By Mary Zajac
Across Peabody, opportunities abound for students to explore and refine their own creative expression. The singers and composers in Opera Études find that collaborative process can have a lasting impact.
A murmur of voices rises and falls through the weak winter light in Leakin Hall, Room 114. “You are the enemy of the people. You are the enemy of the people. You are the enemy of the people.” Menacingly intoned by students, the phrase begins, repeats, and circulates like a sinister round of a children’s rhyme. There is no melody—yet. But this read-through of the libretto for Shadow Stretches Long and White, composition student Victor Cui’s opera based on the real story of American student Otto Warmbier’s arrest and imprisonment in North Korea in 2016, already emanates quiet power.
“But when you hear real people reading your work, you begin to experience the back and forth between characters, to hear the drama brought to life.”
The day’s workshop, a component of the Opera Études seminar, is a valuable next step in the creation process, says master’s candidate Cui, “because there’s always a difference between what you imagine something will sound like and hearing it live.”
“Before this, I mostly focused on crafting the language, which is a highly technical, cerebral process. But when you hear real people reading your work, you begin to experience the back and forth between characters, to hear the drama brought to life.”
Pushing the Boundaries
Throughout Peabody, multiple opportunities exist for dancers and instrumentalists, audio engineers and new media artists, and singers and composers to explore and refine their work in their given fields, in short, to find their metaphorical (and actual) voices.
Opera Études is just one of those spaces. Originally developed by Roger Brunyate, artistic director emeritus of Peabody’s Opera Department, the seminar takes place over two semesters and brings together composers and vocalists to develop—and ultimately to per-form—new operatic works. During the fall semester, 32 singers and 12 composers are assigned to work in teams made up of one com-poser and two or three singers. Over three project cycles, each team is tasked with devising a text, written collaboratively by the singers and composers, ultimately set to music by the composer. A fourth expanded project uses this same format, but introduces a requirement of setting one text three different ways. This could mean using different characters, different orchestration, or different ways of dealing with the text using monologue or dialogue, for example.
With students writing three minutes of music every two to three weeks, supplemented by lectures from a variety of Peabody faculty members, the class essentially becomes a “writing-for-the-voice bootcamp,” says Tony Arnold, associate professor, Voice, who is teaching the class this year for the third time.
At the end of that semester,” she says, “everyone is pretty wrung out.”
The seminar’s second semester is devoted to writing, practicing, and performing the operas of five composers who attended the first-semester “bootcamp” and whose work has been selected by a faculty committee. Each composer is charged with writing a 15-minute scene or one-act opera to be performed with minimal costumes and set later in the spring by singers who also took part in the fall seminar.
Despite the intensity of the class due, in part, to its tight time constraints, students praise the seminar as a crucial step in their development as composers and performers.
“It’s a strength of the Composition program at Peabody that its students are so frequently paired with student-performer collaborators because those opportunities afford us the chance to practice those kinds of interactions,” he says. “They teach composers what’s possible, what’s impossible, and how to talk about that. And they teach performers new ways of thinking about their instrument that the standard rep would seldom expose them to.”
“I grew a lot in that class,” he adds. “It kinda trans-formed me.”
Singers also benefit deeply from the collaborative process. “I think when singers come to Peabody, part of the expectation is that they’re going to be engaging in music of our time,” says Arnold. “That being said, they don’t have deep experience in it. They come up against obstacles—this is hard to sing, this doesn’t sound familiar to me, there’s no recording. They have to find their own way through that and that can be challenging. This class is giving them some of the technical tools to navigate that.”
Contralto McKey Monroe, a first year master’s student, revels in the chance to work with living composers. “We usually work from composers who are gone, and we have to interpret a role based on the score,” they explain. “Now we can give feedback to composers and get their feedback on how things should be pre-pared instead of it being a guessing game.”
“By being part of the process, we know what characters are feeling as opposed to learning from research-ing other operas. We get to create the emotions, which makes it more meaningful,” Monroe says.
For junior Grace Hebeisen, the unique experience of singing a role that no one else has sung before is price-less. “Today in opera, there might be only one or two different interpretations of a character,” she says. “Now I can create my own.”
Arnold would seem the perfect person to lead such an endeavor. A multi-instrumentalist who spent the early part of her career as a conductor, she now concentrates on performing modern vocal chamber music repertoire, and many times she is the first interpreter of a new work.
