Recital June 11 -- Click on image for larger view

Resurrection Parish

651 Millbrook Avenue

Randolph, NJ 07869-3703
(973) 895-4224

Homogenization and Art

I was talking to a friend yesterday who told me he was teaching his young daughter not to use the word “coger” in Spanish (“to take”) because in some countries (the vast minority), the word has a sexual alternate meaning, just like the word “take” in English (Oh, baby, take me now). I smiled and said, “you can’t possibly bring up an international child,” to which he answered, “oh, yes, I can.”

Well, yes, I’m sure he could, but the question here is: why?

I can’t help but be sad at the potential loss of cultural flavor in this new era of market homogenization. Not to mention that by choosing certain words that are pan-adequate, we are unavoidably categorizing vocabulary and idioms as acceptable/not-acceptable, better/worse, ensuring that one bigger group will assimilate the smaller ones, as if their contribution to the richness of human kind were less valuable.

This also strikes me as a concern characteristic of minorities. With this specific case, we can see the mentality of the Hispanic minority in the English-speaking US. Perhaps we as Hispanics feel stronger as a group, but we might be going to extravagant lengths to ensure we can, indeed, be categorized as a group. The homogenization of our language is one of those sacrifices. But have you ever heard of an American parent teaching his or her children not to say they have a “bloody nose” but rather than their “nose is bleeding,” or not to describe the dog as “shaggy” but rather as “hairy” or “messy”? Certainly these words can evoke other thoughts when heard by the Brits, but no one really cares.

My deeper concern here is creativity, art. We live in a world that more and more is encouraging individuality and diversity of expression when it comes to individuals, yet foments assimilation and seamless integration when it comes to whole societies. Where does this leave art? How are we to produce truly distinct individuals with their own visual, musical, verbal trends of expression if we remove colors from the equation, rather than teaching how or what these colors and tools may perform or evoke in different environments?

Remove the local flavor influence, and you would not be able to tell apart Puccini from Bizet or Tchaikovsky. How will this impact our future geniuses?

Divas and Divos Everywhere

An advertising agency gathers all of its employees in one large room for 3 hours. A huge presentation is given, defining the future of the company, the structure of the game, and the role of each group within the new plan: creative, account planning, media buying, account management, digital, linguistics, strategic planning, print studio. At the end of the meeting, two creatives (don't get me started on the use of this word as a noun) walk out together, and one of them says to the other:

"At the end of the day, all this is fine and dandy. But if the creative concept were not amazing, who cares about your media buy, how you handled the client, the correctness of language, the strategy. All of it really means nothing without us."

True as this statement is, let me propose a few others that are equally true.

• If you have an amazing campaign, published through the most effective media, targeting the perfect audience and at just the right time, and you publish a typo or a voiceover with a grammatical/language brain-fart on it, people will remember your campaign. But not because it was amazing, but because of your embarrassing mistake, which, by the way, just cost you credibility, on top of all the thousands of dollars in re-printing/re-producing.
• If you have the most amazing campaign, brilliant idea, beautifully redacted, perfectly proofread, flawlessly printed and produced, and no one sees it, or it is seen only by the non-consumerist Piraha tribe in Brazil, who cares?
• If you had to contact the client yourself, nurture your relationship with said client, organize and manage bookings of talent, studio, engineers, research markets and consumers, negotiate media time and fees with vendors and clients alike, when exactly would you expect to think and produce your awesome idea?

Don't take me wrong, it's not that I don't whole-heartedly agree with the creative's point of view. After all, I am a creative, and I've been creative my whole life—or what else do you call being a musician?

As a matter of fact, I hate the common doctrine that insists that no one is indispensable. I would like to propose instead that we all are. What a novel thought! We are all indispensable.

And why am I writing this on an opera company's blog? This false divo attitude is precisely what coópera seeks to eradicate. I say "false" because there's nothing divine about thinking yourself better than the orchestra, the wardrobe people, the planners, the marketers, the chorus, in the same way that there's no value in thinking yourself easily replaceable. 

