Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe has performed on many of the world’s great stages, such as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, Paris National Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Seattle Opera. This season Blythe returns to the San Francisco Opera as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd and the Houston Grand Opera as Nettie Fowler in Carousel. She also performs her new program, Sing, America! at Carnegie Hall and at the Harris Theater in Chicago. She is the cofounder and artistic director of the Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar.
Pianist Alan Smith, a longtime favorite collaborator of Stephanie Blythe’s, has also worked with Thomas Stewart, Barbara Bonney, and Rod Gilfry. At the USC Thornton School of Music, Smith serves as the chair of Keyboard Studies and the director of the Keyboard Collaborative Arts Program and has served for 25 years as a member of the vocal coaching faculty at the Tanglewood Music Center. His own compositions for voice and piano have received performances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Wigmore Hall, Tanglewood Music Center, Music Academy of the West, and the Ravinia Festival.
Blythe and Smith are now taking their collaboration to a new level, creating the Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar, a program for singers and pianists. (For more on Fall Island and Blythe’s remarkable career, see the cover story, p. 24.) On Saturday, May 23, during the 2015 Fall Island’s inaugural seminar, Blythe and Smith answered questions from program auditors on a variety of topics related to the origins and development of the seminar, teaching, personal artistry, text interpretation, and 21st-century art song repertoire for young singers.
Auditors included Nicole Asel, assistant professor of voice at the University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley; Mitra Sadeghpour, associate professor of voice and opera at the University of Northern Iowa; Melanie Shank, master of music candidate in vocal performance at the SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music; and Jie Zhou, visiting scholar in voice at Nanjing University of the Arts, China.
The following is an excerpt of the Q&A session. The full transcript is available at www.fallisland.org.
On Performing and Teaching
Mitra Sadeghpour: I find you both very positive in your masterclasses in that you start by giving a compliment. Do you find this more effective?
Stephanie Blythe: I have learned that the first thing that comes out of your mouth must be praise. That’s what applause is about. It is a validation that we need. . . . Every time a singer gets up, they reveal a little bit about themselves. They reveal something that is personal, and sometimes frightening. It’s like taking a peek in somebody’s bedroom or even in somebody’s underwear drawer. Sometimes it can be very embarrassing. If the singers are willing to take the risks . . . then the result is edifying for both the performer and the audience and for me.
Alan Smith: I use the mantra “Plus-Minus-Plus” in my own teaching and in every day of my life. That is, I say something positive, then I [make a critique], then I follow with a plus. It is very important for all three of those stages to be really specific. For example, it’s almost useless to say, “That was really lovely” because you need to be specific. You need to say what worked, that it had legato and such. Then comes the minus. I never say that we need to work on this particular aspect, but I usually say that this aspect [needs attention]. If a student comes in and makes the same mistake three times, then I will point that out immediately and not start with a plus—or I will ask that they name me a date and time that that mistake will be fixed, because I want to be there. They usually remember it.
Jie Zhou: Could you explain autonomous to me? You state in your literature and marketing materials that [Fall Island] focuses on “autonomous artistry.”
SB: This means being able to make musical decisions on your own. . . . [Singers] are always waiting because it takes so long for our voices to develop. We’re not like an 11-year-old piano or violin prodigy. Voices don’t mature until about age 35. So singers are constantly in a state of waiting. We wait for our teachers to tell us when which repertoire is good for us. Or [a] coach will tell us when we are ready for a role. Then we join the world of professionals and it’s a conductor or opera director who advises us. There’s always someone to tell you what to do.
Singers end up being trained not to make their own choices, and actually believing that they are not capable of making them. We wanted to create a situation where artists —singers and pianists, would become autonomous. Our job as teachers is to make ourselves obsolete. So we wanted young artists [to have] a place where they are allowed to make musical and interpretive choices on their own.
AS: Then we want to get out of the way so that any success is their own success. And, if not successful then, they can work to make it more effective the next time.
