Brundibar

Brundibar was a story I heard when I was pretty young; I had a music teacher in elementary school who thought it'd be a cool thing for us to learn as a Holocaust survivor was coming to speak to us around the same time.  Brundibar is a Czech children's opera written during the time of the Holocaust about two children who go to the town square to get some milk for their sick mother.  With the help of their animal friends, the manage to end the musical tyranny of Brundibar the accordion player (with very Nazi-esque evil tendencies) over the town square so they can sing and earn some money to buy the milk.  The wiki of the story is really good if you want to learn more about it.  Now as a college graduate with a degree in music education, this lesson has popped into my head on more than one occasion because I think it'd be a neat thing to teach my older students and tie into learning about the Holocaust and WWII in their main classroom some day.  What fortune that I should happen upon a copy of the adapted book by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) in the delete rack while I was processing books to go to the book sale room!  The book was in lovely condition and $.50 for such a rad children's book is a steal!  I'm pretty jazzed about the find and will definitely find a way to use this in my classroom in the future.  ^-^

Things I REALLY wish teenagers understood about auditions.

So, I decided to hop off and watch Footloose auditions on Tuesday and teacher-me kicked in wanting to fix so many little problems I saw...couple of issues with that, though; 1. I'm not their teacher and 2. in order to illustrate why they shouldn't do some of these things, I'd have to use some teaching unfriendly language.  Therefore, I'm gonna put it on the internet where I will not be fired for saying such things and hopefully, this'll help at least one someone out there.  There are three lists.  The first is a list of things that I used to think were common sense and maybe just hadn't floated into the heads of these kiddos.  The second is just a few singing tips that are a lot easier said than done.  The third is a few voiced irritations toward the behind-the-scenes people.  Here goes...

List One: Wow, the lights are really bright, aren't they?

1. For those of you whose largest stage debut to date was in the school's gymacafetorium, let me tell you something: stage lights are bright.  Blindingly so.  That's where all those cliched phrases about actors getting lost in the blinding lights came from.  (Ugh.)  Now that you know this, there's really no need to mention it to the people you're auditioning for.  Chances are they know it.  And when you hear the phrase, "Wow!  Those are really bright lights!" from 60 different kids, it can get very taxing on the nerves. 
2. Wear nice clothes.  It makes you look like you care.  And take off your damn hat.
3. If you bring a CD to sing with, for the love of all that is right in the world, make sure it's actually a karaoke track.  If I can't hear you over Journey, I can't tell how well you can sing.  It also says that you probably can't hold your own with a chorus behind you.  Neither of those are a good sign for a director.
4. Do NOT injure yourself during the dance audition.  I don't care how cute or cool the move you just did was.  A cool dance move is so not worth having a gimped character for the rest of the show.
5. Allright, this one isn't necessarily common sense, but it needs to be said.  Ladies, do not toss your hair every five minutes.  To the casting committee it makes you look nervous, fidget-y, and not in control of your body.  To the other female auditioners, it just makes you look like a stuck up bitch.  Hopefully, neither of those sentences is true of you and you don't want to be perceived as such. 

List Two: The walls make for a good audience, I promise.

1. If you are going to bring sheet music, try very hard to find a copy with the chord changes written above the measures.  (They're the things that look a little like this: Gm7, BbM+6...stuff like that.)  It helps the accompanist fake their way through your song if the written notes are really hard to play without lots of practice. 
2. On that note, when you've got an accompanist whose sight reading your music, things might not go perfectly like you'd like them.  Don't freak out and DON'T try to make it look like everything's the piano player's fault.  It's in your best interest to know your song backwards and forwards and plow through when things go awry.
3. Did I mention practice?  Practice.  When you're done practicing, get a captive audience and sing some more.  Sing to the wall, sing in front of a mirror, sing for your friends...what-have-you.  Most people who work in music have magic powers that allow us to be able to tell the difference between a nervous brain spasm and I'm-so-awesome-I-don't-need-to-practice syndrome.  The latter is soooo not endearing.
4. Breathe, but not too much.  You know when you speak and you just naturally breathe where commas and periods would fall if what you said were written?  It's the same things with singing.  Breathe where the commas and periods are and you'll be allright.  If that doesn't quite feel right, say the words out loud as though you were speaking to a friend and make a note of where you took breaths.
5. Chill out.  Natural you will always be better than overacting you.
6. This may be difficult for you to know the difference, but please pick a song that is in your comfortable singing range.  You may have picked a song that you like, but if you can't hit some of the notes because they're too low or high, it sounds bad; you'll normally end up either cutting out in those spots or singing wonky notes.  And while a seasoned musician will be able to tell that that's what the problem is, we're still stuck with the issue that you sang something out of your range and we didn't get to hear what you sound like in your range.  Essentially, we don't know what you sound like and that makes it hard to give you a role. 
7. Gentlemen, there is nothing wrong with singing in your upper register.  Just because you're not a low, growl-y bass, doesn't mean you're not manly.  Hell, tenors are hot and the majority of musical theatre roles are written for them, not the basses.

List Three: It is just never okay.

