Script Draft: Vocal Performance

EVE ONTIVEROS, HOST: 

The music building at Arizona State is a terra-cotta colored, circular building. Dubbed, the 'birthday cake', it hides in the southwest corner of the ASU campus.  Boasting a talented faculty, rich library, and fine facilities, proficient musicians flock to ASU to get a degree.

The music students here spend most of their time in the practice rooms.  When walking down the long, curved hallway of the music building, one can note the trills, and the scales as each musician works hard to perfect their sound and skill.  

SOUND BITE OF PRACTICE ROOMS

Here, the reed instruments mix with the brass, and the strings blend with the percussion.  They sound coherent--yet jumbled, and each with a unique tone.  But something rises above the others.  It is a sound that all the musical instruments were designed to emulate:  the sound of the human voice.

It is not too uncommon for a vocal performance major to also minor or double major in a language--since the study of a foreign language is part of the course requirements.

Students like Rebecca Woodbury find that their love for languages and love for music go hand-in-hand.

REBECCA WOODBURY:  There's a lot of great operas and songs written in German.

Rebecca is  junior majoring in voice performance at ASU with a minor in German.

WOODBURY:  I actually did an opera program in Germany in-between my senior year of high school and my first year of college.  We worked in an opera company there and participated in some of their shows.

I had  taken two semesters of German already as dual enrollment at a community college while I was in high school. Then I went to Germany and I was like, "Wow I love Germany and I love German music."

For Rebecca, studying German was something crucial for her potential career.

WOODBURY:  It is actually easier to be a full time opera singer in Germany because all the opera houses are subsidized so you can get a two year contract to be "the" soprano at a certain opera house and you get government benefits and a stable job. It's really predictable and that's pretty unique in the world. Most of the places you get contracted for a role. Then you'd be working in one place for six weeks and then you'd have to go across the world and work at another place for another six weeks. And you're always traveling unless you can get a  job in Germany when you can stay in one place . Some people stay for years and years at one opera house. Then you can have kind of a normal life.

So I was like, "hmm, if this opera thing works, out Germany would be a great place to go."

EVE ONTIVEROS:  I didn't know the 'world of opera' worked that way.

WOODBURY:  The Arizona opera--for instance--hires singers that perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and just from all over. They'll hire them--they learn their role wherever they happen to be. They learn music and then they come here for probably  four to six weeks of rehearsal. And then they perform for two weekends and that's it! They get paid for that and they have to go find a job somewhere else.

ONTIVEROS:  I always wondered how the met could perform "Don Giovanni" one weekend and do "Carmen" the next. 

WOODBURY:  Singers are contracted--some singers are Met favorites so they're always working at the Met--but the soloists for the one show and the rest of the year are working around the world doing concerts or working at other opera houses. Unless you're in the chorus and that's your real job and you live in New York and do most of the shows.

It's so different from instrumentalists that work at one orchestra and that's their job and they can live there and have a normal life.

ONITVEROS:  What was that like--starting to learn German? Are you usually inclined to foreign languages or did you have to struggle through the pronunciations?

WOODBURY:  I love learning languages. I took Latin in junior high, Spanish in high school and I took German and also I had to take Italian and French for my major so I studied a lot of languages and I really enjoy it. We also take diction classes about how to pronounce the languages--covering the really minute details. Sometimes it conflicts with spoken diction. Just like when you sing in English, it's different from speaking in English.

ONTIVEROS:  So do singers always get coaching?

WOODBURY:  We get coaching all the time. I remember getting diction coaching for the first time with a German.  My mind was blown from all the minute details with the different vowels. I was like,  "I don't understand! I can't even hear the difference."

It sounds so  silly to be like, "I'm working on diction," because it's so tiny, but it makes a big difference in the performance.

ONTIVEROS:  What kind of difference does it make?

WOODBURY:  A lot of composers set the music based on the sound of the language: what makes a song sound really German can be how you pronounce the words.  And there are so many expressive techniques just in the use of the language itself. It's something unique to vocal music--because we're the only ones who have words . It's a big tool for how we express ourselves, and it works with the music itself, really, in tandem.

For Rebecca, performing is more than singing musical notes with words. It's creating something for the audience to experience through her singing.

WOODBURY:  Sometimes when you perform in different languages there are subtitles so people get a sense of what you're speaking. But when we perform for each other in studio classes, there's no subtitles. I think it's interesting to use the language to inform. I think in pictures when I sing--I have a little scene that I'm walking through or if I have emotions, they're usually connected to visuals.

So I'm having this visual experience; I'm in this other place and thinking through these emotions that I want to communicate. It's always interesting what people who are listening who don't really know what the words mean; what they get with that. What visual or emotional experience did they walk through that could be different from what I'm experiencing--but is because of what I'm expressing.