Year Won- That’s a Rap!
“Just like that” my first year of my doctorate is completed. It is remarkable to look back and think of what I learned, accomplished and the many ways I have been inspired. This morning, I was reflecting on summer, my plans, and the relief it will be to have some time away from singing and music. But I realized that though this was my first thought, it isn’t entirely accurate. Being back in school, back in a structured learning and work environment has been extremely fruitful and inspiring. It has been everything I wanted it to be as I chose to return to school after 5 years working in the field, but it has also surprised me by being even more than that. It has given me structure (calendar and task-wise), colleagues, mentors, spaces to practice and perform– these are all things I anticipated. But it has also given me incredible friends, the ability to speak a new language, courses that inspired new ideas and new ways of conceiving old ideas, graduating from Second City’s first year improv sequence, and loads and loads of new ideas from projects, both performance and research. I could not have hoped for this cascade of adventure for my mind and my soul, and here I am, on the eve of flying to Italy to be a program assistant for a Northwestern study abroad program about leadership and networks in Renaissance Florence, and thinking, it will be nice to not be doing music this summer.
And then I realize that it’s not that. One aspect is that by TA-ing a class and shepherding undergraduate students who might be experiencing a new culture for the first time, I am getting to use gifts I have outside of music. But the other, more important aspect is that I am ready for unstructured creative time. I need to have space to breathe, process, think, plan, dream, and to really organize and put to use all of the inspiration and knowledge I have been gifted in this past year. I need to be my own music boss again for a while. Now that I understand that which I am privy to as a student at Northwestern (without getting into the weeds about the frustrations of bureaucracy within the school of music and how DMA students are not valued by the institution the way PhD students are, a blog for a different time), I want to make full use of this privilege.
Don’t get my wrong, I stand by my choice of coming to NU above Juilliard for the DMA for the relative unstructured quality of the program in general- because if I feel this strongly about needing some flexibility and freedom to stretch my legs here, I can’t imagine how much I would have been bursting at the seams there. Both schools are rigorous. Both will keep you busy and expect high levels of achievement. But here, I can be more than a DMA student. I can take a yearlong intensive Italian class and make lifelong friends who study languages, literature, economy and neuroscience. I can take improv classes at the most famous comedy school in the United States and integrate those ideas into my performance. I can get a job as a TA in Italy for the summer. I can pretend to be a musicologist, take hard classes about theories and philosophies of writing about history and spend hours in the archive constructing a research project based on an “object,” and, one of my favorite parts, I can go to a brewery with some of the best and smartest musicians of our generation and talk about stupid, unimportant and silly things while sipping beers.
And this year has been hard. Harder than I expected (classic Marie overconfidence). I pushed myself by taking maximum credit hours each quarter, nearly half of which don’t even count for degree credit (*cough* Italian- no regrets). I took classes I was interested in and challenged me, even if I knew there were easier options (but seriously, why else go back to school?). I have written in-depth papers every quarter (another delight of NU- 3 quarters for the price of 2 semesters, meaning the tempo of every class is vite, presto, schnell). I have experienced stress in a whole new way this year, and am learning how to deal with it, which is also very valuable.
I get to be silly here. I turned 32-years-old this past week and I feel more like my 9-year-old self than I have since I was 9-years-old. I am spreading my wings and discovering what I really want, who I am and what I want to do. I said for the first time this past week, “I think I am supposed to be a professor.” Don’t get me wrong, the singing will never stop. But the kinds of projects I want to pursue with my energy and create, aren’t the kind for which anyone in the “industry” is hiring. And don’t get me wrong, I love singing in an opera, I love programming a recital and doing all of the classic performance things for which people would hire you to sing. And I am singing the best I ever have. I keep saying that, but there has been a huge breakthrough for me this year working with Steve (W. Stephen Smith to all the singers out there). I finally believe I am a mezzo-soprano, but I also believe I could sing almost anything I put my mind to because I understand singing in a whole new way. I understand how easy singing can be now- easy, not because I am naturally gifted and have cords of steel, but easy because singing is a natural process, like speaking that doesn’t actually require much more effort. The training requires a heck-of-a lot more focus and concentration, but this focus then allows the singing to happen so freely that all one need do is focus on character and story-telling. It’s a dream, one I never expected but one for which I am so grateful.
