Claudia Friedlander's Open Salon Blog

On Being a Community Musician

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:04:12 -0400

A version of this post originally ran on my blog last August. I thought I'd post it here to share some background/bio info as I introduce myself to the Open Salon community.

Last summer, I paid a long-overdue visit to Brattleboro, Vermont where I lived for about three years after graduating from Bennington College. I came to Brattleboro a clarinetist and left a singer. While I was there I had countless opportunities to perform as both, often on the same program, as well as to try my luck at a wide range of musical genres.

Vermont's oldest town, Brattleboro sits in the southeast corner of the state, neighboring the Marlboro Music Festival and home to a robust arts community all its own. Among the population of 8000 are hippies who moved to Vermont in the 70s, including founding members of some eight communes that thrived in the area for many years.

It's an incomparably progressive and eclectic place to live and make music.

When you move to a city like New York, for the first couple of years it's all you can manage to just keep your passion alive and avoid being chewed up and spat out. But an experienced, enthusiastic artist meets a very different kind of welcome in a community the size of Brattleboro.

You're needed there. You have a role to play.

Everyone knows who you are and where to find you. You end up doing a lot of different kinds of things with different people and wearing various hats. The lines blur regarding who's a pro and who's an amateur, because many of the "amateurs" are highly skilled and many of the "pros" are still so passionate about what they're doing that they'll often still play simply for the pleasure of it, with little or no pay, if it's the right project and they have the time.

You keep busy. During my brief stay in Brattleboro I taught clarinet at the Brattleboro Music Center, performed with the Windham Orchestra, Friends of Music at Guilford, the Consortium of Vermont Composers and the New England Bach Festival, subbed with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, in addition to organizing dozens of chamber music and art song performances primarily as excuses to play music with people I found attractive and fascinating.

I also sat in on performances by The Tiny Monsters and the Ill Wind Ensemble , notorious local free improvisation groups. I got to record and perform with songwriter Philip Price of The Winterpills under the pseudonym Smoki Thoreau back when his band was still called Feet Wet.

And for some reason Nick Branch let me tag along for several gigs with his band The Prime Rib, possibly because my classical bass clarinet chops and polished sound mitigated the number of wrong notes I hit. I did my best to keep up with saxophone virtuoso Scott Shetler, who kindly tried to teach me to improvise. It was pretty much an exercise in futility, but giving it my best shot greatly expanded my musical spontaneity and willingness to take risks in classical performances.

Scott maintains strong ties to the Brattleboro area. During my visit I got to see him perform with The Dysfunctional Family Jazz Band at a party to celebrate the release of their new CD,Come Over, and to support efforts to close the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.

Great music for a great cause, held on the stunning grounds of the Guilford Organ Barn. Community musicians know they have the power and responsibility to take care of their community.

Obviously, you don't have to live in a small town to build a career that spans musical genres, organize concerts around the music and people who inspire you, or use your talents to further a political agenda. But I am so grateful that I was able to immerse myself for several years in an environment where I could focus on passion and politics without having to obsess about impeccable technique, audition skills, and command of the standard repertoire.

These things of course did eventually become obsessions for me.

The end of the Vermont chapter of my life became inevitable from the moment that voice teachers Nan Nall and Lise Messier, then my colleagues at the BMC, hired me to play clarinet for a run of Die Fledermaus they produced in an effort to found an opera company in Brattleboro.

I had never been around an opera production before. I was instantly enchanted. I could hardly bear to leave the theatre after rehearsals. I remember walking out of the historic Latchis Theatre into the blinding winter sunlight and preferring the dark magical world inside to the beautiful rustic outdoors of my beloved town.

If this had just been a routine production of Fledermaus, maybe I would have escaped seduction. But our music director was the late, deeply beloved conductor and coach Glenn Parker. I know I am far from the only one who found Glenn's passion for singing infectious, and I think he would gladly take the blame for making me fall in love with opera. Fledermaus is such a silly show, but the music and characters bloomed under his affectionate and skilled leadership to create a great night of theatre that was both hilarious and very touching.

I needed a great deal of intense training. I couldn't get it in Vermont.

I would not be the artist and person I am today if I had leapt straight into conservatory education without my too-short tenure in the land where three-pronged outlets are still a rarity. I learned the joy of playing whatever, and with whomever, I wished. I had the nerve to experiment with all styles of music whether or not I was any good at them. I know that the distinction between professional and amateur musicians isn't what you might expect.

While part of me will always regret having left, I don't want to idealize musical life in Brattleboro. There are certainly steep lows as well as highs. Many of the friends and colleagues I knew in the early 90s continue to live and perform there, and I was able to appreciate the challenges as well as the payoff of their choice to stay.

