A little more Sondheim

Hello All,

For the last blog I decided to send a couple of videos concerning, perhaps, Stephen Sondheim’s most famous song – Send in the Clowns from the musical which you guys are doing in the spring – A Little Night Music. 

When I was around 10 years old my mother was involved in several productions of this musical as Madam Armfelt and I was constantly dragged to rehearsals.  As a result, I had the entire piece fully memorized and was constantly singing things and saying things that no 10 year old should sing or say – blissfully unaware of the meaning of anything.  I never much cared for Send in the Clowns even as a kid but it occurs to me now that it’s because at that age the entire piece went completely over my head – like a mile over my head.

As with so much of Sondheim it is an unbelievably smart/clever piece existing on multiple levels all at once.  I still find it hard to believe that a mind like his exists.  All you really need to know about the song is that the character singing – Desiré is an aging actress who has gotten herself caught up in a kind of love triangle, quadrangle, multiangle… she’s gotten herself into a mess; and you need to know that the idea of sending in the clowns is a circus phrase – if an accident happened during a circus act – a tightrope walker fell or the lion tamer got eaten – they would “send in the clowns” to distract the audience from the drama. 

The first video is part of a master class with Sondheim working with a young singer on the piece.  It’s remarkable how concerned he is with diction and how unconcerned he is with singing.  It’s telling.  He is making her deal with the words in excruciating detail because they are the thing.

The second video is of Burnadette Peters performing the song with Sondheim at the piano. 

Why do we work so hard to learn how to sing well?  I suppose there are a lot of possible answers to that question.  But for me there is only one “correct” answer.  We work on our voices so that we may express the words and the music we are performing in the best way possible.  We the singers are the servant of the creators – the poets and the composers.  Perhaps we are artists but we are certainly interpreters.  In this final video, Sondheim is the artist, the creator and Bernadette Peters gives him voice.  He painted on sheet music and she is somehow the air and light between those pages and our ears.  Her voice is working but it is at the complete service of the text she is putting across.  The words couldn’t be more spontaneous or more carefully pronounced and fitted together. 

Sondheim Class

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-VXXZLh2a0

Bernadette Peters and Stephen Sondheim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOZhmsp6iBQ

Elaine Stritch

Company      

                                                                                                                                       

This is a very quirky blog choice.  4 videos this week.  I know, I’m trying your patients.  You would be amused and bemused to watch me pick out the videos and subjects of these blogs.  I started at 7:50 AM watching Christa Ludwig sing Brahms trying to show that you can also express yourself AND move and an hour later ended up watching half an hour of Elaine Stritch videos.  Who is Elaine Stritch?  You’ll see.

All 5 videos are of Elaine Stritch recording and performing pieces from Stephen Sondheim’s 1970 musical “Company.”  If you don’t know any of the songs from “Company” you should take some time and seek them out. 

Elaine Stritch couln’t sing; let’s just get that out there.  Never-the-less, she managed to have a Broadway career for over 60 years!  I don’t think it’ll take you long to see why.  She died just 3 years ago at 89.  About a year before, she did one last run of cabaret shows in the Carlisle Hotel’s lounge – one of the last great cabaret rooms in the city.  She actually lived in the hotel until just before she died. 

The first video is from a documentary about making the first cast recording of the musical.  You’ll hear Sondheim explaining the context of the song “Here’s to the ladies who lunch” and then the struggles to get Stritch to put down a good take.  It’s hard to watch if you’ve ever recorded anything.  Imagine the composer and producer being so visually and vocally unsatisfied with your performance in front of a roomful of people who are waiting for you to get it right.  Realize too that it’s 2:00 in the morning and everyone has two performances the next day!  And watch all of the acrobatics she goes through to try and produce a vocal character.  In the second video you get to see the take they’re so upset about.  Can you find anything wrong with it?

Cut to the third video and watch her (many years later) perform the same piece for an audience.  Notice how still she is but how clear the words are and how laser focused the meaning and intention of everything is.  It’s almost as if she has internalized all of the crazy physicality from before and it’s all being put into the piece rather than her body.  Also, notice how she (and Sondheim) keep leading you to a climax and then taking it away until the very end.  The entire piece is one of delayed gratification.  It builds and builds and pulls back and then ends with a huge crescendo.  I’ve talked a lot about pacing in class.  Here is a master class in how to do that.  And how many times have I said “look like what you sing?”  Well, here you go.  The original production of “Company” had around 700 performances and Stritch has probably sung the song a thousand more times since then by the time this video was made.  Does she seem to be phoning it in or does it still seem like it’s new for her?

The last video is just sort of a bonus for those of you who might ever like to record.  Notice that everyone is performing though there’s no audience.  They are singing to the microphone as if it’s an audience member.  And notice how you can somehow hear Stritch’s ironic expressions in her voice.  Again, how you look can determine how you sound.  You are the instrument!  You are the performance!  By the way, the co-lyricist says something at the end of the video which is extremely important.

By the way, there is one last video which you can watch or not but it is the take which they ended up using on the cast recording.  After all of the drama, she got it in one take.

Documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf52APstI0A&NR=1

First take

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo-UMJfRNWI&t=1m37s

Live performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slvaecBozmQ

Other piece

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po9-NWhk1Qo&feature=related

Take that was used

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcI_Px5_Vi8

Can you bear it?

Hello All,

As we get into the practical application of all of the diction ideas we’ve been discussing this semester it’s time to start expanding the tool box of interpretation that has solely to do with English pronunciation and think about some vocal things that can help pronunciation be more effective.  These techniques are part of pronunciation but let’s call them extended techniques of pronunciation.  We’ve already talked about marrying the language’s rhythm to the rhythm of the music (a hard concept to learn but perhaps the most effective extended technique to making language in music sound natural) and we’ve touched on the importance of glottal stops to clarify and accent a word which begins with a vowel.  We’ve also talked a bit about elongating voiced consonants at the beginnings and/or ends of words to make things clearer. 

I would like to add to those ideas, that of portamento.  In Italian, ‘portamento’ means bearing, as in the way one carries one’s self; or bearing something from one place to another – to carry.  In singing, that ‘bearing’ has to do with tone.  When you have two separate pitches you can bear your tone from one to the other.  Bearing is such a better word than sliding because bearing has the connotation of carrying, not just going.  A portamento builds or maintains energy either up or down.  A slide may build energy going down but loses energy going up.  Portamento started as a bel canto vocal technique.  In order to keep one’s tone consistent up and down the scale, you bore that tone from one pitch to another – especially in a wide interval.  Over time this vocal technique has also become an interpretive technique.  Bearing a lower tone to a higher tone (or vice versa) can give the music – and the word set to that music a sense of gravitas – a sense of weight. 

As illustration I have two videos for you to watch and listen to.  The first is of Marian Anderson who you should all get to know.  I don’t even know where to start with her.  In many ways she is the most important American singer of the 20^th Century.  Arturo Toscanini (look him up) said of her voice that it was of a quality that only comes around once in a hundred years.  In 1939 she was dis-invited by the Daughters of the American Revolution to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C.   In reaction, President and Mrs. Roosevelt arranged for her to do an entire concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  70,000 or so people showed up!  Remember, this was 24 years before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech was delivered in the same place.  The popularity of her singing alone transcended prejudice.  Florence Kopleff always told me that Anderson’s singing was the most touching and beautiful she ever heard.  I really do encourage you to look her up and listen to as much of her singing as you can.  Here she sings the spiritual “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.”  She uses all of the techniques we’ve talked about but notice her portamentos.  By the way, there is one big thing that makes her singing old fashioned in this recording (to my ears).  What is it?

It’s very hard to follow Marian Anderson with anyone else but I think I found just the person.  That’s right, it’s Elvis Presley!  Here he sings “Love me tender” and notice that he’s using all of the techniques we “serious” singers use to be immediate and sincere and moving.  In what ways is he doing the same things as Marian Anderson?

R

Marian Anderson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QedPOq2gi7U

Elvis Presley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ2Fd2IMfR0

Oh Susanna!

Hello All,

Typically I pick a particular aspect of diction and write the point to death but this week I’m doing something a little different.  I’m sending you two videos of arias from Carlisle Floyd’s opera Susannah.  Carlisle, who is still alive at 91 wrote the opera when he was a faculty member at Florida State University in 1955 and after Porgy and Bess it’s the most performed American opera ever written.  In every generation there seems to be a soprano and a bass who are known as the quintessential Susannah and Blitch of their day.  Until recently the two singers were Renee Fleming and Sam Ramey.  

You probably know who Renee Fleming is.  The video I’m sending is from 1995 when Renee was really something – before real stardom and the mannerisms set in.  She sings the big aria “Ain’t it a pretty night” a bit grand for my taste but her control is, as always amazing.  It’s also astonishing for her relative stillness with all of the big singing she does.  The opera is written in a sort of “Appalachian dialect” but notice how she seems to always be concerned with making sure the language is understood.

Sam Ramey is a force of nature.  His voice shows some wear and tear these days but he’s still out there getting it done and now teaches in Kansas.  From the mid 70s through the 90s however, Sam was the gold standard of bel canto basses.  In fact, when I was coming up, all bass baritones even styled their hair after Sam.  I’ll never forget the first time I heard Sam live.  His extreme low was as loud as his extreme high.  And all of this sound came from a skinny Kansas cuss.  I have a few funny stories about Sam but my favorite is as follows.  One night in NYC a group of us went to see a movie on the upper west side.  The theater was crowded so we couldn’t all sit on one row.  Sam ended up sitting behind me and my friend Eric Owens who some of you might remember from doing a master class for us a few years ago.  At one point in the movie something quiet was going on and Sam cleared his throat.  He wasn’t doing anything unusual; he was just clearing his throat.  But the sound was a Sam Ramey sound and it was so impressive that Eric stood up, turned around, and gave Sam a standing ovation in the middle of the movie theater.  I’m sure the audience was annoyed but I couldn’t stop laughing for the rest of the night. 

