Schmentrepreneurship in Schmusic

Ugh.  I am not a fan of sitting and listening for 6+ hours a day!  I am not, and I just had to get that off of my chest.  All grumps aside, this past week we had a 5-day seminar on entrepreneurship in music, and it was mostly an excellent time all around.  Several of the guest speakers even openly encouraged us to squirm in our seats or get up and move around if we wanted, so I did!

There was a different speaker every morning and afternoon, and they all spoke about their areas of expertise – some were business-people, and some were artists-turned-business-people.  One of my favorite speakers all week was Eric Modig, an artist who has also opened his own art gallery in Stockholm, called Art concept Store.  I liked his enthusiasm for advertising; so often you hear artists talk about self-promotion and advertising as though it is the antithesis of art, and I can’t say that I agree with that.  Just like any trade, we need people to show up and ‘shop’, i.e. buy tickets and cd’s, if we want that trade to survive.  Owning up to that and making it work to the best of my ability is one of my goals for this coming year.  I have a website that I update regularly, but until today I had not been tracking any of the data from the website.  For the luddites out there, if you own a website you can sign up for services, (some, like Google, are free) to keep track of information like how many people have visited your website, where in the world are they, how long do they stay on each page, etc.  There isn’t any personal information available, but it gives you a very good idea about the kind of people that are looking at your site, and what they are interested in.  I’m looking forward to learning more about what specifically people look at on my site.  I know what I look for in other singers’ websites, but I wonder if it’s the same for other people, and non-singers?  Me, I go first to the bio, and second to the recordings.  anything other than that I’m not too interested in.

This week we are back at work for the opening of Opera Mecatronica, which is in 9 days.  It’s creeping up!  We’re working on choreography for the group numbers, and as always I’m plugging away at the Iphone app, the Throat3.  I like being able to accompany myself as I sing.  I am not a great pianist, so it’s a pretty new feeling to be able to perform with music without someone else making that music with me.  I will post a few pictures of it in action next time around.

That’s it for today!  I’m pooped.  I hope you’re all having a beautiful day.  Here is a photo of the view outside our entrepreneurship class; pretty darn sweet.

Stitch & Bitch

I thought I would share some of the pictures from my most recent show, Stitch & Bitch, that we performed at the Folkoperan’s festival Opera Showroom here in Stockholm last weekend.  As a part of our class working with Carina Reich and Bogdan Szyber, my four classmates and I created our own show using arias from our repertoire, as well as a couple of ensemble pieces.  We chose the songs, decided on our action, and built our costumes and set.  Our set was a sort of garbage-land, and for it we constructed a huge tarp made out of garbage bags that we cut open and taped together.  It was really wonderful watching an everyday item transform into something so dramatic.  I also had more fun than I would have imagined making my costume, especially the wig.  I spent many hours watching internet-tv, and tying strands of yarn in to this wig cap.

 

Beginning to tie yarn onto the wig cap...

what's a wig without a rat-tail? This was my favorite part.

Here it is once I had finished putting all of the yarn in, before I attached the little paper-curls I used in the front for bangs.

the final product! I was stuffing it with newspaper to make it bigger, and ended up really loving the sort of Frankenstein look it gave, so I kept it open like that.

 

I sang, “Va!  Laisse coules mes larmes” by Massenet’s opera Werther.  When Massenet was alive people dismissed him, saying his music lacked substance and that he wrote for the masses, but personally I think he really understood drama, and how to write for a singer.  Here are a couple of photos from the show, as well as my finished-product wig and costume.  The boustiere is made from bags from a discount grocery store called Lidl, which is kind of like having Wal-Mart plastered across your chest.  I especially  liked that addition, thanks to Bogdan and Carina for the idea!

 

The whole, crazy gang.