I am immeasurably grateful to all of them for maintaining the lively artistic community from which I benefited so greatly. I hope to spend more time with them in the future – and that they'll still let me come play music with them occasionally!

Equanimity, or Why We Must Fail in Order to Succeed

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:04:44 -0400

e·qua·nim·i·ty –noun

Mental or emotional stability or composure, especially under tension or strain; calmness; equilibrium. Synonyms: serenity, self-possession, aplomb.

Equanimity is a fundamental skill for self-exploration and emotional intelligence. It is a deep and subtle concept frequently misunderstood and easily confused with suppression of feeling, apathy or inexpressiveness…[it] means attempting to let go of negative judgments about what you are experiencing and replacing them with an attitude of loving acceptance and gentle matter-of-factness.

Shinzen Young

I teach and blog about vocal technique. Singing is more than my art form of choice – like a martial art, yoga practice, or motorcycle maintenance for some people, it also serves as my object of meditation.

To be a useful object of meditation, an endeavor has to be inherently open-ended. However great your technique and artistry become, each new success reveals a higher potential level of achievement. You have to become capable of simultaneously celebrating your success and acknowledging how much you still have to learn.

On a grand scale, this means that while your debut in a major new opera role may be a huge triumph, performing it for the first time reveals how much more depth and nuance there is to be found as you become increasingly familiar with it. On a more private scale, a technical breakthrough in the practice room or a voice lesson is a definitely a personal triumph – but it also swiftly gives you an idea of what the next challenge is going to be!

So singing is an incredibly fulfilling practice, and it's also quite humbling.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do as a singer, or as a person, really, is cultivate the ability to respond with equanimity to all your triumphs and your challenges, great and small. I write about how to achieve this in the context of a singing practice, but the principles hold true for all disciplines.

If you're a singer, a good way to work on this is monitoring your reactions to your own voice when you're practicing technical exercises or learning repertoire.

I've been thinking about the frequency with which many of my students express disappointment or frustration with themselves in small habitual ways after each repetition of an exercise – a dismissive grimace, a shake of the head, a muttered expletive – despite the fact that in my view, what they had just done was quite successful!

Why does everyone do this?

Well, no matter how awesome you may be, you come to me because you want to get even better. Getting better usually means changing something. So I teach you an exercise designed to help you make a useful change; I explain what it is for; and I direct your attention to the movements and qualities that will determine whether you've done it successfully. Because I'm asking you to do something that is different from what you are used to doing, it may result in sensations and sounds that are unfamiliar, unstable and/or uncomfortable to you, even if when you later listen to the recording of your lesson you realize that in fact you were making a spectacular sound. The law of homeostasis says that we are programmed to react negatively to change of any kind, so even though you're paying me good money to get you to do something different, your subjective reaction to successfully making changes may initially be one of great discomfort.

You may also criticize your attempt at the exercise if you think you didn't do it right, but the true success of the exercise isn't really determined by whether you executed it perfectly. It lies in your making your best attempt to perform the exercise and then notice what happened when you tried.

Your job is to form a clear intention, attempt the exercise, and then notice what happened. You lose this crucial opportunity if immediately after performing an exercise you negatively assess your own sound, balk at an unfamiliar sensation, or criticize yourself for doing it "wrong" because your awareness is not being directed at the thing you intend to change.

Awareness by itself is often curative. Even if you can't seem to make the change you want right away, catching yourself in the act of failing gives you crucial information. If you can observe yourself doing in real time something that had previously been an unconscious, habitual movement, you're that much closer to being capable of making a choice not to do it and choose to do something else instead. But if instead you beat yourself up for failing, you've missed the chance to get valuable information about how to make the change you want to make.

Making any change in your life almost always begins by trying, failing, learning from the failure, and trying again. Seth Godin eloquently explains the reasons that the most successful people are the ones who fail most often in this blog post. A great example of the truth of this is the career of baseball legend Ty Cobb, who still holds the highest career batting average of all time: .366. The highest career batting average belongs to a guy who hit the ball less than 4 out of every 10 times at bat.

Even if you're in complete agreement with me about the importance of refraining from self-criticism, it's easier said than done!

So here is how I'd like you to think about it: Included in the price of your voice lesson is permission to fail, as well as absolution from all harsh self-judgement, for the 60 minutes that we're working together.

For the hour that you're with your teacher, let us direct your awareness and assess the success of what you're doing.

With practice, you'll become capable of doing more of this for yourself. Give yourself permission to fail and absolve yourself from harsh self-judgement. With greater equanimity, you will become better able to direct your own awareness and skillfully assess your work in a way that will not only make practice much more enjoyable but will massively speed up your progress.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll also visit my voice blog.