<p>Along the same lines, when my trumpet playing son was home for Thanksgiving my moron father in-law said that he “would be glad when my son gets finished with trumpet because he knew of three horn players who had died of congestive heart failure.”</p>
<p>I didn’t know what to say other than “I don’t think that he is going to ever be finished with trumpet…it’s his major…thats what he wants to do for a living”.</p>
<p>Now I can’t wait to hear the family comments this weekend.</p>
<p>AVA, Yale, etc are the top of the pile when it comes to programs and students who get in are serious about their training and career; entrance requirements and auditions are rigorous. Unfortunately, there are a great many programs out there who will take almost anyone with a pulse and it’s become worse with the attitude that “anyone can sing” and that since singers can’t train as early and hard as instrumentalists that “potential” should be heavily considered when choosing those for admission. Once a school has the tuition check they are loathe to dismiss a student and will reshuffle the cards to allow them to continue.
The “American Idol” genre is often confusing for the public because after all, “Singing is singing” and “Andrea Bocelli and (heaven help me) Jackie Evancho are opera singers, right?”. This could be the end of Western Civilization as we know it!
It’s this time of year that makes my daughter glad that she has a very, very small family and only has to listen to comments from well-meaning members of the congregations in which she sings (i.e "Do you do what Sarah Brightman does? Don’t you want to be in “Phantom?”).
Despite it all, D is doing what she loves (and also getting paid to do it!) and getting all A’s too. I think I’ll keep her!</p>
<p>“AVA, Yale, etc are the top of the pile when it comes to programs and students who get in are serious about their training and career” Well I think at that point(after grad school and well into your 20’s), if you are not qualified enough to be accepted by the most rigorous programs, you are probably better off pursuing something else.</p>
<p>And “Jackie Evancho”???
Clean up your language Mezzo! ;)</p>
<p>I think the rule of thumb is if you have to pay for grad school you should be looking for another career.</p>
<p>Susan Boyle. ;)</p>
<p>“I think the rule of thumb is if you have to pay for grad school you should be looking for another career.”
Yes, that too.
That was D’s point of view and we were glad for it. She took off a quarter to get ready for strong auditions.She had graduated in winter quarter and auditioned a year later. You may be ready, but your voice may need some catching up. </p>
<p>But, then again, some students do bloom in grad school or at least you hope they do.</p>
<p>Theoretically, grad school is where the voice is supposed to bloom because one shouldn’t be singing roles before that time, but everyone is different and not everyone has the sense, or the ability (given student loan rules) to take a year off to prepare.
I was thinking tonight (while my body was otherwise occupied at a concert…) that if schools are going to play so fast and loose with admissions on the basis of “potential” in kids who are not up to snuff, then they should definitely pay more attention to high school grades and even attendance. The kids-undergrads- that I have seen leaving programs (or who should be asked to leave) can’t cut it academically, don’t practice and skip classes routinely. A look at their earlier history could have predicted this.
As for you, stradmom, there will be penalties for those two words! Isn’t she what started this whole mess to begin with? musica, there is always a very heated discussion brewing on a well known music blog whenever that child’s name is mentioned. She has more supporters attesting to her “amazing talents” than you could ever imagine, and it got so out of hand one day that Julliard had to issue a public statement that the kid was NOT going to be accepted as a student there at present nor had any teacher on their staff agreed to take her on. Quite funny really, in a sad sort of way…</p>
<p>I know! I can’t believe people even consider her an opera singer! She’s not even CLOSE to being as good as Charlotte Church or Sarah Brightman! ;)</p>
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<p>Made my day with this one, MM!</p>
<p>I am not aware of the singer you guys are talking about, or the music blog, but what you are talking about is all too common. I used to read ‘violinist.com’ and you would see all these posts about this great prodigy and this kid who is ‘the next coming of Heifetz’ and the like, and when you look at the videos and such they post on you tube and such, you sit there and think “WTH”…many of them couldn’t get into a decent pre college program, let alone college.
The best one had to be this clown claiming to have auditioned for Juilliard (on violin) and having members of the audition panel come up to them after they were done and saying “you were fantastic, the best we ever saw”, etc, etc…needless to say, if that story is true then Elvis is alive and the moon is made of green cheese <em>lol</em>. Problem is a lot of people have been led to believe that because of Susan Boyle and “American Idol” and so forth, that what happens there is how singers really ‘make it’, especially in classical/opera, that ‘natural talent’ exists and so forth (no disrespect to Susan Boyle or the guy who won “Britains Got talent” singing opera, I am happy for them, but it isn’t the same thing:).</p>
<p>Hmm, that comment about thinking while my body was occupied at a concert hits home, especially when forced to listen to a lot of new compositions by young composers coming up these days…</p>
<p>Musicprnt - open your mind to new music and young composers unless you believe that creating music is dead and only performance of what was made in the past matters.</p>
<p>We love young composers! DD loves to sing new music with the wierd jumps and all. She has had 2 young composers ask to write music for her. She is thrilled.</p>
<p>I so agree Singersmom07! I would say more in support of new operas and song cycles etc. but don’t want to hijack the thread which I have enjoyed reading.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is too far off topic. Singers need to figure out ways to make it and if they shut this whole avenue off it limits the future. Who knows where those young composers will end up. I think the future will belong to the flexible and not necessarily the tradional route.</p>
<p>Once again, I agree. To paraphrase a 2007 New York Times article on Oberlin’s new music ensemble - you have to have some chops to play the new stuff. Likewise you have to have the chops to sing the new stuff. It tis not easy. What singer wouldn’t think that taking part in Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians would be fun.</p>
<p>“All music was once new” as the saying goes, but technology has now helped young composers come up with sounds that boggle the mind! My D does perform some of it and greatly admires Dawn Upshaw, John Adams, etc, but I have a feeling that musicprnt may have experienced some lengthy recitals in which there were pieces with 2 pianos, one tuned a quarter tone flat or which contained a 10 minute composition of interesting music punctuated with a computer generated “BLAAATTT” was set to blare out at 7 second intervals! We all try to be supportive, but it requires a lot of ear and mind, retraining for us!
