in conflict.

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So you have the song set.
Meanwhile, there is no relationship through the material and the chronology, anyway.  What kind of a relationship can materialize over the chronology, with a singer changing how an aspiring artist would think of or evaluate that possibility?

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What about after the room and the radio?

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Innovative, no one thought of it first.

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The voice faculty was always 100% behind my success.  I was privately trained after I was out of school, so I’m trained.
After I auditioned and enrolled in voice lessons, I kept in touch with the people who’d auditioned me and liked what my potential might be.

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Russ assumes that you’re the same person and the same singer.

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What, that they don’t sing?  He’s a good singer; he likes to sing.  He’s not also a soprano.
You could have talked about themes; so that there’s a parallel without the culture and art.

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I have an actual point of view.

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Yeah, we were going to play out and get scouted out for a record contract, back then.

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If you’re indirectly in a relationship with someone as a matter of expectation; you think it’s one-to-one.

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As a choice in developing music when you read it.

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Your recordings after your performance debut in classical song.

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Music school for singers.

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I would think that I was a singer.

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It’s not old times; it’s three minutes in a room.

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It’s specific material.

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Is that the same as a song repertoire?  Do you develop as a character?  Do you include it in your song set career decisions?
You can hear better, after years of it.
What about your direction as an artist?  Is that the same as hearing better or conversing with your associates?
Gradually, what happens if you hear better and complement your career choice, but do not actively develop your artistic direction?

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It didn’t seem that it wouldn’t go faster as a singer.

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By ’77, I had the chance to sing in a band, and we had a rival band, and I went out with their lead singer.  We traded song lyrics and future aspirations and school identities, because we all socialized around each other.

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I didn’t think I’d get songs like those as a singer, or that anyone would know who I was.

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I didn’t think that I was going to change music.

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What would your advice have been?  To every singer a song?

It’s not poetry readings.

Speculatively?

I had already been singing for a number of years.  I wasn’t around the block looking for a type of career and afterwards role or part.

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So, do you have to be an artist to go on in art?
You have a part; you’re not in art.

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That’s what we do.  Other than reprise and revise the material.

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O.K., 20th century identities and culture and you’re a rated 19th century Lieder singer; which means you can sing songs, if someone calls you in to.

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You have a part; there are leads in parts to whom you are apprenticed.  You’re not in the chorus.  You can make records.  You can sing other styles.  It’s a good part.

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Into living; that, you can’t go from being a recital artist who’s in school, a Lieder singer, to a lifestyle and culture and become an exponent successfully; that’s where there is an implied context.

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So you join the opera; where is your career?

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Intellectually, and as a matter of disposition, I’d have to say I found that I had a place that might not have been me in the world at large, even then.

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I was a singer.  I made tape recordings on a reel-to-reel.

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So when you think, transitions are subjective; it’s not that they are to the decade.

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I felt in accord with what I sang back then.  I don’t think alike all the time because I can come to terms with my context and make sense of it.

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Because, back then it is a form of self-expression of your feelings or thoughts or ideas about things, depending on the song; how the lines go for the singer, or what the words say, and what you want to say.

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I didn’t think about being a singer differently than being an English or foreign language major from in school on out.  You could be both, and go out into the world as a result of both.

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In reality, you aren’t in with everyone all along; you have an opera part after school.

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About school:  we went in with a bid for one career and out with a career in another; which makes it easier when you go out into the world.
Which we prepared for at all; that the reason the world isn’t about you, is the other people out in it.

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I told my interviewer that I was a singer, otherwise; and I wrote it on my applications, and I was accepted.

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I'd change what a singer can do, or can choose.

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I have a point of view from the type of person I am and the life I've lived to date.  Except when I have a blank mind; which is the rest of the time.

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Sing songs.

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You have to remember what could happen to your ego if you went big picture and two-dimensional and bourhgt into three traits you liked about you and did them out as a persona.  That your environment could affect you.  And that after their teens; people look for their most defined moments; which lends itself to retrieving them.  You don't develop an after by only retrieving and reliving them.

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Other artists' ideas from their 'seventies studios; and their contributions walking on and off, usually from the studio.

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Of course, people want to be like you.  They want you to be like them, or like other people they know.

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You improve, not to infinity, year by year.

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I guess I was on my way through the voice requirements.

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The successful ones are supposed to bring their own identity to their repertoire.

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You don't think about you and choose the mood; you tune into the world around you for it.

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It's not what my days are about anymore, though.

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I couldn't have reached the point of singing both expressions to change the implications for what a listener would feel or think of from a phrase.

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Because you are well-thought of as a singer, you don't change as much.

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I've lost a few hours, over the years, to practice.

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If I'd been a different individual, I could have had all of those other abilities and ended up making other choices.

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You can be less social and leave a favorable instead of an unfavorable impression on other people.

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After they're good, their relationship to what they're doing changes.

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I'm not on an identity wave, but I wouldn't want to end up in an assertion that's not to the art.