Graduate Vocal Arts Program 

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Alumni/ae Spotlight

*You’re currently based in London...how do you like it?  
London is, in a word, incredible--and, I mean that quite literally. I absolutely love this city, and I didn't expect to feel so comfortable here so quickly! It's incredibly international, the artistic scene is phenomenal...it's absolute paradise for any lover of the arts.

Is the musical life in London much different from the one in the United States?
It is incredibly different largely because of how the performing arts are funded. There is substantial government funding for the arts here. Beyond this financial stability, I see theaters like ROH taking calculated risks in terms of casting and programming and musical interpretation--and, I really, really dig that. It is very exciting to be around so many professionals who are constantly thinking outside of the box, who are always saying something with their work, who are challenging everyone around them to be relevant, immediate, and effective with music. It seems to me that the culture surrounding the arts here is about contributing a voice, a perspective to the global artistic discourse.

Congratulations on recently earning your DMA! What inspired you to choose to do a Nico Castel-style translation of Wozzeck for your dissertation? 
Thank you! I've straddled the line between performer and academic for the past few years, and it's given me a unique perspective into both worlds. I became interested in translating while I was at Bard, and the Core Seminar I format is still how I format my translations! Over the years, I've noticed how many translations are missing from the repertoire, and I wanted my final work as a DMA student to be something that would meet a need for performers. Most of my research during my doctorate was on Berg's works, and I noticed during my coursework that there wasn't a published scholarly translation of Wozzeck . It took me about four months from start to finish, but I'm working with an editor now to make it absolutely perfect for commercial publication.

What are you most excited about in your upcoming season?
I'm most excited for June of 2018--I'll be reprising my role of Azema in Rossini's Semiramide at Bayerische Staatsoper. I have studied German for two years, and I am very excited to be living and working in Germany for three weeks. And, of course, singing at such an amazing theater is a dream come true!

How has your education from Bard shaped you as an artist?
Bard is the reason I am an artist. I think I would have had some sort of career as a singer had I not attended Bard, but it was at Bard where I discovered my musical interests and strengths, cultivated my musical taste, and gave myself permission to just be who I am as a musician. Kayo, Dawn, Erika, Amii, and Lorraine were instrumental in guiding me as I figured out my vocal technique, how to inhabit my body, how to be comfortable using my instrument, and being at Bard exposed me to so many different kinds of music--but it is a blessed mystery to me how Bard gave me the courage to just be comfortable in my skin as a singer and artist. I sort of, for lack of a better way of saying this, got over myself at Bard. It's not about my voice; it's about my mind and my soul and my heart. You work on your technique and you practice so that you can say something. It is a great shame when singers focus more on their sound than their expression. You have to sing well and healthily, of course; but, if you aren't saying something and making yourself vulnerable, that beautiful sound you've made is empty. It doesn't show the world who you are, and it doesn't forge a connection with another human being. If you aren't communicating, what's the point of singing?

What is your favorite memory from your time at Bard?
There are far, far too many wonderful memories: the fourth day of classes when fellow '13 Bardian Logan Walsh and I sat in silence at Blithewood together; getting lost while driving the van back from Friday lessons in NYC; coaching Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with Dawn; "Friendsgiving" in 2011 with Barrett Radzuin, Kameryn Leung, and Marie Marquis; anytime ever that Kayo laughed (because she has the best laugh in the entire world); my first lesson with Lorraine; the Bard Alumni Recital in October of 2016. Honestly, it is very difficult to pick just a few memories because my time at Bard was idyllic. It was also challenging in many ways, but it was always full of joy and discovery and love. It was the happiest period of my life.

What do you like to do in your down time from singing? 
I love running! I've run three marathons so far, and I'm running the London Marathon in 2018 on a charity bid from the British Lung Foundation. I have been volunteering regularly with BLF over the past few months, and it is one of my new favorite ways to spend my free time. When I'm not running or working with BLF, I enjoy cooking and knitting.

