McGill University is located in Montreal, Quebec, a thriving cultural city in the heart of French-speaking Canada. The Faculty of Music at McGill hosts about 750 students, with about 120 of those in the Voice Area. The teaching faculty of McGill’s vocal program includes specialists in opera, German Lieder, French mélodies, and early music.
Opera Canada, Canada’s opera news magazine, has hailed Opera McGill as, “the premiere program in Canada.” This comes as no surprise to Dixie Ross-Neill, director of Opera Studies.
“I think [what encourages our students to excel] is that we expect professionalism from them. We expect a certain niveau of performing. We treat them as young professionals and we expect them to behave as professionals. … We provide a comprehensive training for them, with a lot of encouragement from the teachers—and that’s probably the most important factor. The teachers really support the students.”
Ross-Neill’s husband, William Neill, director of Vocal Studies, agrees.
“We strongly support our students. When we choose repertoire, it’s chosen to suit the student population. There are any number of wonderful shows we’d love to do, but … it is the mandate of Opera McGill to select repertoire that is appropriate for students who are currently enrolled in our programs. They are paying the fees. They are the ones who should be given the opportunity to learn and to perform.”
“McGill is very active in performance,” adds Valerie Kinslow, chair of the Voice Area. “And we have a very active early-music program. Every year we do a full production of an early opera, a Baroque opera, with a full Baroque orchestra on original instruments. We also do a main-stage production, and another production which tends to be contemporary. We do scenes programs too. So there’s a lot going on.”
These three opera productions are spread out through the year and offer very different performance opportunities. The early-music opera is usually produced in the fall and always performed with an orchestra of historical instruments. The main-stage opera is produced in late January and performed with the McGill Symphony. The Black Box opera, generally a contemporary chamber opera, takes place in March, performed with a chamber orchestra, an instrumental ensemble or piano.
The voice area at McGill has gone through a period of considerable growth and rejuvenation during the past 12 years, largely through the influence of the Neill husband-and-wife team. In 2003, they received Opera Canada’s prestigious Ruby Award jointly, as Opera Educator of the Year.
“Because Bill and I were in the profession for so long,” Ross-Neill says, “knowing the rigors of the profession—and because we had strong academic training—we were able to pinpoint those things that are very important. We’re lucky in that within the structure of an academic environment, we were able to get a lot of courses that are vital to the singer…
“And we happen to have been the ones who have sparked the program, but if McGill didn’t have a good depth of really good voice teaching, we couldn’t have built this program. McGill does have a really fine staff of teachers.”
As of this month, Neill has resigned from his role at McGill to invest in the ever-growing teaching and coaching studio he and Ross-Neill maintain in New York City. (Check out their ad in the August issue of Classical Singer.) Ross-Neill will continue as director of Opera Studies at McGill.
In addition to individual lessons, all McGill voice teachers hold weekly master classes that are open to all students, so that students may observe their peers and the instruction and critique of teachers other than their own. Other master classes deal with audition procedures and audition etiquette. The program also offers acting and movement classes.
All students within the Faculty of Music, instrumentalists and vocalists alike, are required to take the course “Life as a Professional Musician,” an introduction to the responsibilities and skills required of professional musicians. The course syllabus lists various topics, including job options, rehearsal etiquette, contracts, professional organization, auditions, special health problems, and performance anxiety, among others.
Some say McGill has the lowest tuition fees for a vocal program in Canada. Regardless of whether that claim is true, if you are fortunate enough to be from Quebec, tuition is less than half the price other Canadians pay.
The members of the Faculty of Music recently celebrated its centennial, and they continue to invest in the future of their students, evinced by the new Faculty of Music building opening this month [July 2005]. The building includes a rehearsal space large enough to contain an entire orchestra and capable of recording film scores, a 200-seat lecture and recital hall, a permanent home for the Marvin Duchow Music Library (home to one of the largest collections of music books, scores and recordings in Canada, including the largest collection of Handel sound recordings in the world), two floors of administrative and staff offices, specialized production and research labs for music technology research, a conference room, and broadband transmission capacity in each performance, rehearsal and seminar space, for use by the CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] and other media corporations.
McGill’s media information says that the university’s dedication to such state-of-the-art facilities is “to teach music and support research to future generations of world-class performers from the Music Faculty and to allow McGill University to maintain and enhance its status as one of the top worldwide institutions in its field.”
“State of the art” isn’t confined to buildings at McGill.
“Yet one more thing that makes us unique is that the Voice Area also works very closely with the voice clinic of the Montreal General Hospital,” says Kinslow. “We can refer our students there, but students can also go and have videoscopes done of their vocal cords for later reference, and things of that sort. One of the ENTs [ear, nose, and throat specialists] at Montreal General who looks after us … is the same doctor who looks after the Montreal Canadiens hockey team. They have more broken noses than we do, of course, but nonetheless we’re very well looked after!
“And the fact that we’re in Montréal is significant. Montréal is such a vibrant city and culturally active.”
