Alice’s Adventures in an Arts Career

One of the sweetest things about teaching grades 1 through 4 is that children that age are still willing to love their teachers and not act like they are the dumbest creatures to walk the face of the earth and couldn’t possibly know anything about anything.  I don’t know how it is with public school children, but with Waldorf kids I have received many little tokens and gifts of appreciation from my students.  Usually it’s something they’ve spontaneously made or found like a ring made out of blue wool or a stone they found on the path. Like hold it up with gleaming eyes and say “Look what I found for you!” More often than not when you allow students some free drawing time during class you will invariably end up with two or three pictures drawn just for you.

My absolute favourite of these happen last year when I was substituting for a grade 3 class. I had never met this class before.  It was a hot June day, and I was substituting in a French class.  Now my French is not very good.  Actually, it’s horrible and aside from collecting their weeks assignment books, there was little in the way of a real lesson I could do and the heat was making it intolerable for any learning to take place.  So instead, I allowed the class to either work on the main lesson books or they could free draw while I story-told (one day I’ll have to write a post about story-telling).

When the class was over and the students were packing up and getting ready for their next class one student came up to me and handed me a beautifully coloured wax crayon picture.  On the back it said

Dear Miss Hyitella,

You are my favourite teacher, if you really are a real teacher.

From Jenny

I still have this card.  It makes me smile on so many levels.  I enjoy the rather creative spelling of my last name.  I like the questioning of my status as a real teacher, and not one of those fake teachers.  But what I like the most, is that after only one class, I am her favourite teacher …ever!  To be honest, that’s only because I told her stories all afternoon and let her draw.  If I’d been teaching her math, she may not have liked me quite so much.

Today was my choral  arrangement read-through of my final arrangement project.  It was very successful. Well, certainly not performance quality, but that was by no means a reality given that the choir was sight-reading and we only had 20 minutes to spend on the piece.  However, I was extremely pleased with the result.  This was the first time I heard my piece live and as it was meant to be performed with real singers and real instruments.  My friend Josh came in to play the solo sax obbligato line and that was so nice of him.  It was great to work with him, since he was the one who convinced me to write for sax.

After the read-through I received some very positive and constructive feedback.  My prof. Jeff Smallman suggested the entire sax part be played up the octave, which Josh did and I really liked the results.  The tone quality in that upper range of the soprano sax was much clearer and then when the line did drop below in the lower range, the tone quality contrast was very effective.

I was so happy to hear my piece.  It was the first time that I got a real, solid confirmation that what I had written worked and was as effective as I thought and hoped it would be.  I only wish we could have done the same thing with previous arrangements and projects in the course.  Oh well, I guess we can’t have everything.

I had the opportunity yesterday to conduct Les Choristes.   This is the school choir that I am in as part of my ensemble requirements for my degree and it is directed by the wonderful Jennifer Moir.  Usually at the end of the year, Jen opens a few rehearsals up to conducting students who wish to conduct the choir and get some feedback.  She made the announcement last week and asked who would be interested.  My hand flew up immediately.

So I had a short conducting workshop with her and the choir lasting roughly 15 minutes.  I haven’t had any formal conducting lessons or workshops in a year, so this was a really great chance for me to have a quick conducting check-up.  It was really wonderful and exactly what I needed.

I was nervous.  Les Choristes is a large choir and I really admire Jen, so standing in front of everyone with her watching had the butterflies fluttering away.  But, everything went great and I got some really positive feedback.

However, what was even more useful were the direction and new ideas Jen was able to give me.  With the short time that we had, we started by focusing on my conducting plane.  It seems I’ve been conducting a little too high which is contributing to some tension in my shoulders and is sending a “high breath” signal to my choir.  As soon as she brought my arms down, I sighed a huge sigh of relief.  I was told by a previous conducting teacher that I needed to raise my arms up and out for  breadth and space, but I have always felt the tension and had some issues with maintaining simplicity and ease in my gesture .   This new suggestion is really welcomed and will be something that I’m definitely going to experiment with.

The second area we worked on was my prep beat.  Again, my prep beat has always started at the plane and gone up.  Jen suggested I experiment with dropping it below and bouncing up in a cyclical motion.  This really threw my brain through a loop.  I would never have considered going below the plane.  I never knew that was “allowed”. But then again, Jen has always been one for experimenting with the rules for the sake of ease and simplicity.  This new drop down idea, she pointed out, reflects the very breath action we want our singers to take.  How, she asked, can we swing our hands up and expect our singers to drop their diaphragms and breathe low?  Again, such a simple idea, and very much in line with my own approach and understanding of conducting.