 

The festival was great.  There was a lot of diversity in the music, backgrounds, and performance styles of the many acts that were at the festival.  I also took part in a wonderful piece choreographed and designed by Per Sacklén, a dancer from Stockholm.  Using sensors that were attached to my body, I moved around the room and sang while the sensors distorted anc changed the sounds I made.  The quality of the movements was decided beforehand, but each show was different as I reacted to the sounds and moved accordingly.  Between the 2 shows, 4 performances in total, Ryan’s parents coming to visit that week, and Ryan giving a truly fantastic recital the day before this festival, I did not have a moment to absorb or reflect on much that was happening.  Now that I’ve had a while to think about it, though, I am extremely proud of our group, and very happy with the outcome.  As usual, the down side is that we only performed it once!  We hope to be able to put the same show on sometime this summer, or in the near future.  I’ve got my wig here at home, just in case…

 

 

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

I’m a terrible photographer.  I have the idea of what I would like to capture, but it never really comes out right.  I could probably get a better camera, which would help a bit, but then I think if I take such bad pictures, why would I want to put more $ in to that?  Regardless, I was clicking away this past weekend in France.  Lille is my kind of city – big enough to have a downtown that’s pretty busy and lively, but small enough to be able to walk through lots of quiet neighborhoods and slow down a bit.  It’s pretty gritty, and kind of reminds me of my hometown, with all of the ivy on the sides of buildings, people hanging out on their front steps, and, well, the broken glass and bits of garbage, too.  Hey, home is home.  As much as I love Stockholm, some days I get nostalgic for a little bit of grit.

The group.

Yes, people really do carry baguettes around like that.

Can you see how thin this building is? It's right up against a huge old beautiful church.

Those pictures are from the 2 hours I spent outside of the theatre – most of my trip was spent inside the building, waiting for rehearsals, rehearsing, or eating some incredibly delicious food that the theatre’s cook made for us.  Dang, I should have taken pictures of those meals!  I did get a couple of the first lunch we had after running to the grocery store around the corner.  I think every single person in our group bought at least 1 baguette and 1 block of cheese.

The entrance to the theatre, Le Prato

Our first lunch, trés Français

Can you see that this lovely man has a cigarette in his mouth, inside a building? I felt like I was time traveling.

And a video, too!

The show was definitely a success.  This is only what they are calling a, “beta test”, because the final product will not be ready until 2014.  Until then, Marie-Andree, the producer and director of this project, is creating a series of shows (like this one) to test out and try ideas.  I do hope I am a part of the project in the future, but they are here in Europe and I’ll be heading home in a few months.  If they come to Montreal (the home of this kind of circus) or New York, I will hop on up in a minute and be ready to sing!

Happy Wednesday.  Lots of love,

Kristin

Did you know…

… that I’m not only a starving artist, I’m also a starving voice-over artist, too!  In my spare time I’ve been learning how to do voice acting, and have begun to get some jobs over the past 6 months or so.  My hope is that as the years go on, I can do this for a living in addition to singing. My first app came out this week!  Well, an app that has my voice on it.  It’s a children’s book called, “one cold night”, and I read the book as the words are highlighted, helping kids to learn how to identify words.  It was a fun project, and cool to be able to see it put into action.  You can find the app for sale here, although it doesn’t have a sample of my voice or anything like that.  Another cool project that you can listen to is for the Knock Foundation, a volunteer organization that is building infrastructure in African countries.  You can see the video I helped to make at the bottom of their homepage.  I like using my voice in another way, and it feels like it could become a great job down the line.  Much like the rest of the jobs in the creative world, though, it will take a long while to build up my resume.

Hmm, what else?  I don’t think I’ve mentioned one of my favorite places to go in Stockholm – the Stadsbiblioteket, aka the Library.  There are many around the city, but my favorite one is huge, and has a great selection of books in English.  It’s an interesting mish-mash that they have on display – they have many more books in storage, but just a sample selection on the shelves.  Because of this strange selection I started reading Agatha Christie novels at about a rate of 1 a day, and I think that by the time I leave Sweden I will have found the time to have read all of her amusing books.