I want to sing. I want to create shows. I want to do silly things and I want to create stories that mean something. I love classical music- I think it is quite brilliant the more I learn about it. I don’t think it is irrelevant or a relic at all. I do think the way it is presented these days is a relic. And I want to see it live again and be a part of that. Yet I am not interested in being an administrator at a performance company. I want to give the new generations of musicians this freedom I am discovering, to dream and create. And I want to be a part of it. So probably I will never sing at the great opera houses, because I would rather spend my time and energy singing and creating and having joy in those things than climbing the industry ladder and kissing up to the important people. No thanks! I never really understood that there was a choice until now. But the more I learn about the creatives of the past, specifically composers who wanted to do and try new things, the more clear it is that you will never fit into the mold if what you want to do is revolutionary. You will need to supplement your experiments and endeavors, usually with teaching. Good thing I also love teaching! I love mentoring my students and younger singers in my department. I love watching them discover music and characters and grow into themselves in the process.
This quarter, I created and performed my first doctoral recital. I designed an independent study course for myself to dig into the character of the piece I chose to perform: Poulenc’s one-woman opera La voix humaine (The Human Voice), based on a play of the same name by Jean Cocteau; as well as developing a method to involve the audience and give them references for the story for this 45-minute French opera without providing printed or projected translations. My hope is to revitalize what a recital can be without pandering to the audience or sacrificing quality of music or music performance. For me, this looks like incorporating improvisation as much as possible while staying true to the nature of a great work (the music, the structure, the language, etc). In this particular performance, I decided to perform an improvised character monologue in the audience before continuing onto the stage to perform the opera. Over the course of the independent study, I did close character work, digging into Cocteau’s text, using classic theatre pedagogical methods (Hagen, Stanislavsky and Lecoq- because I am particularly interested in clown theatre at the moment), combing through the score for insights from Poulenc, and using improvisational tools from my training at Second City, as well as from Mick Napier’s book Improvise. Scene from the Inside Out. From this work, I developed the monologue: going to the audience as the character, Elle, speaking with them as if in conversation, asking questions and making references to things from the opera (in English) with which they might also have personal experience. I am delighted to say that the recital was a huge success. The monologue was greatly appreciated and people seemed to really get what was going on in the opera without needing to know what every word meant. I hope to revive this project soon, and to take it on the road! If that sounds interesting to you, or like something you would like to be a part of, feel free to reach out! Excitingly, I also competed in Northwestern’ Concerto-Aria competition in April with this opera and was selected as one of the winners to perform with a Northwestern orchestra next school year! So if you need an excuse to come see me perform, might I suggest February 5th, 2026.
The icing on the cake this year, much like in the past few years, was a wonderful birthday scavenger hunt a week ago. This year, I really went for the classic scavenger hunt structure with hidden clues and riddles, but still incorporated silliness and videos. Planning all of the locations and clues, and designing the teams of my friends over a couple weeks before the hunt was such a fun activity for me, and the day of, I was so proud to see friends from various parts of my life (DMAs, improvers, singers, old friends, PhDs, Italians), get to know one another, compete together and then after the hunt, to stay and party with me and get to know all of my wonderful, interesting friends who they maybe didn’t know before. It was the icing on a beautiful cake of a year.
Now, I will be packing up my exorbitant number of idea-journals, my mini keyboard for teaching, several books I have been wanting to read all year, my yoga mat and my sencha tea to head to Italy for six weeks. It won’t be a long enough time for me to change the name of my blog to Marie in Italy, but look out for relatively more updates. But who knows! Maybe I will decide, rather, to invest myself deeply in the moment. I know I will be overzealous in my packing and all the things I think I will have time to do in Florence.
So ciao for now!
Marie
