SST: The "La La La" Song

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

A few months ago my sister Emily requested this Sesame Street clip for her birthday, which is today.



Emily and her fam are down here in Utah with us right now, so I'm enjoying the rare treat of spending a birthday with one of my sisters. (I was with Emily on her last birthday too - the proximity to Christmas definitely factors into that.)

Christmas Découpage

I spent a good portion of the morning helping my parents wrap presents, and like many activities that should be short and straightforward, I turned it into a silly arts and crafts project. My favorite wrapping job is above - it was the last present and I used nothing but leftover wrapping paper fragments. I'm just bummed that Gideon, my 22-month old nephew, probably won't fully appreciate my mad découpage skillz.

P.S. - Vote in the B Vitamin poll on the right sidebar.

J-14

Editor's note: I don't usually use this space for rants, but today I'm making an exception.

I flew into Utah last night and my flight was nondescript, which is what a good flight should be. I had a one hour layover in Chicago, during which I killed time by popping into one of those souvenir/magazine shops. I'm the type person who is usually aware of big current events but doesn't always bother to keep up with all of the extended coverage in the aftermath - I don't watch the news (unless you count SportsCenter), I don't look at newspapers (except to read Utah Jazz coverage and film reviews), and at the grocery store I never pay any attention to the People and Us Weekly-style magazines at the checkout. So yesterday at the magazine shop was quite a shock.

Of course I'm aware of the unfolding Tiger Woods saga - they cover it on SportsCenter, after all. But I have to admit that I was surprised that every single magazine in every genre, from the most respected magazines on down to the worst rags, had Tiger plastered all over the cover with the latest sordid headlines. Looking at the magazine rack was like looking at an Andy Warhol painting of celebrities that are reprinted so many times and painted over so artificially that they stop being human beings and they just turn into a blur. Whether it's Marilyn Monroe, Tiger Woods, or the celebrity of the week, these magazines turn human beings into mere page-filling content and America laps up every single drop of it. Makes me sick.

However, when I returned to the gate before boarding I saw something even more sickening. A girl who looked about 10 years old was sitting next to me reading a magazine I'd never seen before called J-14. It looked exactly like the trash magazines I had just seen in the stores, except for the stories were all about Miley Cyrus and the cast of Twilight. The magazine looked innocuous enough (I glanced over and saw one headline - Miley had an imaginary friend as a kid?! LOL!), but in reality it's a trashy magazine training course. It's preparing youngsters so that in a few years they'll be perfectly primed for grown-up celebrity scandals like Tiger.

There is a small moment in Tina Fey's Mean Girls that brilliantly captures how anxious the media is to give innocent young kids an apprenticeship in trashiness. They all go over to Regina's house and in the background we see her un-parentally supervised little sister in the background copying the skanky dance moves on the TV. That girl will grow up to be another Regina, perpetuating the cycle. Trashiness usually doesn't just happen - you have to be carefully taught. And that's why J-14* upset me so much.

* This post would have been so much cooler if my plane had left from Gate J-14. I think it was B-2 or something boring like that. But then again, Vitamin B2 is Riboflavin, the coolest of the B Vitamins. I always thought Riboflavin would be a cool band name. Thoughts?

Editor's note: Amy Jeppsen offers her retort to this post here.

SST: Oklahoma!

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Today and Thursday the students in my voice class will sing their final in-class performance. Just as I did last year, I have assigned each student a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. In my opinion, the songs R & H are perfect for this type of class for various reasons: they are perfectly within the reach of beginning singers (but are also sophisticated enough to appeal to advanced singers), they promote healthy vocal technique, and down the road they will serve my students well as audition pieces.

Last year I was stunned that most of the class had never even heard of R & H, but my kids this semester are a little more musically savvy and they were very excited about the project. It was a fun project for me too - I had a good time digging through the entire R & H canon looking for a perfect match for each student. I stuck to the major shows (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, Cinderella, and Sound of Music) but I tried to find songs that aren't too cheesy and dated (as some of R & H has grown in the past 50-60 years) or overdone. (I think the performance I'm most looking forward to is the brooding baritone monologue "Lonely Room," which is cut from many a production of Oklahoma!)

Each student in the class has already given three in-class performances, and so far every performance has been well-prepared and professional. Hopefully no one this week has an embarrassing memory lapse like this:

Still Alive, Still Singing

My recent blogging dearth has been a fairly accurate reflection of my social life recently. The last few weeks have been the busiest and most stressful since I've been at the U of M, which is funny because I finished all of my required coursework at the end of the last school year. But this semester I have been (1) teaching both private students and a voice class, (2) learning vocal repertoire like a madman for my first doctoral recital in late January, (3) preparing myself for my last round of preliminary exams also in January, and (4) writing a full-length script for my just-for-fun TV Writing class.

Of that list, the most time consuming by far have been items (2) and (4). The TV writing thing has been pretty well documented in this space, and I fear that I have given the impression that I have taken the semester off from music.

For my first vocal recital I am required to present a program with works in German, Italian, French, and English. I suppose I could have just thrown together a bunch of music that I already know, but I really dislike random and disjointed recitals. So I hit on this idea of putting together a program of songs whose texts were written by poets who were also accomplished novelists. The recital is called "A Novel Approach" and features songs by many different composers who set the poems of Goethe (German), Manzoni (Italian), Victor Hugo (French), and Thomas Hardy (English). I had a lot of fun searching for the most interesting musical settings of their poems, mainly focusing on finding narrative songs to fit with the novelist concept.

This 'novel' idea has lead me to find some really compelling songs that are a little off the beaten path, and when I presented the concept/setlist to various members of my doctoral committee they were really psyched. But the problem is that I'm learning fifteen entirely new pieces, and since most of them are narrative songs they can get long and wordy . I only get 12 voice lessons/coaching per semester, so I've had to prepare multiple long/hardy/wordy songs per week just so my teacher can hear that the whole program before the end of the semester. And it's not like you coach a piece one time and it's perfect. So that's been stressful, particularly since I have a hearing for the entire voice faculty the week that school starts again.

After the January barrage of faculty hearing/orals/first recital, the rest of next semester should be a little bit less stressful. I have to give a total of three recitals next semester and for the second one I am planning on doing an all-Brazilian recital, and that repertoire is more familiar to me and should come together quicker. And for the third one I think there's a fairly good chance that I can get an opera role in an upcoming production that would count as a recital.

Off to church!