The library is right in the middle of my commute from home to the Opera school, so I walk by it every day.  When I find myself really missing the familiar sounds and comforts of home, this is a place I like to go.  I can pick up Kurt Vonnegut and go to Indianapolis, or Sherman Alexie and all of a sudden I’m in Colorado again.

The sign in the middle says, “collection in progress”.  It looks less boring in Swedish, hmm?

The second photo shows the English shelves.  Home sweet home to me!

Better late than later

Oh, I swore I wouldn’t go a month without writing, but here I am! I got caught up in the daily grind, and have not had the energy to sit down and really think about what I would like to talk about here. Still, I know that it’s good to just write – first sit down and do it, and then worry about what to erase.

First, before I forget, I put up a video of a recent performance I did on my website, singing Erbarme dich, mein Gott  (have mercy, my God) from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion.  Click here to go to youtube and watch it.

Being ‘back in school’ is incredible. It’s not really like school, though, it’s more like daily rehearsal for our upcoming shows, and lessons and coachings in addition. I have to say that the coaches and teachers here are really top notch. With one of them, Lotta Larsson, I’m learning the role of Cherubino, and after that Siebel from Faust. With the other coach, Bengt-Åke Lundgrin, I’m working on my audition repertoire for the coming season, and the music I will be singing in our 3rd module this Spring, like “When I am laid in earth” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and some beautiful contemporary pieces written by Carl Unander-Scharin.

3 days a week the 5 students meet with Bogdan Szyber and Carina Reich to work on the piece we’re making for our performance at the Folkoperan festival on March 30th and 31st. So far, it has been absolutely packed with ideas and creativity. I’ve felt like a contestant in my old favorite show, project runway, where these designers are given 48 hours to make a cocktail dress using only glitter and mud and string, or something like that.  Bogdan and Carina asked us to think about who we are, and what we really want to express in this show we’re giving. We thought about it over night, and came back and talked… a lot. For 2 days! We each talked about who we are, where we come from.. oh, I was soooo tired of my own feelings and thinking about ‘me’ stuff by the end of those 2 days. I can talk for a long while with my close friends about what I’m thinking or feeling, but it’s pretty hard for me to get up in front of people I have known for a month or so and talk about ‘who I am’. Part of what I love about opera is that unlike being a singe/songwriter, I don’t have to tell my personal stuff to people; I get to sing otehr people’s words and interpret them, and I like that. So, when we were done with the expressing stuff, they said ‘ok, now forget about your own words, you are going to create a performance using the material you’ve gleaned from the person sitting to your right”. Ok, good thing I was listening! That was a Thursday, and we had until Tuesday to create a representation of that person. On Tuesday, everyone’s sketches were fantastic! No one sang, we all just acted out the things we thought were really beautiful, or ugly, or poignant about that person’s story. It took a lot of time and effort, and we were all so happy when it was finished. At the end of that day, Bogdan said, “great. now make another one for the person sitting 2 to your right for tomorrow. See you then!” What. I came home and ranted and paced around, and talked to myself and to Ryan about what I wanted to do for the next sketch. In one way it was really liberating, because I knew it didn’t have to be perfect, it just had to be done. At one point I was sitting on the kitchen floor with a hat I had just cut out of an egg carton, with my face painted like a Queen-of-the-night-zombie, I looked up and tried to say something serious to Ryan.. he looked at me and said, ‘it’s kind of hard to take you seriously right now, no offense.”  Right.
We performed those sketches for each other the next day, and then for the third day we did the same thing, representing the person sitting 3 people over from us in our circle. After it was all finished, we had 15 original, beautiful and totally weird sketches completed. Some had music, some did not. We videotaped them, and were able to look through them and think about the things we want to use for this upcoming performance, and the things we could definitely live without. On this coming Tuesday we’re gong to meet and go through all of our notes to decide what we can use, and go from there. I think that Bogdan and Carina are really interesting performers and people, and I’m so glad that they are here to help us 5 newbies decide what will look the best on stage, what will be clear, and what we might need to re-work.