I think it is a much better production, in every sense of the word, if we understand how intrinsically and incredibly necessary we are, and how intrinsically and incredibly necessary all the other parts are as well, and therefore consider ourselves lucky—truly lucky—to be so amazing, and to have found all of these other amazing people, to have been able to gather them in one place at one time, to form such an amazingly well-oiled machine that is therefore built to produce greatness.

I don't know about you, but I think this is what advertising and opera are all about.

Laura

"With great emotion comes great power" -- Gossip Girl

We might as well admit that we, too, have guilty pleasures. And, occasionally, we may even extract some surprising wisdom from them. Ah, Gossip Girl, the wise!

We have been doing some reading these past couple of months, and the unintentional common theme among the otherwise unrelated books seems to be happiness and the perception of emotion. Stumbling on Happiness and This Is Your Brain on Music have changed my life. From the conversation on how we fail to make the right choices in order to be happy to the treatment of music as an obsession, I find our existence, and especially that of the artist, fascinating. I will not bore you with my lousy synopsis of these fantastic books, but rather I will say that, again, I am inspired to create, to perform, regardless of financial retribution or even whether an audience is large or small. And I find that, indeed, our need to perform is somewhat of an obsession, and the pursuit of emotion, good, bad, pleasurable or painful, is inevitable, because it is said emotion that fuels our muse, our desire, our drive. Precisely, as Gossip Girl says, for us "with great emotion comes great power," the power of expression.

Today was a tough day at my day job. The company I work for had to face its critical staff and make amends for wrong turns made in the recent past. The room was filled, if not yet with hope, with passion. And it was inspiring and moving in itself, to see so much emotion, to share with those who we musicians call "normal people" that moment of intense feeling--no matter what that feeling was. For a moment, it made us all more alive, more ready. It was a taste of shared power.

So I leave you here with a video/ad that I'm sure many of you have seen, but it never gets old. And I tell you: go, feel, act.

Laura

Marketing Opera

After the collapse of Baltimore Opera last year, the opera community wasted little time in mourning. Almost immediately, a handful of new groups, some founded by young singers themselves, came up with creative ways to keep opera alive in Charm City. These groups have brought fresh ideas and a new passion to the city's arts scene.

Recently, Brendan Cooke, Founder and General Manager of one of these groups, Baltimore Concert Opera, spoke at Ignite Baltimore. The setting itself is unique: each speaker gets 5 minutes and 20 slides (which change automatically) to make his or her point. We find Brendan's enthusiasm inspiring, and he articulates a very valid question: How can we better spread the word about this art form that we love? If the era of the big donor is over, can opera companies survive and thrive with a broad network of committed and engaged fans? And, if so, how do we create it? Below is his five-minute presentation.

The Art of Giving a Recital

A couple of weeks ago, Frederica von Stade gave her farewell recital at Carnegie Hall, accompanied by her long-time collaborator, Martin Katz. It was an honor to witness her in her element, full of comfort, elegance and charm as always. The theme of the evening: Songs and arias that told the story of her life, in and out of music. We should all be lucky enough to have so much to sing about, and to sing it so sincerely. This was one of the few recent events that served as catalysts for our new beginning. 

When a young singer walks into her first voice lesson, often her teacher hands her a song, something in Italian, and plays it through once for her. She learns the words phonetically, learns the translation, learns the notes and when to come in. Eventually, we are all ready to perform for an audience, and, someday, put together a recital. Songs are the building blocks of technique. It's not easy, but the singer becomes comfortable communicating with an audience, just singer, pianist, and the song.


Then opera happens. Starting with simple, short arias, moving on to learning and performing entire roles. We learn how to flesh-out a character, how to work with a director to create a dramatic arch, how to be at home on the stage with costumes and sets and lights and orchestra. And, often, we leave the recitals of our earlier training behind. So accustomed are we to being surrounded and encompassed within the world of an opera, we feel exposed when asked to step back in front of that simple piano with a simple song. Simplicity is not always easy.


So here we go. Let's strip down (again) and sing for you. The coópera monthly recital series starts this June.