Author: kathrynmueller

Fly on the Wall: Recording

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This is my view for most of this week:

TCA recording view

I’m making a recording with Tucson Chamber Artists — all world-premiere recordings of music by American composer Stephen Paulus. It’s going very well so far. I enjoy the intensive, focused work that recording demands. It’s completely different from my usual performing experience. I’m in sneakers and jeans, making the very best sound I can at each moment, trading the spontaneity of connecting with a live audience for inner focus on musicality and perfection.

You’ve seen recording sessions in movies and videos; when you think of making a recording you probably imagine the musicians in a studio, wearing headphones and performing behind a glass wall, like in the great ’80s video We Are the World. That’s not how it works in the classical music world.

Classical music is usually recorded on-site in a concert hall or church. This week we’re at Catalina Foothills High School’s beautiful auditorium, the best small hall in Tucson. No one but the producer and recording engineer are wearing headphones. There are A LOT of microphones scattered about the stage:

TCA recording

The engineers will later be able to do some mixing of how much sound from each mic is used, but it’s not like pop music, where you can record one instrument at a time. Everyone plays or sings everything on every take. It’s exhausting but exhilarating too.

Our GRAMMY-winning producer Peter Rutenberg sits behind stage with the engineers and calls out his feedback and requests over a speaker, his disembodied voice commanding us to take it again, this time with more/less/better/higher/lower/softer/louder whatever. Peter requested several modifications to our usual mode of singing, including silent clothing and jewelry (no taffeta or jingly earrings!) and covering our stands with towels to reduce page-turning noise.

recording stands

Breaks are crucial to give the voice, legs, and brain a rest. There’s plenty of socializing and laughing during breaks, but sometimes we’re quiet too. Even during a one-minute pause when Peter and Tucson Chamber Artists’ conductor Eric Holtan discuss something, we plop down to go somewhere else mentally for a moment.

recording break

I must confess, I have spent a fair number of free minutes vegging out with this (darn you, Candy Crush, why are you so addictive?):

Candy Crush screen

One more day to go. I’m looking forward to the words “it’s a wrap!”, to celebrating with my colleagues tonight, and especially to hearing the album when it’s released this fall.

Music in the Jungle

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One of my favorite things about singing with Seraphic Fire is spending time in Miami. As an Arizona girl I generally prefer dry climates and wide-open landscapes, but I’m also fascinated by tropical places. The sheer abundance of green, growing, creeping things amazes me. Last week I took photos of some of South Florida’s natural phenomena, including:

huge banyan trees
banyan tree

that form a canopy over the streets,
banyans over street

orchids growing outdoors on trees,
orchids

yards full of the exotic plants we keep in pots as house plants in the rest of the country (though my schefflera did flourish outside in Rhode Island one summer!),
outdoor house plants

plants growing into and onto each other,tropical plants and tree

and palm trees swaying overhead.
palm and banyan trees

Not a bad place to sing, eh?

Singing the Reasons I Sing

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My life is not bad. A week ago I flew out of RDU into a quiet, silvery evening —view from plane

 

— and landed here to make some great music.Miami beach

 

Okay, we didn’t actually sing ON the beach. But in between rehearsals and performances with Seraphic Fire, my colleague-friends and I did get some beach time and some great meals together.

It was Seraphic Fire’s season closer, Cathedral Classics. We sang a sightly different program, drawn from some of the greatest hits of choral music, for each of the five concert nights.

Cathedral Classics program

For me it was a sweet musical trip down memory lane. Since my career has tilted more towards solo work, I don’t sing a lot of these pieces very often anymore. But back in the day I sure did.

When I was seventeen I stumbled into my first paying church gig, at S. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Providence. It was a serious music program, and many of the pieces above were in our regular repertoire. While in college at Brown I also sang in the Chorus which tackled a lot of interesting and challenging music. Singing the Duruflé and Rachmaninoff triggered memories of my undergrad days. Back then I was wide-eyed, each new musical experience expanding my concept of the world and what I could do in it.

