December 14, 2024
I am so lucky that I get to teach a musical theatre performance class every few years. There are easily enough students interested to offer it every year, but not enough resources in the Music Department, alas. It is always a treat in any case. For the Fall semester I had a class of five women and five men, many Triangle Club members, some my personal students some not. After the competitive auditions last spring, I thought it was a strong group, but as we got into the first few weeks of the syllabus, I realized that they had a lot to learn, both in terms of the 20th century repertoire and many basic skills. Fortunately, they were all open to trying new things and investigating the unfamiliar songs by Irving Berlin, Kurt Weil, Jerome Kern, Porter and Gershwin. Yikes, it is hard for me to believe that they don’t know these composers, or legendary performers like Fred Astair and Ethel Merman, but they were game to dive in and they loved what they found. The chemistry of the class was also very supportive, and the students brought in fun duets in many combinations of voices. We had one student pianist in the class and were fortunate to have the fantastic pro pianist Vince di Mura playing for every class as well. Vince brought a wealth of experience and great flexibility to the work with the students. After Fall Break all the students started making real progress and each class saw one show stopping performance after another. As they got into the more recent rep that they knew, their performances became even better, supported by all the new tools they were honing and the increased confidence they were building from singing in class each week. The final performance in December was fantastic, and though hard to believe, perhaps this bunch of performers were even stronger than the last time I taught the class. I think all the students had a great time and I had too many wonderful tunes swirling in my head all night and day!
I was so proud of Solène after she sang Barber’s “Knoxville Summer of 1915” with the Princeton University Orchestra on their March concerts. We had worked on it a lot last fall in preparation for the concerto competition. I loved teaching the piece to such a sensitive and talented singer, sharing all my favorite moments of interpretation and expression. It was actually good vocal practice for Solène as well, focusing on the simple, sweet, childlike quality of the music and text, learning not to overload her voice and do more with less. 
Was it really four years ago that we went to Australia for the International Congress of Voice Teachers and an amazing travel adventure? It was time again for the ICVT meeting, this time in Stockholm. I would present my menopause research and Michael would come along for a Scandinavian tour. 
The other big project that has been going on this winter is the Singing Through Menopause Survey. On Sataloff’s recommendation, I got the survey approved by the Princeton Institutional Review Board and enlisted the help of the Princeton Survey Research Center. Everyone I worked with in both offices was wonderful. After getting feedback from a number of my voice teacher colleagues, I launched the online survey in early March – hard to believe with everything else that was going on then!!! 
I finally decided to make an appointment to see Peggy Baroody again, the singing voice specialist in Sataloff’s office. School is over, the estate work has settled down, I have some more time and energy to devote to this. I have been pretty faithful to the low acid diet since January, and I have been doing the few exercises I got from Peggy and the speech pathologist on that first visit. 
Thankfully, this trip was already planned long ago. Boy did we need to be on a beach in Puerto Rico for Spring Break! I had learned about the small cottage in the low key west coast town of Rincon from my ISPP buddy Jane. It was sort of a project to get there – renting a car and driving almost 4 hours in Saturday afternoon traffic from San Juan to Rincon.