Campbell Vertesi

We've been working for four days here at Sarasota Opera - but it feels like a long week already.  Since starting up on Friday morning, the apprentice artists have had 10 and 12 hour days basically every day.  When we aren't in rehearsal, coaching, or classes, we're working on music, translating, memorizing, and warming ourselves up for our next whatever.

If you want a relaxing vacation in Floriday, may I recommend that you stay the hell away from Sarasota Opera.  If however, you want to work your butt off, and learn Romantic opera from serious experts; if you want a music staff whose passion for 19th century music is extraordinary, all-consuming,  and infectious; if you want to spend every possible minute thinking about music... then Sarasota Opera is the place for you.

I've really enjoyed it so far.  Yes, the days are long.  Yes, we get hardly any time to be non-musical.  This really is opera camp: for three months, you're paid to do nothing but opera.  I know that to a lot of people, that sounds awful... but I love it.

I will write some specifics about the kind of things I've been learning so far, but right now I'm exhausted and have worked (another) long day.  Tomorrow will be much harder I think... I'll be actually applying everything I've learned over the weekend.  So you guys will have to give me some time, and I promise I'll write out the choice elements of my notes.

Note to any of my Sarasota colleagues who might tease me for screwing around on the Internet (as our artistic director might put it) instead of actually doing music.  I write this stuff to help solidify it in my own head.  I find that I clarify things very well by writing them down... and if writing them in a public place can help out a few other singers, then I'm happy to do it.  I happen to believe that our art form is in a terrible state at the moment,  and anything I can do to spread the gospel of artistry as I discover it is a Mitzvah.

...from wherever I was.

 Actually, I was taking a vacation.  A real, honest to goodness vacation.  I went somewhere sunny (Maui, actually),  drank fruity cocktails with umbrellas in, and got quite sunburned.  More to the point, I didn't look at any music unless I really felt like it.  I only sang when the mood struck me, and I didn't let myself feel guilty.  When I worked, I worked on computers and websites - totally non-musical.  And I grew out my hair.

That about covers it.  I just arrived in Sarasota yesterday, to start my epic contract as a Sarasota Opera Apprentice Artist. The first two days are going to be packed,  and I understand that the rest of the season will be like that too.  Sounds great!   I'm nice and recharged, and raring to get singing!

Along with this return to the working singer life, is a return to blogging.  I very seriously considered cutting off this blog for awhile... but lately, I've run into so many people who had seen and read my writing, most of whom asked me when I would start writing again.  Well,  if I have fans, I can't disappoint them! :)

So I'm back to writing.  No promises about every day, but that's my goal.  I'm also going to try to get back to the old, happy-go-lucky posts that I used to make.  Funny stories about asshole colleagues and doing laundry in the bathtub... look forward to it.

Finally - for anyone who still checks this space: thank you for your patience with me in this unexpected and unexplained absence.  Your support means a lot to me.

I started working on my scene music for Sarasota this week.  It will be a fun lot to sing: a Baby Doe scene, the Figaro act II finale, a Pasquale scene, and one from La Vida Breve.  The Baby Doe is one of the parts I learned when I was mistakenly assigned a cover for one of Tabor's "cronies", so I'm set on that... and of course I just finished performing in Figaro, so the finale will be a lot of fun.  The new pieces for me are Don Pasquale and Vida.

Pasquale looks like an incredibly fun role for a good buffo bass.  It was composed at the end of Donizetti's career (his third last opera, I think...), so his comic style is in full form.  Plus, it pull heavily from the old commedia dell'arte tradition, which means that corny sight gags and slapstick are a must.  Sounds right up my alley!

Unfortunately, I'm not a "great buffo bass".  But I'm working on it!  This duet lives on my passaggio, which is a tricky part of the voice in which to live.  It's very easy for the throat to tense up, or (for me) to get very shouty... not good things.  The worst though, are the Ebs at the end.  They're very well set vocally, they would be a cinch to sing in isolated phrases... but as is always the case, it's the context that kills.  You get those Ebs after living in passaggio land for 5 straight minutes of patter, and without a breather to relax in between.  This means that in order for  those Ebs to be good, I have to spend the rest of the piece working my butt off to stay vocally relaxed.  So far, I've taken the piece apart phrase-by-phrase, and it seems fun and even easy to sing.  The trick is going to be stringing those phrases together without building tension.

Interestingly, the Figaro scene is the other one that I expect to take some work.  I know I can sing the part just fine, but since October I have quite literally taken my technique apart and put it back together again.  I want to sing the scene with my new technique, and that will take some unlearning of old habits.  I forsee hours in a practice room.