It really does take another set of eyes to see the areas that need work.  As much as I can practice in front of mirrors, I will always miss details.  Workshops and lessons give me that chance for honest feedback and the exploration of new ideas and new ways of doing.

I have come away from my 15 minutes with several things to work on.  I’m looking forward to getting back to Vox Humana and experimenting.  It was a quick tune up, but so valuable.  It keeps me from getting complacent and stuck in my ways and challenges me to keep experimenting and improving.

Music, acting and art have always been a part of my life.  Both my parents were active as musicians and actors and I was raised in an art rich home and school.  However, despite all the creative activities I was a part of and relished, I did not  know I wanted to be an artist until later in my childhood.  But I can remember the exact day it happened.

It was my grade 8 graduation and I sang a solo during the ceremony.  I remember practising for 2 weeks before the big day. When graduation day came,  I stood on that stage wearing a beautiful red dress that made me feel incredible.  My hair was done and I was wearing high heels and make-up (!).  I sang for 3 minutes and it was a singular moment in my life.  I remember feeling so free on stage. I felt as if I was opening my heart up for everyone to see, and that made me feel wonderful.  Off stage, I was a shy, self-critical, awkward, unsure, worried girl with body issues . In other words, I was a typical  13 year old.  But in that moment on stage  I was strong, beautiful and  brave.  I felt as if I could accomplish anything and I felt right a home.  

When my song was over and I sat down, listening to the applause and feeling good about my performance, I realized that the stage and I got along very well.  In that moment I knew that no matter what I did in life, I wanted the stage to be a part of it.  It would take a few more years for me decide music would be my primary direction, but it was on that day, the last day of grade 8, that I first knew I wanted to be an artist.

I have been taking a choral arrangement course this term from Jeff Smallman and it has to be one of the best courses I have ever taken.  It’s been a blast writing arrangements and really applying my composition in a more formal way.

However, as fun as it has been, the final term project nearly killed me.  We were assigned to combine the total sum of our skills learned in the class into one final choral piece.  The only guidelines: write an SATB choral piece using a public domain text and/or melody with piano accompaniment.

I don’t think I have ever put so much time and effort into a university project before.  I used nearly every single day of the two weeks given and it was a great experience, but also incredibly frustrating and exhausting.

I knew I wanted to write an original work and didn’t want to do an arrangement of an existing piece.  So the first thing I had to do was find a text.  I’m not very good with poetry and there are thousands of poets who have put sublime inspiration into words far better than I ever could.  One such poet is Christina Rossetti (1830-1894).   Her writing has the ability to touch me. Her poems make me cry.  I figured if a text could do that, then it would stand up well to choral arrangement.  I finally decided on “Song”

I set to work writing and things seemed to flow almost as well as the text, but then the nit-picking stage began, and I nearly lost my mind.  See, I was working with a combination of notation software and the piano.  Anyone who’s worked with notation software knows that it lies.  The sounds you hear don’t necessarily reflect what a performance will sound like.  More often than not what sounds awful on the computer will work wonderfully in performance.  I found myself writing and re-writing lines over and over and adjusting harmonies and second guessing myself because what I was hearing from my computer and what I was hearing on the piano were different and I didn’t know which to trust more.  Also, I have little experience writing piano accompaniments.  Oh sure I write things on the piano all the time, but I’ve never written the piano as a background instrument.  I must have written at least 3 new accompaniment parts.  Each time I would write something and think “oh, yes, this works, this is great.” but as soon as I started piecing everything together I’d realize it didn’t work.  I would have to scrap that whole thing and start over. You see, I struggle with keeping things simple.  When I play around on the piano and really get into it, my instinct is to make it bigger and bigger to the point where I’m just rockin’ out.  Now, this is fine if I am just fooling around and having fun.  But for this text with this piece, big DOES NOT WORK.  So it was a constant struggle to keep myself from getting carried away. I would have to remind myself to just keep it simple. I put hours and hours every day into this piece, so that I could get it just perfect. I got down right obsessive.

