An American in Paris...

After having a great coaching in Paris yesterday, I decided to go for a run around Paris. I thought I was headed to the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Seine (which are just a few blocks from our apartment in le Marais, but somehow I ended up running the opposite direction (le Marais is horribly confusing with all these small narrow streets that change names on every block) and ended up at Paris Opera (the Bastille). Regardless, not a long jog. Being so close to Paris Opera reminds me of what used to be told to the Julliard kids as they prepared for careers at the Met...

'Although you may be in the building just across the street from the Met Opera and the Lincoln Center, that street you have to cross is the longest street you will ever have to walk in your life'.

It reminds me of where I am and how I feel about Paris Opera. I am minutes away from this beautiful opera house (and trust me, this edifice is magnificent), but I am also almost impenetrably far at the same time to taking the stage.

In my coaching yesterday, we focused on what I am lacking in my singing at this point...That certain something that allows the singer to relate to the audience and allow them to laugh and cry with us as we perform. It has nothing to do with technique, but everything to do with technique. As it was explained poetically to me yesterday, technique is the thing that allows us to sing unencumbered. So, while we often think we are building this huge constructure that allows us to sing, we are actually in fact tearing down that same constructure and eliminating the critical and emotional distance between the singer and the audience. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish, but at the same time, it is absolutely necessary to making great art. It is only then that our art can appear honest and then can really reach someone's heart strings.

So, to sum up: keep music as simple as possible and allow the music to just be itself. This also speaks to the state of Americans singing French music. It is normal for us to stress certain words, i.e. the noun or the adjective, or whatever. This is fact a great fallacy in french singing. We think often as Americans that we are showing the audience that we know the text and what it means by stressing the words. Wrong. In fact, we are destroying the line completely. The only way to express french text is to let it flow naturally. The french do not have the extreme ups and downs in their sentence flow like we do. This was the other big lesson yesterday. As I was singing stuff by Gounod, it was shown to me how the music itself in the rhythm gave as much emphasis as necessary and that anything more that what he wrote is just exaggeration to the french language. Oh, the things you can only learn about a language while in that country.

In audition news, I am still preparing for some small auditions here and also for some larger competitions in the next month.

I promise to take some pictures of our place soon and place them on my website. I will even include some shots of the homeless guy across the street who brings his mattress out every night and rests on it with his bottle of wine and harrasses all passers by for money to help support his drinking habit. That and the constant smell of cigarette smoke even at 3am. Oh and let me not forget that when you go to the local Target/Walmart (called BHV), it is IMPOSSIBLE to actually find anything in any logical manner. That includes finding throw rugs or alarm clocks. Would you believe we had to go to a specialty store to get an alarm clock? Or that I had to do quite a bit of searching to find protein powder for my workouts (called a Tonicizer here...I can't figure out if that is the French mocking us Americans for using all these food supplements).

Only in Paris, France folks...Only in Paris, France.