It would be interesting to have a thread about new operas/ song cycles, compdad, or if you want to chat, PM me!</p>
<p>Dawn Upshaw singing Samuel Barber’s Knoxville Summer 1915. WOW!</p>
<p>Now now - my son wrote a piece for two pianos, one turned down a quarter tone, and it’s one of my favorite pieces, and even has gotten airplay! I also love the Corigliano piece. Careful what you say on CC! 
He’s also programmed with his ensemble a number of pieces with singers - working with the post-grad singers in Dawn Upshaw’s program at Bard. Some really exciting singing!</p>
<p>A short quote from an essay my son wrote for his application:</p>
<p>“One feature that is present throughout my works is the absence of a tonality. I feel that one impedes the expression of a piece of music immensely by applying a key signature. That isnt to say that I will not use a tonal center, I simply wish not to adhere to a key.”</p>
<p>I never said that only music written in the past is good and new music is bad, far from it. I enjoy a lot of what John Adams and Phillip Glass have done in their works,e moved away from the rigid orthodoxy of their earlier works. There are plenty of composers like Steven Mackey and of younger generations, there are people like Kyle Blaha who have written some incredible stuff…</p>
<p>But having gone to a lot of concerts with premieres of works by young composers, a lot of it is academic exercises in writing music, as much of the 12 tone movement always struck me as being, and a lot of it is derivative, it is either the 12 tone/atonal music form in the Schonberg style or a copy of serialist/minimalist music style of people like Glass et al, but without quite frankly the feeling those people have.</p>
<p>The problem I have with it is they have forgotten the audience, there is a reason why people react as they do to so called ‘modern’ music, it is because when you have a piece of music that you need a degree in music theory to understand the structural concepts, it is telling an audience “I know what is good for you” and it drove audiences off, big time (Bernard Holland, a past music critic for the NY Times, wrote a lengthy piece talking about why much ‘modern music’ drove people out of concert halls, and I agree with him). There is something that was in Ken Burn’s magnificent program “Jazz” about Cecil Taylor, the avant garde jazz pianist, his statement was that he expected audiences to ‘do their homework’ before they came to his concerts, to which Branford Marsalis made the immortal observation “That’s B… That’s like saying before going to a Yankees game I have to take infield practice to be able to enjoy the fame”. </p>
<p>There was a cool episode of Star Trek: Voyager that I think highlights the problems with a lot of ‘modern’ pieces. In one episode the doctor, who is big on singing Opera, is on a planet where they have never heard music, and they are enraptured with it, but it turns out they don’t like the music itself (for example, they hate jazz), they are enraptured by the mathematics underneath the music (jazz was too ‘disorderly’), and when one of their own people composes a piece, it is a big hit but sounds like, well, you can guess. </p>
<p>It is funny, I have heard that most music is once young and often misunderstood, and people point out that music we take for granted today, like Beethoven’s late string quartets or even his eroica symphony, had its detractors, and they point out that “The Rite of Spring” caused riots, or that Shastakovich and Prokofiev and Bartok were considered difficult, but what they leave out is the style that is typically modern, the atonalism of schonberg et al specifically, has been around almost 100 years and it is still having trouble finding an audience, whereas Beethoven has remained popular from his day forward and was considered a genius in his own day, the Rite of Spring became a staple of performance well within a year of its premiere and so forth and Shastokovic and Prokofiev and Bartok are part of the standard canon. If after almost 100 years that style of music can’t find an audience, whose fault is that? Maybe the problem is writing music where form is more important </p>
<p>I think personally what I object to is ‘modern’ music was supposed to abolish the rules of the past, the orthodoxy that did stifle developing new ideas, and what I see since the earlier part of the 20th century is a new orthodoxy, one that says that tonality or the styles of the earlier eras is ‘dead’, one that says if you are going to write music it better be in the style of 12 tone/atonalism or serialism, or have composition teachers tell you to find another profession and so forth. Instead of being free to find a voice, they seem to me to being turned out by music departments that don’t quite realize that the orthodoxy they teach isn’t reaching audiences…</p>
<p>And the music I have heard is not written by kids in some scmuck program, I am talking about kids in programs like the Yale school of music, supposedly the top of the top (New York Youth Symphony is one program that has commissioned quite a few new pieces, and a lot of people from Yale SOM had premiere pieces) and probably 1 in 10 IMO was all that listenable or had something an audience could love. You can say it is the fault of audiences as many supporters of ‘modern music’ claim, but the reality is music is an art form and as such has to touch the emotion and something inside people, and music that is constructed based on structure is not going to do that.It is pretty arrogant to write music to please oneself and then expect that audiences should accept it because ‘that is real music’ according to the orthodoxy of the day, the point being that audiences do matter and what audiences have shown isn’t that they are against new music, it is that they are against much of what has been presented as ‘new music’.</p>