All in all it looks like it will be a great season in Sarasota... I'm really looking forward to it. 

I would love to be singing full time.  I'd like to be able to earn my income from my voice, doing what I love.  Unfortunately, that's just not a reality at this level.  All of my colleagues rely on day jobs to buy their dinner, and I'm no exception.  But my day job is a technical one, and it drives me crazy.

I design and host websites for a living.  It earns pretty good money, and it's a creative outlet I suppose... but man, I can't stand doing web design!  I don't know how you CSS hackers can stomach it!  When I design sites, I like to use as much "plagiarized" code as possible (with permission! don't worry...), and make the changes I need.  Every once in awhile though, I really have to build a site from scratch,  and it drives me crazy.

Honestly, I find the whole positioning thing in CSS a little nuts.  Relative position, absolute position, floating... it all becomes a big jumble in my head.  When I design from scratch, I absolutely must have some scratch paper, just so I can write down the totally obvious things.  And if it gets complicated - ohhhh boy, I can be up until 4 or 5 in the morning beating my head against the keyboard.

This week I'm out of school, and Bryn is out of town.  That means it's time for me to do some serious code work and get some of these web sites off my plate.  Hence the procrastinatory blog post.   

My PowerBook, Miranda, is in critical condition today. I wrote a charged email essay to my father-in-law, and closed the laptop to move on to real-world concerns. I didn't know that it would be the last time she would turn on. I never even got to say goodbye... *sniff*

There are surgical options, but none of them too hopeful. In the end I'll probably have to excise the hard drive and move on.But there's the rub. Move on... To what?

Right now I'm writing on my iphone. Workable, but it's not a permanent solution. I have a desktop that i can do most of my big processing tasks on, but it's not exactly portable... And i hate to rely on Windows for anything really mission critical.

Odd how we get attached to physical objects. We even tend to assign them human characteristics. Miranda was the veteran of many travels, and had the scars to prove it - she was held together by duct tape for the last year. One of the googly eyes I had so lovingly glued onto het front panel was missing, and she had a big dent from a nasty encounter with a hardwood floor. She was always reliable though. She will be missed.

(for the curious: she was called miranda because my previous laptop was prospero, and she was a prettier relative to that old linux box. The one before was caliban. Yes, I'm a literature nerd as well)

I've been sick since we got back from Thanksgiving.  Actually, sick is barely the word to use.  I have a little frog in my throat.

In any other career, I would go to work.

As a singer though, a little frog means I've been bedridden all week, getting up only to do the absolutely essential errands.  And it's been driving me crazy.

Bryn had this bug, as did a few of our other Oxford friends.  From all of their experiences, the vocal chord irritation lasts a long time after the other symptoms disappear.  One of our friends was still hoarse a week after coming back to school!  While I hope that doesn't happen to me, I'm happy I don't have to audition for anything like this.  Every time I try to sing, it... well, it sucks.  

I mentioned in my last post that I'd write a bit about politics and religion, to try and re-center this blog on my real-life identity. I think I also mentioned that my positions aren't exactly popular. Let's go for the gusto and start with the real hot-button subject: Religion.

I'm an atheist. I'm not even an "I'm not sure if there's a god" atheist, I'm the worst kind: the kind that actively believes that there is no god. I cite as evidence a universe that has unfolded essentially exactly the way we would expect without a god. It behaves predictably, according to principles that we can uncover and understand. I will grant the possibility of a god who takes no involvement in the day-to-day workings of the universe, but it amounts to the same thing: either way the deity has no effect on my life, and I like it that way. I prefer a predictable reality with no contradictions.

Heck, I can make myself even more unpopular: I believe that faith is a BAD thing for human beings. To clarify: I define "faith" here as a belief held in the absence of, or in contradiction to, material evidence. The human brain is an amazing survival system, one that has outcompeted all the claws, jaws, and speed on the planet. Our ability to use the brain for survival is dependent on our ability to accurately perceive and analyze the world around us. To teach people to ignore or contradict physical evidence - and worse still, to teach that this ignorance is a virtue - is to undermine the very ability that allows us to survive.

But don't lynch me just yet: at least I don't go so far as to call for the banishment of all religion. I'm no Dawkins: what you believe is your own business. You can starve yourself for Zeus, and I will protect your right to do so. It's only when religion starts actively destroying or damaging the lives of human beings that I will actively oppose it.