But although she has experience performing opera, initially she hesitated at teaching the course. “My forte as a singer is chamber music, working collaboratively and intensively with composers, mostly in concert music, recorded music, avant garde,” she explains. “I thought: I don’t know if I can really do the opera part, but I can definitely do the études. I know what it means to help a composer tease out the essence of a concept in a way that a performer can digest it and deliver it.”
Arnold would seem the perfect person to lead such an endeavor. A multi-instrumentalist who spent the early part of her career as a conductor, she now concentrates on performing modern vocal chamber music repertoire, and many times she is the first interpreter of a new work.
But although she has experience performing opera, initially she hesitated at teaching the course. “My forte as a singer is chamber music, working collaboratively and intensively with composers, mostly in concert music, recorded music, avant garde,” she explains. “I thought: I don’t know if I can really do the opera part, but I can definitely do the études. I know what it means to help a composer tease out the essence of a concept in a way that a performer can digest it and deliver it.”
‘The Music of the Words’
Back in Leakin Hall, Arnold nods to this as she intro-duces the day’s libretto read-through by reminding students that “it’s one thing to read as text; it’s another to give voice as text.”
“It’s here we start to learn the music of the words.”
Over the next two hours, singers (with some additional support from Arnold and the composers) will give voice to myriad characters—from former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Cui’s opera, to a statue in a fanciful retelling of Pygmalion with a gender twist, to three grieving sisters in a family drama written in rhyme. With each libretto, Arnold asks the composer to set the scene, explaining a title or character motivation. And after each reading, there is applause.
During the class, composition master’s student Will Martin heard his opera, Zwischenspiel, read aloud for the first time. “I learned a lot,” he said during a break. “When you write, you hear the words one way in your head. But in the reading, other people bring their thoughts, and I learn more about the characters through their interpretations or their emphasis on certain words.”
Cui, visibly moved to hear his heartbreaking libretto performed, added, “I was personally very touched.”
In the weeks that follow, composers will write the vocal lines, and singers will work one-on-one with Arnold to learn and interpret the score with piano. Orchestration is added before the spring performance.
In 2021, David Carlton Adams’ opera Annunciation was performed online, rather than in person, due to COVID-19 restrictions. Despite the challenges of teach-ing and learning in a virtual environment, Adams believes that Opera Études has set him on a path of discovery. “Part of education is trying things on, seeing what fits,” he says. “And I have found through this class, and my subsequent work at Peabody, some stuff that really makes sense to me.”
Arnold sees the seminar as a rich opportunity to broaden students’ perspectives and give them more choices. “For many students, the idea of not having to recreate something that already exists is very liberating,” she explains. “They have no choice but to find their own voice in this music that had never existed before.”
“That’s very liberating, especially for a singer, because we box ourselves into the most beautiful recording of something that we ever heard, and we want to repeat that. And that’s not what our voices are meant to do. Our voices are meant to be a reflection of our uniqueness.”
“For many students, the idea of not having to recreate something that already exists is very liberating.”
Starting from Scratch
On a Thursday afternoon in late February, six undergraduate dancers sit on a campus studio floor in Dance faculty Kelly Hirina’s
spring 2023 choreography class discussing their in-progress idea.
Like the emerging works in Opera Études, these new choreographies are an example of the creative training that students experience at Peabody. Students in the Jazz, Music for New Media, Computer Music, and Dance programs have creative projects built into their degree programs, while extracurricular, student-run organizations such as the New Contemporary Tonality Collective or Peabody M-House produce concerts of new vocal and pop music over the academic year.
Peabody Dance BFA’s choreography track officially begins in the second year with an improvisation course where students discover their authentic movement language. Third-year dancers in Choreography 1 build technical skills through the creation of small studies and one longer work. The spring Choreography 2 class “allows the choreographers to implement these tools in longer works while experimenting with different methods within the creative process,” Hirina says. She adds that this process prepares students for their senior-year Capstone Project—where they deliver a choreography, panel discussion, or multimedia presentation—introducing students to the creative processes required to realize the various creative collaborations they’ll pursue in their careers.
This spring’s Choreography 2 class is the program’s first collaboration with the Composition Department, whose students collaborate with a wide variety of instrumental departments, ensembles-in-residence, and more as part of their training. This spring alone student composers created new vocal works inspired by images from the James Webb Space Telescope in collaboration with students in Ah Young Hong’s studio and Johns Hopkins Center for Astrophysical Science, the visiting Ensemble Musikfabrik, and a new music ensemble called Old Bay New Music, among others.
— Bret McCabe