But I digress.  In the video Sam sings Blitch’s big camp meeting scene.  And I think you’ll agree that it’s an amazing performance.  Sam does move around and gesture but in a very confined space and still manages to really take charge of the stage.  I’ve talked to you about how everything counts when you’re on stage – breathing, walking, looking, facial expressions – all of it.  Notice how Sam never, even for a second, does anything that isn’t at the service of the text and the music and the character.  I would say that his English and dialect are even more idiomatic than Renee’s but it’s always sung and always understandable.  You can tell that these are two singers who have complete control of their vocalism and use it to get the character and the language across.  Isn’t this what it’s all about?

Enjoy,

R

Renee

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PTQ-7v4aJ8&feature=related

Sam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW5YBdAjSs0

'merican!

Hello All,

We’re at the point in the semester where I can’t think of any bits and pieces of English Diction and the execution thereof that we haven’t touched on. And as I try and find a few more singers for you to listen to and a few more composers to expose you to and a few more songs for you to get to know, I keep running into the same wall – namely, that English is not a very legato language and therefore only seems to “sing” when the words and the stresses of the words (both in terms of syllabic stress and stress within sentences and clauses) are given equal importance. It’s an odd phenomenon: Americans tend to love someone with an accent – we find it exotic. But we tend to not like hearing English sung with an accent. We want to know what the words are. In the European countries where I’ve sung it tends to be the opposite. French, Germans and Italians tend to not love their languages spoken with accents but if someone has a beautiful voice they’re not typically concerned with how much the language is getting massacred. (This is all rather anecdotal of course.)

My point is, as always, you’re singing to express a poem (or a story in an operas). In a perfect world the audience is captivated by both your voice and the message. But the former should always be at the service of the latter.

This week I have 3 songs for you by three iconic American composers sung by three iconic American singers. First up is Rorem’s “Early in the Morning” sung by Susan Graham whom you should all get to know. Susan is still very much on the scene and always sings with profound taste and clarity. Next is Sandy Sylvan singing Samuel Barber’s The Monk and His Cat from “Hermit Songs” which, if you don’t them – you should!  Sandy is still singing though he now teaches at Julliard. Lastly is Thomas Hampson singing Bernstein’s “To what you said” from “Songfest” on a poem of Walt Whitman. For you baritones who need chamber music on your senior recital, this song has a cello part as well though it’s not heard on this recording. There is a video of a baritone singing the orchestrated version with Bernstein conducting if you’re interested. Hampson has been one of the most famous baritones in the world now for 30 years and was a favorite of Bernstein’s. By the way, this song has a 2 minute introduction which you’ll love if you’ll take the time to find a quiet moment to listen to it.
What makes these singers sound American? For that matter, what makes the songs sound American?

Susan Graham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDOAxJ2ARnU

Sandy Sylvan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLdRwJ1vEtk

Thomas Hampson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ezIP4LAOoE

A Little Lerner and Loewe with a Mozart Kicker!

Hello All,

Hopefully by now you’re realizing that though you may understand what it takes to sing the sounds of English and to make them into syllables and the syllables into words and the words into groups of words and the groups of words into meanings - it’s not so easy to apply these understandings. Mostly this has to do with where you are on your vocal technique journey – how much control you have over your voice. The truth is, it takes courage to attempt to sing the sounds of the words when you don’t know if your voice will respond. We singers have a tendency to let our mechanism dictate what vowel we make. But it works better if we don’t let our mechanism be the boss of us! Our larynx, our soft palate, our fauces (look it up) etc. know how to produce an [a] vowel; so why do we constantly try and manipulate all of them to get them to do what they already know how to do? But that’s a bigger discussion for another time.

For now, I want you to watch 3 videos which show two singers in complete control of their vowels. I’ve known them and sung with them my entire career but am still always amazed at how precise they are with their vowels and how much attention they pay to what they’re singing – the words they’re singing. The truth is, their voices are of such beauty that they don’t really need to pay attention to words; and usually people are too busy staring at Nathan to care much about what he’s singing. But they don’t just sing – they communicate. And it’s like a magic trick. They are what they’re singing. There’s no self-consciousness or timidity. There’s just what they’re trying to project. Their sound pours out – their meaning pours out. Think about that the next time you get up to sing in front of people.

First up is Stephen Powell singing ‘There but for you go I’ from Lerner and Loewe’s “Brigadoon” with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (in the tabernacle itself) followed by Nathan Gunn singing ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in Julie Taymor’s production from the Met. As a bonus I’m having you watch Nathan sing ‘C’est moi’ from Lerner and Loewe’s “Camelot” in a semi-staged production at the New York Philharmonic. He is employing off and on a slight accent to suggest the idea that Lancelot is French but you get the idea.

Enjoy

Stephen – Brigadoon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9oYrch7fRg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9oYrch7fRg

Nathan – Papageno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2NxvM-rIkQ

Nathan – Lancelot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBN_nlXbIIc