What is the most important piece of advice that you would give to recent alumni? 
Keep being weird. And, don't ever stop reading poetry.
 
*Interview from fall 2017

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Alumni/ae Spotlight

What have you been up to recently? Where are you based?
I'm living in New York City and Portland, Maine. My husband Edwin Cahill and I just got married, and he's from Portland. He’s a director who trained as a classical pianist and singer and has been an actor on Broadway, so we both share a love for story-telling across genres. In that vein, we’re starting a production company together in Manhattan called HogFish dedicated to story-telling across genres. We have a beautiful new blackbox theater and rehearsal in midtown at the Balance Arts Center, and I can’t wait to plan our first season. I’ll be performing in some productions, directing others, planning the season and bringing in artists that fit our mission, as well as helping to run the HogFish Performance Laboratory, an open ended exploration of cross-genre story-telling techniques. I am also currently in my final stages of training to be an Alexander Technique teacher at the Balance Arts Center with Ann Rodiger, which has been transformational. Combining a lot of these separate threads, along with Ann Rodiger and Audrey Luna, I have founded ATSinging, which seeks to help singers improve their vocal technique, breathing, stage nerves, performance, and more through the Alexander Technique. In addition, I'm still doing some performing. I just performed Hautey: Memory of Fire with Mary Birnbaum, which was a new opera/musical at Montclair State University, based on the true story of a poet Oscar Pinis, who escaped the pogroms, immigrated to Cuba, and was so inspired by the Cuban national hero Hatuey that he wrote an epic poem about him in Yiddish. Speaking of cross-genre!

You have experience in pretty much everything--opera, musical theatre, dance, teaching, alexander technique, directing, choreography. What led you down the path to all of these different things, and what has that journey been like?
It’s taken me a long time to come full circle. I think this happens for a lot of people who study anything: we start out doing something naturally and loving it, and then we study it, and learn from the “experts” everything that we’re doing wrong, and then that’s all we can focus on, and we start to question if we’re any good and hate the thing we used to love. And then, hopefully, with a good teacher (or two or three) and a support network, and a lot of patience and hard work, there's eventually a caterpillar turning into the butterfly moment, where your technique can serve you instead of you serving your technique, and you can express what you want, the way you want, and you come back to loving performing even more deeply. I think it's really important and hard not to lose why you love what you’re doing and what your original strengths are, as you focus on where you’re improving, and are constantly re-incorporating new information back into the whole. It’s really important to reframe “problems” as “areas for improvement”, and to understand that the work never ends. If you’re a perfectionist, (guilty) this can be terrifying, but if you can truly accept it, it can also be a big relief to know you’ll never get it “right”, and you can just go on learning and getting better every day. It’s also exciting!

Like a lot of American kids who come from non-musical families, my first exposure to music was Disney. So, I grew up always wanting to do it all: sing, act, dance with penguins, twirl in the mountains of Salzburg-that triple threat idea. I sang in choir, took piano, did the musicals in school, and loved it. When it came time for college, the only music school I had heard of was Juilliard, and I was lucky enough to audition and get in. I had to go. But I had no idea what I was doing or what I was getting into. I met some incredible teachers and colleagues at Juilliard, and concentrated mostly on classical singing. I wasn’t even a single threat, let alone triple. Sadly, somewhere along the way, I really lost what I loved about it. I left school, “fachless”, feeling like a failure, and I thought maybe I’d go in a different direction, or maybe I would do a graduate degree in acting. I felt like a lot of times in classical music the emphasis on truth and storytelling would get lost because people are so worried about the music, resonance, and making certain sounds. But, then in the theater, I felt that a lot of times I was missing the specificity of music, and just music in general, and an emphasis on not just telling the story and the truth, but also doing that in a beautiful heightened way.