 This choral arranging course has something of a history to it.  There have been students who have written final term projects that turned out to be national competition winning pieces.  There have been students who have had their term project published.  Sarah Quartel wrote the 1st movement of her “Snow Angel”, one of the most moving and incredible contemporary choral works ever, in this course. Now I am by no means expecting this to happen to me but it does set a certain president and mood for what is possible.

I think I am fairly satisfied with my final product.  After talking with my good friend Josh (a wicked saxophone player), I decided to include a soprano sax obbligato line which lends itself very well to the mood of the piece.  There is certainly more I wish I could do with the piece.  There are sections where I wanted to use certain techniques, but after days of trying I was unable to come up with anything particularly successful. May I’ll keep trying.

The project has been handed in, and we are now reading through our arrangements in class, which is so helped. It gives us the change to actually hear our pieces and discover what works and what doesn’t.  My piece will be read on Thursday March 26th and I can hardly wait to get a sense of what it will sound like with a choir and real instruments.

When I was in grade 6, I wrote a letter to my future self.  When I was in grade 12 and about to leave home to go to university for music, I opened that letter.  It was filled with my hopes and dreams as well as a description of my daily life in grade 6.

I described the youth band I played in.  I described the piano and viola lessons I was taking.  I descibed all the composing and improv and jazz I was doing and the choirs I sang in and the recitals and performances I was giving.  I wrote how much fun I had doing all these things.

Then, under that, I stated in bold  letters… “When I grow up, I want to be a coral reef marine biologist.” 

Funny how we sometimes can’t see what’s staring us in the face.

Some of you may be wondering about the quotation under my blog title.  It’s a real comment I had directed at me several years ago.  Around the time I was doing my first university music auditions, a family friend asked the ever popular question of all high school graduates.

“So, what are you going into university for?”

I replied with an eager hopefulness, “music.”

The woman paused and said, “Music? That’s nice dear, but how are you going to make money?” 

I was too stunned and too young and naive to come up with a good response.  I think I mumbled something about teaching, performing and doing a “bunch of things”.  I felt the need to justify my choices with sound financial facts and strategies for making the hard cash this woman was expecting me to make, but ultimately I came up short.

I find it funny, and simultaneously annoying, that of all the people I tell about my educational and career path choices, there is always a small percentage that  informs me how difficult and penniless such a life will be.  It’s as if I live under a rock and was completely unaware.  I once had a complete stranger at the gym feel the need to tell me I would never make it as a musician and I should just keep it as a nice hobby.

I think every person invloved with an arts career has had something like this said to them at one point or another. And you know, these people are perfectly right.  It is hard to “make it” in an arts field.  No, there is not a lot of money.  No, there are not a lot of opportunities and the odds of becoming a huge star are astronomically slim.  But to me, that is not the point.  If I were concerned about making money, I would never have gone into music.  I would have done something sensible and in demand, like a  trade skill.

Now the reality of life is that one needs a pay cheque in order to survive in our society. So I do worry sometimes about how I’m going to balance my passion for art with my financial needs.  Of course the simplest solution would be to teach high school or something like that.  But as I have mentioned before, I have reservations about teaching right away. 

Either way, I don’t do art for the money; I do art because I have to.  For all the frustrations, anxieties and self-doubts it causes me, music and acting and writing and all things artistic make me happy.  These things nourish me and I can not imagine my life without them.  Ideally, I want my career to be in art.  If I can make it work and find a way to live off of music and theater, in all it’s forms, that would be wonderful.  However, if I have to take an average day-job to pay my bills, I will.  As long as the arts are an active part of my life, I will never feel that I have wasted my time or money on a “useless” degree.

Ultimately,  it should be unnecessary for me to defend my choices.  I should not have to explain or rationalize how I am going to support myself.  But sadly, too many people simply do not understand the purpose of art, or even the purpose of education.  The fundamental assumption of people who make comments like “you’ll never make any money” is that the purpose of learning is job training.  Education is there to make us all more hire-able and nothing more.  You go to school so you can become a doctor, or a teacher, or an architected etc.   I find this a limited definition.  I did not go to university to get a job.  I have never viewed education as vocational training. I went to university and studied music to better myself, to broaden my intellect, to explore myself and the human world and to shape myself into a freer, independent, thinking, feeling human being.  I learn so that I can make myself a better citizen of a democracy,  who is better equipped to navigate the ambiguities of society and see through manipulations and propaganda that tell us  how we all should think, feel, act and be. I study art so that I can explore new ranges of self and group expression, so that I can better understand the culture and society that I live in and so that I can enrich and better understand myself .  If I can get a $50,000 salary job from it as well, that would be great, but if not, the above mentioned benefits are more than enough to make me happy.