As if that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, I’ve also started working a cafe job and have joined the circus.
The cafe job is very part time, and is at Stockholm’s botanical gardens. Its a gorgeous setting, very calm environment, and it feels good to be offsetting some of my living expenses here. I am also getting better at asking people, in Swedish, if they want their cake warmed up with a little bit of vanilla sauce, and I know that will surely help me in the future if Dolph Lundgren stops by for tea in America.  As for the circus, well, it’s only for a week! Some graduates of the circus school here in Stockholm have come together with the director of the school to create a project they are calling “The Gynoïde projeckt”. Gynoid is the feminine version of android. They wanted an opera singer to collaborate with a dj that they have used for this project in the past, so I’m stepping in and working with them for this one show, and maybe for shows in the future, too, depending on what direction they want to take. We had 4 days of intensive rehearsals, and then next week we’re going to Lille, France to perform the show at a festival for women in the circus. I think it’s going to be strange and wonderful. I will definitely post videos, because you have to see these beautiful and strong women flipping around the stage – I’ve never seen anything like it so close up before! It’s like a backstage pass to Cirque du Soleil – in fact, the director of the project is from Montreal (where Cirque was started) and works for them as a casting director, so there is definitely a feeling of fantasy that I love that is really present in the show.

To wrap it up, I’ll post a picture of Ryan’s and my new favorite bread recipe.  Dang, it’s good, and takes about an hour to make from start to finish.  If you’re interested, you can find the recipe here.

An Opera filled week

What a week! It’s Friday evening, and I am siting here reflecting on all that’s happened. Well, really I’m waking up from a nap that I actually accidentally fell into while checking my e-mail on the bed and hour and a half ago. Don’t go near the bed when you’re tired, blog-readers! Even though I’m usually anti-nap, I think it was probably a good thing. Sometimes so many new things in one week can be tiring just by itself. Not to mention getting up at 6:30 now, that is something that I just don’t think I will ever get used to, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of times I do it. Eew.
Since I don’t want to sit here for 18 paragraphs talking about the Opera school, I will just mention a few highlights. One, the facility itself is incredible. the building is new, so the facilities are sparkly, and the whole place just has a very… well, clean feeling that neither of the fine schools I went to could ever hope to have. The students have their own kind of lounge complete with a bed to sleep in, (it’s a single bed, but I bet that hasn’t stopped a couple of kids from cuddling up on that thing – no thank you, I will stay away from those blankies!) a kitchen with – among other things –  4 microwaves, 6 fridges, and a liquor cabinet that I think must have about 15 bottles of assorted booze. I mean, the students are supplying the alcohol for themselves, but what school do you know of in the US that would be down with a student-run bar in it’s lounge? We were happy enough to have ho-ho’s in the Butler lounge vending machine, and Colorado did not have any vending machines, so ho-ho’s were definitely out.
The second highlight of the week was a visit from Nina Stemme ( here are links to her website and wikipedia), who is Swedish, and one of the top singers in the world right now for the bigger repertoire like Wagner, or like the Puccini she is currently singing at the Royal Opera here in Sweden, La Fanciulla del West. She came to the school to talk to the students about how she got her start, her life now as a singer, what she feels students today can do to be prepared, things like that. It was all in Swedish, so I had to really, really concentrate to understand about 60%, but it was so worth it. It sounds trite, but the phrase down-to-earth keeps coming up in my mind as I find words to describe her interview. She is obviously very confident in her person, and that shows, but there is a feeling that she is very normal, and I love that. I really love it when you meet singers that treat opera like the job that it is. Yes, it’s an incredible job, and we get to wear really lacy costumes and sing for thousands of people, but at the end of the day you work, and you work very hard, for that priveledge. It’s just nice to meet someone like Ms. Stemme, and see that she still has a sense of what it’s like to be a person, and not a diva. I guess having three young kids will probably do that to someone, no matter what they do for a living.