Do you hate me yet? So much for religion. Now let's talk politics.

I'm a paleo-libertarian. That means I believe the chief responsibility of government is to protect my individual liberties and property. There may be other areas in which gevernment can be the most useful and effective solution, but there aren't many of them and they require very very careful consideration. Don't think this is a big deal? That means I'm against socialized health care, against social security, against the Federal Department of Education, and against government funding for the arts. There we go - now you get it.

I'm a Republican. Well, I would be. I can't vote in the US (yet?), but if I could I would support the small government, "meek foreign policy" objectives that defined the GOP until 2001. Notice the date: I can't stand the so-called "new conservative" movement that has dominated the party since Bush took power. I think that spreading democracy at gunpoint is a stupid and dangerous idea, that religion has no place in government, and that Guantanamo Bay and Iraq have removed whatever moral authority the US government ever had.

But I digress: those are popular ideas. Since the theme of this post is how unpopular my beliefs are, let's get back on track.

I'm a Ron Paul supporter. Yup, I'm one of those guys that swarm post-debate polls, that puts up posters around town and writes comments on every Paul-related story in the blogosphere. Go on and hate me. I think that Paul is the only candidate on either side with enough integrity to stand up to the moneyed interests that run Washington - after all, he's stood up for his principles and voted against the rest of Congress umpteen million times as a Congressman. I also think that he's the only candidate with the courage to speak to Americans like they're intelligent human beings, instead of using empty political platitudes. And I think Ron Paul is the only grassroots candidate in years that has stood a real chance of showing up the established powers in Washington.

I think that's it. To review: I'm an atheist, small-government Republican, living in the bible belt, on a college-campus, trying to break into a state-subsidized artform. I don't think that these things were so critical to my identity before I moved here, but constant exposure to commentary that I find inflammatory - and the constant social demand to shut up about it - makes this stuff uncomfortably central in one's life.

So now it's out there, I feel honest again, and I can go back to writing about music. Comments turned off, for obvious reasons.

There are some things I need to get off my chest in this space.  I've been having a hard time writing here lately, because over three years of writing "nonymously", I think I've sanitized my identity out of the blog.  I find myself censoring writing ideas before they even get down on paper (as it were), because I'm worried about what people will think or say.

 To some extent it's necessary to sanitize a public space like this.  After all, this is my professional site, and while I'm no big name right now, I'd like to be one eventually...And the Internet never forgets.  For instance, I've always refrained from badmouthing colleagues, and have avoided giving negative reviews except when I felt particularly pressed to give one. I do this because I never want to lose a job over something stupid I said.

That being said, I think I have gone too far in sanitizing some areas.  In particular, I have worked very hard not to write anything about religion or politics in this space, because they are divisive subjects and not particularly relevant to the career subjects I profess to write about.  The trouble is, religion and politics are very important aspects of my life.  In cutting these subjects out so completely, I have started to feel alienated from my own blog.

Maybe this isn't so bad.  After all, do I really think that (both) my readers come here to find out about the deepest soul-searching moments of my life? No.  But you sure as hell aren't here for the career advice either. Ultimately, the purpose of this blog is to give a realistic picture of who I am as a person.  For the time being this is only interesting in a limited capacity: either you know me, or you like hearing about how I make my way up the opera career ladder.  Eventually, I hope it provides some three-dimensionality to the experience of seeing a performer onstage.  When you really know the human being behind the singer, the performance can be that much more captivating.

So with that "mission statement" for the blog in mind, I'm changing my self-censorship policy.  I'm still going to censor my negative comments about particularly terrible colleagues, but I'd like to strike a better balance with the taboo subjects.  This will never become a blog about religion and politics, but I will from time to time rant on the subjects.  You're welcome not to read those posts if you like.  If I find the comments too inflammatory or that they are taking up inordinate focus on the site, I have no qualms with closing comments on individual posts. The bottom line is, I think it's important to have a real insight into my identity here, not the identity of some made-up, sanitized person.  And that means I'm gonna piss a few people off.

This is actually very hard to do.  I've been so afraid to touch these subjects on here for as long as I've been writing... particularly because my positions aren't necessarily popular ones.  This is like a little coming out of the closet for me.  Time to close my eyes and jump. 

We hear a lot, especially in the last few years, about America as a "great nation".  Very few feel compelled to define what they mean by that.  Is America great because of it's free elections?  Maybe because of free enterprise, or the extraordinary military might she enjoys?  All of these are true, to some extent.  But they are incomplete answers.  To comfort an anonymous commenter, I'm going to try to answer this question from my perspective.  Very appropriate for Thanksgiving.  My Canadian friends are going to tease me mercilessly for this.