Choral singing helped me find my way professionally as a young singer. I don’t know if I’d be the lucky woman I am, flying around the country to make great music with great people, if it weren’t for Byrd, Allegri, and Vaughan Williams. Thanks, guys.

Delight in Dallas

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In my lifetime I’ve probably flown through Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport over 100 times. I’ve never been outside the airport to experience the city it serves, but my singing travels take me through DFW sometimes ten or more times a year. I’d say I’m a pretty experienced DFW flyer.

So here’s my expert advice: if you have more than an hour’s layover, head to Terminal D. Even if neither of your connecting flights has anything to do with Terminal D. Terminals A through C are serviceable but there’s nothing nice about them. They have low ceilings, stale air, and restrooms too far apart. Terminal D, by contrast, is a great work of aviation architecture, or at least a nice place to spend an hour between flights.TerminalD

It’s airy and light, surprisingly quiet, and several degrees warmer than the aforementioned other terminals which force me to carry on a jacket just for my layovers. Terminal D has nice food selections, shopping options, and public art.DFW floor

 

There’s even a section of comfy armchairs away from any boarding gate, but I forget exactly where that is and couldn’t find it today. Terminal D rivals Charlotte for pleasantness, and pleasantness is hard to come by during a day of air travel, unless you’re fancy enough to belong to an airline lounge.TerminalD-art

 

In case my frequent repetition of its name hasn’t burned Terminal D into your brain, I have a simple mnemonic for remembering which terminal it is. Once I flew through Dallas with my friend Aryo and we had an argument about whether it was D or E that was the nice terminal. He may have been trying to get my goat, but he insisted it was E. I was 100 percent sure it was D. I told him, “D for delightful.” I was right, of course. I don’t mess around when it comes to Terminal D. As I began writing this post, I realized that one could also, more obviously, remember “D for Dallas.” So there you have it. One more travel day made more Delightful (or at least less oppressive) by DFW’s Terminal D.

Diva Dressed Down

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Here’s one thing you might not know about the life of a freelance singer:

Sometimes we don diva gowns topped by glamorous makeup and hair, sing glorious concerts, great our adoring public, then retire for the evening to a luxurious hotel or homestay…

…and other times we spend seven frustrating hours at the Raleigh-Durham airport waiting for a hopelessly delayed flight and then, unshowered and grumpy, have to warm up in a NYC taxi cab.

Luckily RDU is a very nice airport (see photo below) with free wifi.RDU

Also luckily I had built several extra disaster hours into my itinerary in case of just such a setback as this. Still, it was aggravating to spend all those hours at my gate, awaiting the periodic announcements of further delays, knowing that I could have slept late and taken a nice shower and still have made it to the airport in plenty of time to wait hours for my flight. I was also worried the stress and extra time in canned air would affect my voice for the OSNY competition the next day, so I tried extra hard to stay chill.

It worked, partly thanks to a couple pleasantly distracting Freaks and Geeks episodes I watched on my phone. I landed at LaGuardia at pretty much the last possible second that would have allowed me to just barely make my already-postponed rehearsal. But without a minute to spare, which meant that I wouldn’t have time to warm up before singing the high Cs in my arias, unless I sang in the cab from the airport to Manhattan.

I spent the first ten minutes of the cab ride stewing about whether I should make a spectacle of myself that way.  And then I said to myself, “what the heck?” I warned the driver that I’d be singing a little so that he didn’t think there was a crazy lady in his backseat. He immediately turned off the radio, which I assured him was not necessary. And then I began to sing long, quiet tones through a stirring straw.straw

 

Rather than being annoyed, the driver was fascinated. “What do you call that thing?” he asked. He was incredulous that a lowly stirring straw was allowing me to make sounds he’d never heard before. He asked me several questions, and then left me to my warmup.

The straw is an amazing tool, taught to me by my wonderful voice therapist and illustrated by the great Ingo Titze in this YouTube video. This was the first time I used it to warm up right off an airplane, and it sure did a great job combating Airplane Voice.

I had a good rehearsal, sang well in the competition the next day, and won an award. Thanks, Ingo Titze/taxi driver/Freaks and Geeks!

on stage