As I’ve come to explore in my own performing and teaching, I feel like singing, musicianship, and acting are separate skills. If you only think as a musician, the performance becomes very specific and weaves a very tactile musical fabric, but it may not yet be emotionally alive or seem to have a reason “why”, and perhaps it will not be so embodied or beautifully sung. If you think only as an actor, the performance becomes very alive and emotionally charged, but it’s probably not very specific because you're not following the score and...you have to have truth on the downbeat, and it has to be the truth the composer wants and indicated with that pianissimo high a flat, and probably you’re sacrificing vocal quality for some feeling of emotional connection. If you only think as a singer or kinesthetically, your performance is probably full of a certain easy presence and beautiful sounds, but potentially all sounding the same without the specific musical information, and empty of emotional charge and meaning. But, if you can work in all three of these modes, then you get a performance that is specific, alive, and beautiful, which feels like a miracle and can be truly life-changing.

You are also a passionate teacher. What inspired you to become a teacher?
I was always really passionate about learning, and I was always very opinionated about the process of learning. (Just ask my teachers! Bless them…) When I graduated from Juilliard, I was a mess. I just didn't know what to do. I was waiting tables and trying different voice teachers to figure out what the next step might be, when I got a phone call from my alma mater grade school (an all boys prep school with very little arts) that their middle school music teacher had left on short notice. They asked me if I had any interest in coming to teach for a year while they did a search for a full-time teacher.

When I started the job, it was so intriguing to me because I love music, and I love kids, but I had never really thought about teaching. I didn't have any training in teaching, but I had learned from some great teachers, and did the best I could and asked a lot of my old teachers questions, and read as many books as I could, and did the best I could. But I found the students themselves were my best teacher, and kept me humble. By not having any prefixed idea of how to teach, I really had to look at the students and say: What do you want to learn? Are you learning it? Is this interesting to you? What do you need? And that led me to a student centered way of teaching, which when I think about it, was modeled by my favorite teachers in my own studies. I found I really loved teaching, and have followed that passion ever since.

Can you talk about your teaching philosophy a bit? What has helped you to shape this philosophy over the years?
I have always been on the fence or “in-between” worlds, and I've always been really interested in inter-connectivity (a fancy way of saying that young kid watching Disney with story-telling furthered by words, music, and dance). A word I use a lot now to describe this that we learned in our Alexander teacher training is “tensegrity,” which means that the integrity of something can be maintained by an optimal tension or cooperation between elements.
Storytelling is something I've always been drawn to. I come from a scientific, very “nuts-and-bolts” family, so from an early age, music and stories were always an escape from that. As a kid, I didn't see a difference between opera and music theater. I liked music that had a story, and I didn't understand why there needed to be such a difference between the two. As I've learned more and more, historically I don’t think that there really was as much of a difference. And I think we’re seeing the dawning of a new age of musical and theatrical story-telling which borrows from any idiom to tell the most powerful story possible, and that is very exciting to me.

I think one of the central problems in training performers of musical theater/opera, is that they have to do so much. And the best teachers tend to specialize in one of those areas: voice, acting, movement, etc. And rightly so. These are experts and the field of knowledge is deep. And then that nudges up against one of the other central problems of training musical theater/opera performers: money and time. There’s just never enough time to impart everything that teacher in that specific field has to share, let alone link it to the other disciplines, and there’s not enough money to get the two teachers in the room to work with the student together.

I spent a lot of my training being really upset about this because I, personally, couldn't put together what seemed to be conflicting information. For instance, in my acting class, the teacher might say something like, “just say the words and the voice will follow.” But, then, I would go to a voice lesson and my voice teacher would say, "Don't think about the words so much, just say ‘ah’ and stay easy in your throat.” So then I was left thinking, "Okay which one am I supposed to do? I don't know.” And the funny thing is that probably both teachers were going after the same thing from their own discipline, and if I knew enough to ask, or if there were time and money to have both teachers in the same room, or to link knowledge from one lesson to the next, I probably would have found that they weren’t contradicting each other at all. But to a young student trying to put all the pieces together on their own, it can be daunting.