America is the first - and only - nation in the world to be founded on a philosophy rather than a bloodline.  What identifies a person as American is very different than what makes one, say, French or German or Russian.  Where other nationalities are defined by birthright, to be American means "one who believes in individual freedom."  In 1776 it was an enormous experiment, to see if a population unrestrained by rulers could create a coherent country.  To see if a collection of individuals, acting only for their individual benefit, could become anything more than a chaotic rabble.  The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were established as a way to limit the powers of leadership to a very narrow sphere - individuals would run this country.  By and large, it worked.

This nation of individuals became much more than a chaotic rabble.  Indeed, it was responsible for almost all the great technological and social advances of the late 19th and 20th centuries.  From the cotton gin to the light bulb, from female suffrage to racial equality, America led the Western world.  These advances were all made possible by the individualist nature of American society, and by the legal protections offered individual expression.  No matter what institutions stood against them, individual dissenters were permitted to argue the merits of their ideas.  It is these ideas, given voice by the defining philosophy of America, that have made this country great.

Not that America has never done wrong.  For many years she promoted institutionalized slavery.  Afterwards she fought against her own lower classes in the industrial revolution.  Still later she destroyed the lives of many prominent citizens on the basis of their political beliefs.  More recently she dropped the single most destructive weapon ever used in an act of war, and has spent the last fifty years using military might to enforce her political and trade interests abroad.  Her government has, by and large, been as beholden to special and moneyed interests as any monarchy or dictatorship before her.  Clearly, this is not a perfect nation.  But because of the limitations imposed on that government from the start, because of the institutionalized systems for free individual expression and free assembly, she has been able to change, eradicating her own shortcomings.  America is not a nation without mistakes; but she is the nation best able to learn from them.

So when I say that America is a great nation, I say it because of the institutions that limit the power of the established rulers.  I am applying for citizenship here because  only in a citizen-powered nation could I hope to help change the policies I find unjust.  When I complain about an aggressive and expensive foreign policy, about an invasive domestic policy, and a culture of corruption in government, these are not empty complaints.  I complain because awareness and dissent are the motive power for individual action.  And America, more than any other country in the world,  derives every aspect of her greatness - military, trade, justice, you name it - from individuals.

I'm struggling with some major career decisions lately. I'm making great professional progress - for a bass at my age I've worked with some great companies, and have a well-stacked resume.  But I'm not happy with where I am vocally.  And this is the only chance I'm going to get to fix my technique.

So it's time for me to pull back and cocoon myself in vocal training camp.  I'm breaking my instrument down to fundamentals again - hopefully for the last time for a few years - so I can start my career with a really solid technique that will last for a long time.

This means a few things that are psychologically very difficult for me.  It means  I should stay in Cincinnati to keep working with my teacher and coach here, who are phenomenal matches for me.   I should apply for CCM again, for whatever program will pay for my voice lessons (even if that means - ulp - more coursework). I should cancel my remaining auditions for this season, so I can spend the summer and next year here at least.  And it means I have to stop singing the big repertoire I love so much, and go to note-by-note vocalises.

This is hard for me on a number of levels: I hate living in Cincinnati.  The culture in the Midwest is driving me crazy, and I given the dominant ideas on foreign policy here, I don't like living in the United States much either.  I'm sick to death of school, too.  Academia has never been a good fit for me: one-sided learning is a chore, the lack of interest in student input drives me nuts, and academic testing plays precisely to my intellectual weaknesses.  And last - but maybe hardest - is the fact that a lot of my self-esteem as a singer comes from the career success I've had.  I'm proud of the work I've done, and it is incredibly hard for me to give up the prospect of that ego support for an entire year.

But it comes down to a question of priorities - my mission in life, if you will.  My goal is (unabashedly) to take my voice to it's full potential, and use every faculty at my disposal to become, in my own estimation, a great artist.  Career success would be great and I certainly hope that that would go along... but in the end, I'd rather be a great artist who fixes computers for a living than a Metropolitan Opera bass who embarrasses my art for a fat paycheck.  (Sorry Mr. Gelb, but there have been a few).

So I'm working my butt off between now and Sarasota, taking the first steps to rebuild my instrument from ground zero.  After I get back in the Spring, I'll be in full-on Rocky mode training for a year at least.  

Jeez - now that I've said this publically, I'd better act on it.  Excuse me while I go write some cancellation emails.