As a young singer, unfamiliarity with repertoire is common. You haven’t had the years of experience of your coaches and teachers to know tons of operas. It can be difficult to be motivated to look up operas and then listen to recordings, watch DVDs, and study scores on your own. So, why not start an opera “book club”?
In a book club, people get together to discuss assigned reading and enjoy food, drink, and each other’s company. Doing this with opera DVDs or CDs can be just as gratifying. By doing it with a group, it establishes accountability for learning new operas—not just a new role, but familiarity with the overall work. It also makes it more fun.
If you wait until you’re hired to learn an opera, or if you learn only your specific audition arias, you do yourself a great disservice in competitions and auditions. Knowing about the entire work and being familiar with it musically and theatrically can enrich your experience of singing even just part of the work. It can also give you a vocabulary and musical knowledge to draw on in rehearsals. As noted in the article “How Practicing Less Can Foster Musical Growth” in Psychology Today, “musicians can always benefit by increasing the amount of music listening they do. Listening is a primary means by which we encode into memory what ‘good music’ sounds like.”
How to set up an opera book club:
1. Invite friends who would be interested to an initial event—choose a date and location. Consider space, quality of audio/visual equipment, and acoustics. If you have a tiny studio with a tiny TV, your apartment may not be the best choice. Maybe a friend with a giant flat screen can host, and you can be responsible for planning food.
2. Choose the opera to view. The sky’s the limit, but make sure it’s something that you or someone involved owns or can borrow readily. Make plans to check out DVDs or recordings from the library ahead of time. When I first started doing Opera DVD Night with friends as a college student, one of our professors made his extensive recording and DVD collection available for us.
3. Get scores. It’s important to follow along in the music. You can then see where great singers take more liberty with what’s on the page and get a greater feel for style.
4. Assign research tasks—have each invitee share something: insight into characters from having read the original source material (book, play, etc.), history of the piece, details about the composer, etc. Doing all of these tasks takes a lot of time, but doing just one is simple and allows the group to gain the benefit of learning from one another.
5. Plan a menu—potluck, tapas, wine, and cheese—anything goes! Book clubs always have food to make the night more fun and inviting; it’s a definite must for opera viewing.
6. Have fun! Enjoy learning a new piece with friends and colleagues that share your interest.
After my first opera “book club” night, the friends who attended practiced the bows the grand diva used and then performed the bows after singing in class together. In addition to gaining valuable knowledge of our art, we had a wonderful time bonding over the art form we all loved!