Moving on, I also have to ask my opera-loving friends out there – am I the only one who had never heard of the Opera Now podcast? I just randomly picked it a month or so ago when I was looking for new things to listen to, and as I was taking the train so early this week, I brought along my Ipod to space out to. I have been laughing like a nut to myself the whole week on my commute! It is a group of between 2-4 opera singers and opera lovers that meet once a week to talk about topical issues in the opera world, and also to analyze and critique singers and recordings. These people, though, are not what you would think of when I use those words to describe them. They are funny, and I mean really, really funny. Also, and this one is harder to pin down, but they don’t give me anxiety when I listen to them. So often when I try to tune in to an opera-themed show or listen to a talk by someone who really knows what they are talking about, I start to get this creeping feeling that I actually know nothing about the world that I am choosing to live in, and that there is no way I will ever know enough to be successful. When I listen to these folks, though, I just have fun, and am learning a lot in the process. So, I highly recommend it. That is all!

Have a fantastic weekend; I’m going back to bed.
Love, KG

Tags: opera

Week 2 – Chinese food – dumplings and lo mein

I had high hopes to write more since my last week’s food post, but here we are.  This week when by really quickly – I’ve been doing some voiceover stuff, applying to a bunch of summer festivals, and have been practicing a lot more, because the first day of the mystery-opera class starts tomorrow.  I’m so excited!  Looking forward to being around other musicians, and having stuff to work towards that I didn’t make up myself.

For the Chinese food challenge, week 2, I made chicken and shrimp wontons, ‘fried’ (more like sauteed, I don’t think I would be down with deep frying… sorry, L’Hommedieu folks!) chicken wings and lo mein with bok choy.  It was a great challenge, and I ended up learning a lot of new things – marinating chicken in soy sauce and then sautéing it will burn it like nobody’s business, for instance.  Now I know!

Because Swedish people are so darn concerned for their fellow man, they like to pay everyone in the country a living wage – even the guy who cuts up chickens.  Sven, we can call him.  Since they pay Sven $20 an hour to cut up chicken bits, it ends up costing about 3 times as much if you want to buy boneless, skinless chicken breasts, compared to buying a whole chicken.  Because of this, I’ve learned how to cut and disjoint a chicken, which I’m really happy about.  It’s a good skill to have, I think, and I enjoy using every bit of the happy little bird.  Oh, and they are relatively happy.  No hormones in these chickies, but that’s another rant!  

Step 1 – the chicken has been cut into small pieces and mixed with the shrimp.  I also cut up a large scallion, saved half of it for the chicken stock I made later, and put the rest in this bowl:

Step 2 – Mix it up! Here I have the same stuff, but now I’ve added about a tablespoon of flour, as well as all of the ingredients behind the bowl – salt, sugar, apple vinegar, sesame oil, and a little bit of olive oil.  If I wanted to be legit I should have used a big dollop of pork fat, but I didn’t have any lying around so I used olive oil instead.

Then came the labor-intensive part.  Once I got the hang of it, it went pretty quickly.  The hardest part was keeping the wrappers from drying out as they sat on the counter waiting to be used.  I ended up filling that dish that you see below until it was full, we ate as many as we thought we could, and then froze the rest.  Weee!  I’m exerting my will power and not eating them.  But I know they’re in there…

I didn’t take any pictures of making the lo mein or the chicken, but it was pretty standard.  Here is a picture – I couldn’t really get a great one.  Let me tell you, when you are super-hungry and sugar-low, it is not the best time to try taking a photo of the food you really want to eat.  Something else I learned from this is that less time is more flavor, when it comes to cooking bok choy.  Any more than a minute or so in the pan and it starts to get watery and strange.  High heat and just a quick stir, and it’s totally delicious.

Like I said, this was all made and devoured a week ago already!  I wanted to wait and write something else between posts, but here I am now.  Next week’s challenge is… soup.  My favorite food!  I have the chicken stock from this little guy ready to go.

I hope you all are having a fantastic weekend – enjoy every last bit of it…

K