Michael James Oberhauser

The theme of my resolutions this year: No excuses.

I will create more. Since that in itself is a pretty awful resolution, here's how I'm going to quantify it:
-I will spend at least 10 minutes at least every other day writing music, searching for/writing text, or doing other work that pertains to advancing my career.
-I will not listen to music, check my email, get on Facebook, get on Twitter, or anything else like that unless I have already done this work. Eating dinner first is fine, and I can listen to music while I'm eating, but none of those websites will be on.
-If I need to, I will turn on my old desktop before I change out of my work clothes to entice me to work right away. (This is one time when it would be nice to have Finale on my laptop...)

I will take better care of myself. I still don't know exactly how I'm going to measure this one. Once I figure that out, I'll work on sticking to it.

I might have more resolutions on the way as I think of them. 2012 might be the year of rolling resolutions. Always, though: no excuses.

I was thinking today about where my time goes, and how that's changed over the years...

Grade school: 
Getting better at everything: 50%
Having fun: 50%

High School:
Getting better at everything: 50%
Figuring out what I enjoy: 20%
Figuring out what I'm good at: 15%
Having fun: 15%

College:
Getting better at everything: 10% (liberal arts school)
Figuring out what I enjoy: 10%
Figuring out what I'm good at: 30%
Getting better at what I enjoy: 20%
Getting better at what I'm good at: 20%
Having fun: 10%

Grad School:
Getting better at what I enjoy: 10%
Getting better at what I'm good at: 70%
Working on places I need improvement: 10%
Having fun: 10%

The real world:
Making money: 50%
Trying to make money out of what I enjoy and what I'm good at: 40%
Having fun: 10%

My soul-searching, self-finding, and self-improvement pretty much stopped after I got out of school. Right now I feel like I'm mostly coasting on everything I've learned up to this point, and spending most of my time just trying to get by. I feel like I haven't grown nearly as fast these past two years as I did any year before. I need to find a way to fit some self-growth in my life.

Two posts in one day? That's MADNESS!

Anyway, I recently ran across this blog post, and it brought up some questions in my mind:

Here's the post

That'll open in a new window, so keep it open to reference back and forth :)

Issue #1: "Operas are usually performed in an opera house or concert hall with a live orchestra." This is the norm, but what if it's not? What about accompaniment just by a piano, in, say, an art gallery or outdoor ampitheater?


Issue #2: Amplification. Again, what the blog post brings up is the norm, but what if I want my opera to be accompanied by electric guitar or electric violin, or by computer generated sounds? Also, what about musicals like The Fantasticks? That'd be just plain odd if it were amplified. (unless it were in a large space, but why would you do that show in a large space?)

Issue #3: "Operatic voices tend to focus sound from the throat." That seems to go contrary to most of what I've been taught about singing. My teachers have always told me to get my throat out of the way and get the sound more in my head. Vocal pedagogy friends, help me out here.

Issue #4: "In musical theatre, you could usually remove all the songs and still have the story make sense, as the dialogue would outline what is happening in the story." What about Into the Woods? Les Miserables? Phantom of the Opera? The Last Five Years? Spoken dialogue-led musicals are still the norm, but less and less so as time goes on.

Issue #5: "Opera can have dialogue, however 'in opera the dialogue is sung; in musicals the dialogue is spoken' (@frindley)." What about Singspielen? Die Zauberflöte? Carmen? There is plenty of spoken dialogue in plenty of operas.

I know these are just guidelines, but I think they need to be re-evaluated. I'd propose:
1.) Operas tend to not use amplification, while musicals tend to.
2.) The style of singing between the two artforms tend to be different - but there is a spectrum to this with a lot of grey area between.

Those two are almost intact from how Opera Australia presented them.  I would actually throw out their #3 entirely, about spoken vs. sung text. I would add my own point, though:

3.) The style of composition between the two artforms tends to be different. Again, there is a spectrum here, from, say, ABBA's Mamma Mia! to perhaps something like Schönberg's Erwartung. There's a lot of grey area in the middle of this one, too, where it becomes difficult to classify such pieces as A Little Night Music, Candide, and Die Fledermaus. 

Those are just a few of my thoughts... what are yours?

As I was finishing this post, I ran across my friend Steve Spotswood's article about the definition of theatre: http://www.stephenspotswood.com/?p=134