VOICEPrints Volume 16, Number 1 JOURNAL OF THE NEW YORK SINGING TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION September--October 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Season Opening Event: Master Class with Soprano Jennifer Rowley.....................................................1 President’s and Editor’s Messages.....................................................................................................2--6 2018--2019 Events Calendar......................................................................................................................7 Call for Singers.........................................................................................................................................8 NYSTA Professional Development Program...................................................................................... 8 Feature Article: The Voice Teacher as Advocate: Making a Case for Arts Integration, by Nathan Krueger......................................................................................................................9--11 Feature Article: Singing For A New World: How Voice Can Save The Culture, by John Nix, Lynn Helding, Erin Guinup, Constanza Roeder, and Allen Henderson...........................12--15 Book Review by Susan Williams: Performance Anxiety Strategies............................................16--18 Book Review by Chadley Ballantyne: Kinesthetic Voice Pedagogy.............................................19--22 NYSTA New Members 2018............................................................................................................ 23-24 Season Opening Event & Reception JOSEPHINE MONGIARDO GREAT COACHES SERIES Master Class with Soprano Jennifer Rowley (Appearing courtesy The Metropolitan Opera) Sunday, October 14, 2018 4:00-6:00 PM EDT Marc Scorca Hall at National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Avenue, NYC Free for NYSTA members, students, and guests. Donations welcome. © Famous Studios Four singers will be selected to present two operatic arias for Ms. Rowley. See Call for Singers (page 8) for application information. Soprano Jennifer Rowley is acclaimed worldwide for her unforgettable voice and remarkable stage presence. Her triumphant Metropolitan Opera role debut in Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac inspired universal critical praise. This fall she will appear at the Met as Tosca and Adriana Lecouvreur. In recent seasons, Ms. Rowley has also sung at the Royal Opera House/Covent Garden, Teatro Colón, Norwegian National Opera, Savonlinna Festival, Opéra de Lille, Théâtre de Caen, West Australian Opera, the Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, and Opera Hong Kong. In the US, the soprano has enjoyed notable successes with the New York City Opera, Cleveland Opera, Toledo Opera, New Orleans Opera, and at Spoleto Festival USA, Caramoor Music Festival, and Carnegie Hall. This summer she starred in the title role of Mayr’s Medea in Corinto in New York. The highly decorated soprano has been recognized by many international voice competitions. She holds a master of music degree from the Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and a bachelor of music degree from the Baldwin Wallace College Conservatory of Music. She holds a certificate of performance achievement from the Instituto Superior del Arte of the Teatro Colón, and was a Max Kade Scholar at Middlebury College’s German for Singers program. 1 Vol. 16, no. 1, September--October 2018 © NYSTA PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Voice Pedagogy: Celebrating the Past with One Eye Fixed Firmly on the Future In May 2018, I had the privilege of attending a symposium at the University of Southern California entitled “The Art and Science of Great Teaching: Celebrating the Legacy of William Vennard.” As we complete the second decade of the twenty-first century, we cannot take for granted that younger teachers of singing are familiar with Vennard and his work. Older generations (including mine) certain- ly are: the 1967 enlarged edition of his Singing: The Mechanism and the Technic was virtually unrivaled as the standard voice pedagogy Matthew Hoch textbook in university classrooms for two decades, until it was replaced in many circles by Richard Miller’s The Structure of Singing in 1986. Vennard’s legacy looms large, and his treatise became a foundation for much of what came after it in the modern “fact- based” era of voice pedagogy. NYSTA’s Oren Lathrop Brown Pro- fessional Development Program is firmly grounded in the scientific voice principles for which Vennard so passionately advocated. For those (perhaps younger) readers who are less familiar with Vennard and his work, I think it is worth it to take a few paragraphs to intro- duce Vennard and discuss his career and important contributions to voice pedagogy. 