One day, I would like to respond to the critics by saying, “Accounting?  You know, you’ll never be happy.”

But I suppose that would just be petty.

I’m trying out a new look for the blog.  What do you think?

I think one of the prevailing images of the university experience, as side from excessive partying and experimentation, is of the intellectual and philosophical forum.  Universities have a reputation for being spaces where free, open and provocative discussion and debate take place.  While I have had many stirring and thought provoking conversations with friends and profs alike and have learned many “mind” opening things, I have not experienced the sort of extended peer discussion that one associates with this vision of university.  I have not sat under a tree for extended periods of time arguing critical questions of the day.  I have not argued radical ideas that upset the social status quo and been a threat to the establishment.  That is until this evening.

My friend Erika, decided after an entire year of fragmented and time constrained discussions in our music philosophy and psychology course, to organize a discussion evening.  A small group of 4th year music education majors met at the campus bar and began talking about all the ideas and unfinished thoughts that never had the chance to be heard in class.  We simply took all the topics that we have been covering in our courses, threw them out on the table and talked.  We started by discussing our final research paper topics and the evening progressed from there.   We wrestled with issues like forms of assessment, multi-culturalism, popular music, teaching methods, teaching goals, the purpose of music education, the purpose of music, grade inflation, aesthetic judgement, our hopes, fears and goals  as we approach careers as educators.  We spent hours tossing our ideas around and our experiences, not always agreeing with each other, but willing to consider the other’s position. 

 It was incredible.  It was exactly the sort of peer engagement I have been craving.  Class discussions are fine and can be very stimulating, but there is never enough time to properly cover a topic.  I find more often than not one rarely has enough time to process a given new idea and formulate an opinion quick enough to respond.  But this evening, in this format, we all came with our ideas and our unanswered questions ready to toss them around and engage.

Eventually, the conversation began to develop toward other topic areas and we began talking about broader, non music related philosophical and social questions.  We touched on religion, spirituality, politics, and ended with an open and frank discussion of gender and sexuality.  Now, I have had these conversations many time before, but with friends in a casual formatand not in this sort of round, academic table discussion with references to scholars in our fields and recent research etc.  It was absolutely stimulating.

We decided we need to have more evenings like this, however we have also decided to avoid using a bar for a meeting place.  It got a little too loud for such an intimate type of conversation.  Next time one of us will host at our home.  I can hardly wait until the date and place is set for our next session.

I started piano lessons when I was in grade 2.  I started with those little method books with simple folk songs and moved on to Minute in G.  From there my classical piano education took off.  I began doing RCM exams and playing at recitals and seniors residences. 

Then, I turned 12 and I lost all interest in the instrument.  I couldn’t bring myself to practise.  I hated the music.   I hated the instrument.  I was board and in danger of quitting all together.  My mom had a standing rule that both my brother and I had to complete our grade 8 exam before she would allow us to quit, but at my rate of  decay, I wasn’t likely to achieve that.

Then, my piano teacher did the smartest thing.  He decided we were going to put away the RCM and classical repertoire and spend a year or two learning improv, jazz and composition.  I thrived on that material.  I had a blast learning standard chord progressions and styles, learning how to develop my own musical ideas, learning how to arrange new chords to existing tunes and create my pieces.  It was invaluable experience that has served me a thousand times over.  After nearly two years of this,  my enthusiasm for all music had been rekindled and I returned to the classical repertoire, but I never gave up practising my own music and experimenting.

When I entered university, I  discovered we had a course called keyboard harmony which was geared towards teaching what I had already spent two years learning how to do.  While others cursed and bemoaned the course, I relished the challenge of harmonizing melodies and transposing chord progressions.  The course only added to my repertory of improv and writing techniques and has since increased the sophistication of my composing.

 I am indebted to my teacher who had the wisdom to guide my frustration down a different path.  I could have given up so easily, but instead I experimented with new musical  ideas and developed a better understanding of music on the whole.  Now I arrange, compose and generally “noodle” around on the piano for fun.  It is the an area of music that has nothing to do with my courses or degree.  It is my escape and my relaxation.