I feel this is where I come in, as this kind of “jack of all trades, master of none.” I am really passionate about creating a space where we can actually talk about how all these different parts of singing-acting intersect and how they can help each other. It’s fascinating to me how freeing up your ribcage can free your breath, free your voice, make your acting choices clearer, and your musical ideas more precise. And you can really enter the whole system from any of the parts. And when they’re all helping each other out rather than cancelling each other out, it’s what I think makes singing-acting such a powerful medium.

What inspired you to become an Alexander Technique teacher? What has that process been like?
I'd always been interested in Alexander Technique from my first lessons at Juilliard with Lori Schiff, and in general connected with a certain “vibe” I sensed from Alexander teachers (like Judith Grodowitz and Gwen Ellison at Bard!), but I felt like I would never have enough time to do the three year training separate from my performing and that it was peripheral to an actual singing career. But, as I started to teach more and more, I realized more and more what I didn’t know. (And still do!) One of those areas of total ignorance was body knowledge on as deep and specific level as my musical and acting training.

Then, I met Ann Rodiger, at a singing program in Israel. They say something like, when the student is ready the teacher appears. It was kind of like that. And then I learned that she ran a teacher training course where you could take time off for performing gigs if you needed. It was perfect. So I started the training, and it continues to be probably the one of the most profound educational experiences of my life. It has changed how I think about everything, especially singing, and it’s not peripheral at all--it's like the whole kit and caboodle. It's just amazing how much it has to do with voice.

At first it was mind-blowing to find so much ease and freedom. My body had never felt better. My mood lifted which was amazing. But, I slowly started to realize that so many vocal technique things, where I had heard the information but didn't totally comprehend, made so much more sense. I didn’t actually know the size of my tongue, where it attaches in my mouth, and what it felt like to leave it easy while I breathed and phonated...how could I hope to understand a voice teacher’s plea to “leave my tongue easy” or say “ya ya ya ya”... if I never knew how big my tongue was, where it attached, and what that felt like to have an easy and free tongue? And then you gain the beginning of that knowledge, and realize the voice teacher was right, I just didn’t have the ability to understand at the time. And Alexander Technique has given me the agency to understand my own body and translate all the wonderful vocal technique information I’ve been given into embodied knowledge so that I can be my own teacher, and teach others. And it's an ongoing process that never ends. You can always get more subtle and refined awareness of your body and higher coordination.

Can you talk about your new program, AT Singing? How did you develop it?
In my experience Alexander Technique has been on the periphery of singing training, private lessons when you’re lucky, but very rarely incorporated into a voice lesson, or in tandem with the voice teacher or acting teacher, etc. (Money and time!) From the breakthroughs I experienced in my own singing and teaching of singing during my Alexander study, I became fascinated to see what would be possible if Alexander training were given more of a primary focus in singing. What would happen if students were taught how to stand with ease and balance, so that their breath and throat could stay easy, so that when they go to phonate, they can maintain that ease? And that singing can start to come from this idea of our body being our instrument, and learning what it feels like to be coordinated and free and easy, so that we can all teach ourselves. I'm excited to see what happens if we set up parameters where people are always paying attention to what their body is doing. We’re always standing, and we're always breathing, even when we’re not singing. So, we are available to practice all the time. If we spend 2-3 hours a day, not thinking about our breath, how do we expect that to suddenly change for an hour when we practice?

At ATsinging, we’re setting up the parameter where it's the focus all day long. Where it follows you into the coaching room with an Alexander Teacher having hands-on you, while you're getting musical information. Then, it follows you into a performance class, while you’re talking more about performance. This way you can incorporate it all and constantly keep bringing it back to the whole of your body and your breath and your awareness. And it’s the kind of daily hands-on-private work that seems to be a hallmark of the training of great singers of the past that’s just been too expensive to do. And we’re excited to bring that kind of training back and see what is possible today.