1 1 Portions of this message draw William Durham Vennard was born on January 31, 1909, in Normal, from an article that I recently Illinois. He earned his first undergraduate degree in English at published in Voice and Speech Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, in 1930. He later became Review—“The Legacy of William interested in music (and singing opera in particular), and he earned Vennard and D. Ralph Appel- a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance from Northwestern Uni- man and Their Influence on versity in 1941 and a master’s degree in vocal performance from the Singing Voice Pedagogy: American Conservatory in Chicago in 1943. After several years of Reflections after 50 Years (1967– freelance work and part-time teaching, Vennard joined the faculty of the University of Southern California in 1946. He became chair of 2017)” (volume 11, no. 3, 2017). the voice department at USC in 1950, a position that he held until his death on January 10, 1971, in Los Angeles, California. In addition to being a successful singing teacher and academic, Ven- nard was also extremely active in professional organizations, partic- ularly the National Association of Teachers of Singing, an organiza- tion which he served as president from 1964 to 1966. In a lengthy tribute in the February/March 1971 issue of the NATS Bulletin, Karl Trump wrote: The Art and Science [Vennard’s] work as a teacher of singing and vocal pedagogy, his of Great Teaching authorship of an unsurpassed book on the singing voice and of Celebrating the Legacy of numerous articles in the NATS Bulletin and other scholarly jour- WILLIAM nals, his interest in and his unique contribution to scientific re- VENNARD Friday, May 18, 2018 search on the vocal mechanism as it applied to singing, and his University of Southern California many appearances as lecturer and clinician all contributed to his 2 Vol. 16, no. 1, September--October 2018 © NYSTA reputation both in America and wherever singing is studied abroad. Each of us in NATS should grieve at the passing of William Vennard. For if ever one man embodied all that is best in our profession and in our organization, he was that man. 2 2 “In Memoriam: William D. Vennard, 1909–1971,” NATS Although Singing: The Mechanism and the Technic will always be Ven- Bulletin 27, no. 3 (1971), 1. nard’s primary legacy, he also collaborated with director Janwillem van den Berg (1920–1985) on the film entitled Voice Production: The Vibrating Larynx, which won several awards in Europe. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Pepperdine University in 1970 for his contributions to singing and voice science. The symposium at the University of Southern California celebrated not only Vennard’s contributions to our field, but also acknow- ledged the inauguration of the Vennard Collection: a new archive of Vennard’s personal writings, research files, and memorabilia. It was fascinating to browse through these materials, which were on dis- play for all symposium attendees to examine during intervals between sessions. Keynote speakers at the symposium included Stephen F. Austin, Kenneth Bozeman, Thomas F. Cleveland, Cindy Dewey, Lynn Helding, Scott McCoy, and Kari Ragan, all of whom presented lectures on various pedagogic topics. While all of these speakers offered fascinating insights into twenty- first-century voice pedagogy, perhaps the most forward looking were the lectures by Helding and Ragan. Helding presented a ses- sion entitled “The Missing Mind: The Third Pillar of Voice Peda- gogy.” In it, she convincingly argued that singing voice research over the past several decades has focused overwhelmingly on biomechanics and acoustic theory, but the brain’s role in singing— including topics such as cognition, perception, procedural learning, neuroplasticity, and motor learning theory—has been a largely neglected aspect of voice pedagogy. Ragan proposed a dynamic new approach to the intersection of the interdisciplinary “voice team”—a term for the triumvirate core group consisting of the singing teacher, speech-language pathologist, and otolaryngolo- gist—which she labels “Evidence-Based Voice Pedagogy.” The inter- William DurhamVennard (1909-1971) disciplinary nature of our field has never been more front and center. At the conclusion of the Friday symposium, forty pedagogues from institutions across North America remained for an additional two days to discuss voice pedagogy curricula with the goal of produ- cing a white paper that would chart a course for the future. Through breakout sessions, small and large-group discussions, and compromise, the following six questions were examined: Question 1: Why Do We Teach Pedagogy? Question 2: What Skills Are [Should Be] Possessed by the Ideal Singing Teacher? Question 3: What Skills Are We Currently Teaching Well? Question 4: What Are Our Current Weaknesses? Question