1. If you're going to cut a person of in the middle of their song, please at least wait untill a cadence.  It is irritating and jarring to get cut off smack in the middle and because of how we're trained with music in modern society, it actually makes the person singing feel like they've done poorly to be cut off so unceremoniously.
2. Being a choreographer does NOT give you free license to be a raging bitch.  Being a director or member of the production staff doesn't either, but this seems to be a pretty common choregrapher character flaw.  Theatre is a professional community and that means it is built upon respect.  You have to show your performers the same amount of respect you expect them to show you regardless of age or skill level.  I've had really nice and awesome choreographers take uncoordinated people like me and turn them into a spinning, awesome-looking, dance-y thing.  Respectful choreographers (and directors, stage managers, etc.) get their performers to learn steps quicker and better.  The bitchy ones get ignored and argued with.  I mean, really, you're only making more work for yourself.  Especially with teenagers!  What, do you have a death wish or something?  An adult is going to write a letter of complaint or something reasonable like that when you suck; a teenager's gonna put krazy glue in your socks.  Choose wisely. 
3. Parents.  Chill out.  Chill out, chill out, chill out.  You're making everyone crazy.  Sit in the back, watch politely, keep your comments to yourself, and after it's all over, tell your kid he/she did a good job. 

Really, after all of that, I guess the important bit is to not get discouraged by stuff and keep auditioning.  Practice makes perfect and what-all. 

Loud and Soft

I don't think I stopped laughing for most of that class.

Livestrong!

I've had some time to write some amusing depictions of things I have heard in my classroom.  Enjoy.

The sad bit is that this is one of my high school classes.  Sigh. 

So...

...I now live in Rock Springs.  I'm pretty apprehensive about the weeks to come; I just don't quite know what I'm supposed to be doing as a student teacher.  I hope I can still remember how to be effective at teaching.  I hope I don't screw up royally in front of the class.  I hope my fear of doing this dissipates before I'm in too deep.

Racism is just silly.

Listening to: McLusky - Without MSG I Am Nothing

Blah blah blah, liver transplant, blah blah blah. I don't much want to talk about it yet.

So, I don't know if I ever wrote about this particular college experience of mine...I assume I must have because I was incensed about the whole event - so much so I dropped the class. Either way, the memory got dredged up, so I'll revisit it again with, hopefully, better writing.

My friend Clay posted a link to this article in google reader and I just got annoyed. I am not naive, not by a long shot. Racism is everywhere whether we like it or not. However, I have a great deal of misplace faith in the human race, it seems, because I still believe that people who are educated and are caring individuals would try to recognize when they participate in racism and try to correct their behavior. Seems reasonable, doesn't it? *sigh*

The attitude held by the administrators in the article further by the hell that is diversity quotas isn't only visible in the admissions process. I see it everywhere in the classes I've taken in at my university perpetuated by the professors and picked up by the tragically impressionable students. Here's my happy (read: infuriating) experience.

I took a class entitled "Racial and Ethnic Relations" my sophomore year of college. I was still a political science major at the time, so the class seemed relevant to my degree and I needed the unireg. One day the class was having a discussion about ethnicity specific dorm floors at certain universities. I was planning to take a backseat in the argument that day because it was already past my threshold of angry. (Thus far in my college career, I had learned something about my degree plan: Poli Sci classes are mainly comprised of militant, angry, and loud people who will take a side of an argument in a millisecond and fight tooth and nail for it, no matter how inane. We spent an entire class period arguing about the usefulness of the post office once... "We don't need the post office! This is the technology age!" "Yeah, and we, like, have fed-ex and stuff!" *facepalm* "Yeah, well I hate fed-ex!" /tangent ) The argument was this: "Race specific floors offer unity in a white dominated microsociety." vs. "Integrated floors are the only way to begin moving in directions to end racial stigmas." And anywhere in between. The argument wasn't progressing anywhere and was mostly just different, angry students reasserting their point with different semantics.

This was about half an hour into the class. Then, one of the usually quiet students (I wasn't one of those either. I spoke frequently, but I bounced from side to side and brought in new points as often as I could. More fun that way. It also kept the angry students from attacking my views outside of class. Some of them were wont to do that.) He asked, "If we have a black floor or a latino floor, is it also okay to have a floor of only students from agricultural families or all from Alaska?" He had a valid point. If the point of the floor is unity in an unfamiliar environment, why not groups of white students from different life situations as well as race-specific groups? The professor...ugh...her response was (verbatim), "When a group of black get together on a floor, it's about unity; when a group of whites get together on a floor, it's about excluding the black man."

The hell you say??? I'll never forget those words as long as I live. I couldn't even keep quiet anymore if I tried. Isn't that just condoning and even promoting racism?? Reverse racism is still racism and, yes, it is ever-present in the world, but any respectable educational institution should do its best to not only denounce such behavior, but also teach its students that a person is an individual, not simply skin or heritage. I'm pretty certain my argument fell on deaf ears and several of the angries who traditionally hung on her every word in the class set in to tear me apart for the rest of the hour.

Between that and the two Cs I'd gotten on papers earlier in the semester (which were, according to her, well written and well supported... Eh???), I'd had enough. I withdrew as fast as I could.

I don't have much of a conclusion for this... I still maintain my faith in humanity, despite it all. It's a lot easier to do as a teacher, I've found.