October 2, 2020

Princeton is having an all virtual semester and it seems to be going pretty well overall. Some schools are trying to have in person classes with precautions, some schools are having a hybrid combination. Some schools with in-person students are having outbreaks of COVID and sending everyone home for virtual classes. What a mess. I am still happy to be teaching from home, doing yoga classes from home, and meditating from home with people from all over the world. What a delightful surprise it was to receive an email from a grad student in Brazil about Singing in Style.

She said her class is based on my book and is called “Singing in Style: social, geographical, diachronic and gender variations.” She said her professor is a big fan of my work and asked if I would be willing to record a video greeting to her class, which meets online on Friday afternoons. I wrote right back and said I would be delighted to send a greeting to her class. We traded a few more emails and I ended up writing a ten-minute talk about some of my inspirations for writing he book, some connections to my new book So You Want to Sing Early Music, and general issues about singers interacting with composers and notated scores. It was fun to think about these issues again, and I had no trouble recording the video and sharing it with Monica in a Google Drive folder. I am getting so much better at all this tech by sheer necessity. I also included a transcript of the talk so they could prepare subtitles in Portugese! Monica was thrilled and so appreciative. One advantage of this new reality we are in is that it is incredibly easy to connect across long distances. People are reaching out to make connections that they might not have thought to make before. I am so touched and inspired that students are studying and learning from my work, and it is still having an impact.