How has your education from Bard shaped you as an artist? 
I've been so lucky, and I'm so thankful for all the different teachers that I've had, specifically my teachers at Bard. I left undergrad thinking, "I'm a terrible singer. I'm a terrible actor. I can't get hired, I used to feel like I would never be rejected, now I’ve been rejected so many times that I just wanna cry in a corner, and I should have just gone to regular school like my parents told me”...all these things and so on! And, Dawn and Kayo have created this space--I call it the musical monastery and also the caterpillar to butterfly place--that’s truly magical. To me, the program is unique in that it actually acknowledges the interconnectivity of the different elements of musical performers: Core Seminar 1’s focus on great poets for instance, or Core Seminar 3’s putting on a show off campus, or the simple fact that the brilliant and kind faculty all seem to talk to one another, and be on the same page with the student. They approach the students in a holistic fashion and try to be on the same page so that it doesn't get confusing for the student, and they try to give the space for the student to find their self-agency and unique artistry, which we talk about in Alexander Technique all the time, so that singers don’t go down that road of teacher pleasing, and trying to force ourselves into sellable “fach packages” and loose what makes us sparkle and unique.

It requires a lot of space and time for people to really absorb these deeper ideas, and I think it's always fun at Bard to see people freak out when they first get there because they have so much space: literally just space in the mountains, and time to process and think deeply, and then start to suss out, “what am I interested in, is there something inside of me that still cares about anything? And then, okay if it does, what does it want to work on?” And, that process is just so important to the artistic soul.

I read an interesting article in the Times today about how telling people to follow their passion is the worst thing, because most of us don't know we have a passion. Most of us are terrible at things when we first start them, and it actually takes commitment to something over a long period of time, dealing with being terrible, dealing with rejection, and then moving past that rejection, when you start to get good at something, and then you start to be passionate about it. I think Dawn and Kayo understand this on a deep level because they have created a place where it's okay to fail and a place where it's okay to have space and time to commit to something over a period of time, to grow and learn and change. They're kind and supportive, and they have that magic equilibrium between being able to provide brilliant specific information that's helpful while also staying positive and nurturing so that you can implement that information. They care enough about how that information is received that they talk to other teachers and dole out the information in a way that it can be taken in by the student at the right time, in the right way.

I can never thank Bard enough because by the time I left Bard, I loved what I did again, and I was excited for the journey of learning and working and practicing. I probably would have given up if it weren’t for Dawn and Kayo and the program.

What is your favorite memory from your time at Bard, and why?
Some of my favorite memories were just being with such an interesting and varied group of colleagues and having time and space to ourselves. The fact that we’ve all stayed close is amazing. We were all just texting, actually, about how we were nostalgic for pancakes at the silver diner.

Coachings with Kayo were always highlight. I think towards the end, we laughed about a quarter of the time, just about life and art. I think, actually, my favorite times were being given a song or something to work on by one of the teachers. And then, I had all this time in the gate house, in a beautiful open room to work, and to start to trust myself again, and to learn that I could ultimately become my own teacher. That was a big awakening and realization for me.

What is the most important piece of advice that you would give to recent alumni and current students?
As my grandmother used to say, “Matthew, everyone likes being told they’re wonderful”. Take time every day to reach out to a few people, in person, over text or a phone call, at the check-out line or dog park, and let them know they’re wonderful. Only say it when you mean it, but if we can’t find a few moments that are wonderful per day, I don’t think we’re looking in the right way. I think I tend to find what I’m looking for: when I think people are out to get me and life is terrible, it’s true. When I think that people are wonderful and life is full of opportunity, it’s true.

It makes me happier when I find these moments, it makes the people I speak to happier, it increases my connectivity with my environment and network, and opens me to change and growth and learning from the world around me: magical things tend to happen. Back to that tensegrity idea!
*Interview from spring 2019