Nicole Asel: Stephanie, when you’re in a situation in opera that is less than desirable, maybe with a production or a director that does not jive with how you feel, how do you handle it?
SB: What you have to do (and what teaching has taught me) is that there is nothing we do that cannot teach us something. What I try to do in such a situation—where the situation is untenable, where the production is confusing or uninteresting—is to try to find a way to learn something from it.
Mitra Sadeghpour: As an auditor, I think it’s invaluable to be here, and the opportunity to do the recital was also excellent because I could absorb some of the ideas [from the masterclasses] and use them in my performance. For example, “Look people in the eye” is a concept of yours I have taken to heart.
SB: Thank you! You know, it’s the scariest thing to look the public in the eye. I’ll use this example—the first time I sang Carmen, I was terrified. I told the tenor, John Keyes, that I was afraid to go on stage for my scene in the “Habanera.” I was afraid the audience was going to laugh at me because I’m so much bigger than any woman who has ever sung Carmen—that they were going to hate me. John told me that it was not my job to make people like me; it was my job to show them who Carmen is and they will like her or they will not—and the people who don’t like her never intended to in the first place.
All of my feelings on recital have developed from his comment. . . . I like to perform with the [house] lights up so we can all see each other. People often come to recitals and sit there as if they’re sitting in front of a television set. They don’t realize there’s a reciprocal arrangement going on. If we take the chance to invite them in, 95 percent of the time they will come. The 5 percent who don’t never will, and it has nothing to do with you. This concept isn’t about “Look at me!” It’s about what we are experiencing together.
Also you don’t know who you’re going to affect when you do look at the audience. One of the most poignant moments I’ve had as a performer was with a lady who came up to me after a recital and said, “You know I’ve had the worst week. I didn’t expect that I would want to leave my apartment, and I feel so good now.” That’s who we perform for. Opera is great, but it is more difficult to make as intimate as recital.
Text Recitation and Interpretation
Nicole Asel: Stephanie, you recited the texts at your recent Carnegie Hall concert. I love the idea and want my students to do it, but I’m curious about your experience. What was challenging and what was gratifying to you?
SB: I have been doing recitations for some time now. The first time I did it was at the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Festival where I debuted Alan Smith’s piece Covered Wagon Woman. I did it because no one had ever heard the work and I wanted all of us to experience the piece for the first time together. At the time, Alice Tully Hall was being renovated, so we performed it in the Center for Ethical Culture in New York City, which is a very intimate space. I explained to the audience that we were not providing texts, but that we wanted to go on the journey together. Furthermore, I explained that they would not have to worry about understanding me and would be given a handout after the recital. No one complained and it was a magical time.
After that, I decided that I want to do most of my recitals only in English. No one ever complains about French singers singing only mélodie or German singers only singing Lieder. However, if American singers sing only American song, then they are chastised, and I wanted to make a statement about that. I am an American, and there’s a lot of great music in this country which I would like to sing.
At my debut recital at Stern Auditorium (at Carnegie Hall), I did all American art song debuting a cycle of Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, by James Legg (1962–2000). These are rather difficult poems, which require a few readings to understand. I noticed that if I read a poem, it might take me a couple of repetitions to understand—but if I said it aloud, I understood immediately.
Poetry is written to be read aloud. I asked [my collaborator] Warren Jones if he would mind reading this poetry aloud with me before we did the songs. Every single venue where Warren and I performed those songs, we would recite the 12 poems and then sing the music.
My last recital at Carnegie Hall was not entirely in English—some of it was in French. We would recite the translations in English, making sure the translations were beautiful [and] understandable. The second half, we did four cabaret songs of Benjamin Britten. We recited the texts because they are not easy to understand, as are most of the poems of W. H. Auden.
