Identity theft

With profound hearing impairment following close proximity rehearsals with the ON male chorus for Fanciulla Del West, and after crossing the river Tyne and almost obliterating my ankle on Newcastle cobblestones (can anyone really walk them?!) I’m returning to Leeds tonight.

It’s one month coming up since I arrived here and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this tiny life of travel before I get back to discussing my experiences with Opera North.

                          Our lady blogger captured in reflexive mode at The Newgate, Newcastle 

                                                     

I have travelled from hostel to apartment to hotel. Like Bob Dylan, I’ve been to London, I’ve been to gay Paris.

And I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies.

I’ve been reading Norman Lebrecht’s “Who Killed Classical Music? Maestros, Managers and Corporate Politics,” a searing indictment on a culture of entitlement fostered without acknowledgement by the opera world, one that allows heinous crimes to be perpetrated against innocent victims without recourse.

That crime is the business of music in the 21^st century.

“The saddest victims are the youngest, their shining ideals shattered by callous exploitation. A former music student wrote to me from Florida recalling the summer he spent in the company of a celebrated conductor who surrounded himself with admiring teenagers and habitually abused them:

The adoration and subservience is a little hard for me to describe ... One evening, one of the girls was walking past `Jack' (a pseudonym), who was sitting in his usual reclining chair. Without discussing it, `Jack' stopped her next to his chair, with his hand, slowly reached up and pulled her panties down, and stroked her legs up to her crotch. She didn't protest, and neither did anyone else. Such was his power. And he didn't want to have a sexual relationship with her. One of the reasons why she left -- she saw no future with `Jack'.

…(this) tormentor occupies a prominent position at a major opera house. He is, so far as I am aware, an unreformed character -- and there are more like him.”

You can read the chapter “Sex, Lies and Videodiscs” in its entirety here: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lebrecht-music.html

Recently, I’ve touched a little on the dehumanizing aspects of singing. They are very, very real. From the relatively safe distance of my computer, I want to propose that singing is also a real danger to your health in far more than the ethereal sense.

The art of singing invites us to draw from a wellspring of power and human experience to reach out across an audience. The business of singing, however, starves the soul of oxygen, and turns the milk of human kindness sour. It forges us into creations that we don’t even recognize. And yet – and yet – we still turn back to it time and again. We lavish all our love and affection on it, and it repays us with indifference.

And yet – we can’t turn away from its transcendent power. Opera takes us beyond our everyday world, in an experience we crave again and again. People dream of being onstage for a reason.

The same chains that bind us enslave us to this artform. Perhaps like me you’ve found yourself in a hotel room in the middle of a place whose name you can’t remember, or working for someone whose morals you can’t respect. You are alone, almost utterly; on the road and nameless. You feel like you are losing your identity.

The external pressures are endless: family, financial, religious. If you’re not careful they can destroy you. You can’t talk about these things because it’s taboo. Unless you are a trust fund baby, practically everyone has to find their own path on the so-called golden way. For a slave to ambition, that’s a lot of wallah.

Then there’s the dud steers: bad advice, wrong teaching, misconceptions, misunderstandings (yours, others.) At least in other professions there’s only one way to get things wrong! It can be dispiriting having to go back to a blank canvas again and again. Add to that the odds stacked sky high thanks to other industry practices like nepotism, bribery and corruption.

One of the great crimes in the Western world is, of course, fees for education. It’s completely unforgivable that music schools churn out thousands of new artists every year who are completely unprepared for the reality of finding work. The vast majority of these will sink like a stone their first year out of university due to a combination of debt and bad teaching. The fraction that the world deems acceptable will be catapulted blinking into the harsh light of the new Western economy By Any Means Necessary. They are literally bartering their souls. The passage I’ve already discussed by Lebrecht illustrates how a famous conductor casually molesting a young woman in front of a large group of people can become normalized in such ripe conditions.

This is just the way it is, they tell you. Everyone has to do it to succeed these days. By Any Means Necessary.

The business of singing warps the art of opera. These people are murderers, killing anything good. They are rapists, tainting the pure soul of music. They are criminals. This must never become normal. 

I’ll leave the last word to Lebrecht: “Misconduct cannot be stopped, but it should certainly not be fostered by an art that aspires to spiritual values.”

Extra reading: The Singer's Ego: Finding Balance between Music and Life by Lynn Eustis.