After the Britten, we did Noël Coward songs and did not recite those because a lot of them are funny and you don’t need to give away the joke. I find that, generally, the audiences are more active, are listening more closely, are quieter, and are more appreciative of the music. This is because they experience the text and have an opinion before hearing the composer’s. Additionally, when we did this at Carnegie Hall, we did not use amplification for the recitations. Our reasoning was simple—if you hear a voice amplified and then you hear it not amplified, it gets confusing. Carnegie Hall was built for orators. Great speakers have spoken there and did not need a microphone.
AS: I love to recite, and it makes me play differently because I know more specific ideas with the timing of the words, or stresses, or consonants.
SB: I’ve also realized that not everyone understands the singing voice. Not everyone can sing. Yet, most everyone can speak. If the first thing they hear is the spoken voice, they connect to you faster, and that is when it becomes a reciprocal [relationship] with the audience.
AS: It’s also wonderful to hear the voice of the pianist. It makes them real.
SB: It’s like when you were a kid in kindergarten and the first time you see your teacher shopping, you realize that your teacher is a real person, too. And the same thing when you hear the pianist speak; it’s similar to seeing your teacher shopping. The pianist is a real person, not a machine playing an instrument.
Melanie Shank: Do you have other ideas for taking art song out of the box and for presenting recitals in different venues or different places or occasions?
AS: I think two of the strongest ones are masterclasses in which your students sing or play and you perform. Also, museums often have a recital room or an opportunity to perform among works of art, as well as your church or synagogue. Sometimes restaurants, hospitals, or retirement homes will have a piano, and you can perform there. I would start small with 15 minutes, then maybe 20, then maybe a half hour, and leave yourself and them wanting more. Interestingly, the university where I teach [USC] has a requirement for the guitar majors that they perform four times a year in a venue that is not a performance venue.
SB: One of the things I’m doing now is a sing-along recital. For example, singing in church creates community, and I want more people to have that experience. Alan and I are going to do a sing-along recital on January 23, 2016 at Carnegie Hall where the [audience] will be singing such songs as “Always” and “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.” Last summer, with six singers and four pianists, we did a sing-along with the students at Tanglewood, and it was wildly successful with over 1,500 people singing “On Moonlight Bay” and other Tin Pan Alley songs. We (those of us onstage) sang the verses and the audience sang the chorus. The audience was just shivering to sing.
AS: We could see people out on the lawn running to find a seat and grab a booklet because the back of the hall opens up onto a lawn.
21st-Century Songs for Young Singers
Mitra Sadeghpour: I teach mostly undergrads, and some of the songs—for example, some of Ricky Ian Gordon’s—are extremely difficult. In fact, so much of American music in the 20th and 21st centuries [is] difficult. Do you have any suggestions of American art songs that you would [introduce to young singers]? I am inquiring especially for those with beginning techniques who couldn’t possibly do the songs coached and performed during this seminar.
AS: I think some of Ricky Ian Gordon’s songs from the ’80s work really well. Richard Hundley is a great resource . . . as his songs are really accessible for young singers. William Bolcom songs and John Musto’s song “Litany,” for example, are good songs to teach.
SB: Some of the Lee Hoiby [1926–2011] songs are quite gratifying. Steven Mark Kohn is excellent; his folk song arrangements are fabulous, each song telling a real story. I also think that some of Alan Smith’s work is very accessible.
AS: Yes, my folksong settings and some of my [other] songs are quite doable for young singers.
SB: Alan’s folksong settings are gorgeous, and I think also Ellis Island is quite good. But I wouldn’t give Covered Wagon Woman to any beginning student. Alan composes a folksong arrangement for me every year for my birthday, and I get to sing it all alone for a full year before he publishes it.
AS: All of my songs are published by Glendower Jones, who you can find online at classicalvocalrep.com.
The Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar will celebrate its fifth season May 23–30, 2016, at the Crane School of Music, SUNY–Potsdam. For more information about Fellowships for Singers and Pianists or the Program for Auditors, visit fallisland.org.
