| Thanks for the detailed response, Brent.
Here's an attempt at the tough request you've placed on me. It's tough for me to put into words how much studying vocal literature has affected my musical development adequately ... it took us nearly 65 blocks walking through NYC a month and a half ago to come close!
Study and performance of vocal literature has encompassed a HUGE part of musical development over the past four years while at the Univ of Maryland. My interest in the vocal repertoire was primarily sparked by my frustration with the trumpet and music in general my sophmore year.
Chris Gekker influenced me to go see Ted Guerrant, a staff pianist and amazing musician at the Univ of MD. He subsequently spent a lot of time with me playing songs and talking about music and life nearly each week that semester. We must have played more than 100 songs in that fall semester! Through my study of vocal literature, I was able to discover a lot about myself as a musician and as a person. Prior to that semester, I wasn't using my interest in literature and other art in my music-making very much. There was a disconnect between my music-making and my general interest in other things that vocal music helped bridge. The study of text and music together really opened my eyes and ears to new possibilities.
You can start to discover the text through the composers' eyes by seeing how they reflect that text in their music. To then transfer these 'discoveries' to your performance of a purely instrumental version of the song (a trumpet and piano transcription in my case) it's a tall task to find the right sounds for specific lines of text. It requires great tone color flexibility on the trumpet. That's my favorite area of trumpet playing to explore, TONE COLOR FLEXIBILITY; the ability to change your sound on command ... different topic, different day.
So to tie this into the college audition post, the 'solo' for my Juilliard masters audition was actually not a trumpet piece at all. To nobody's surprise at this point in this posting, I chose a song as my solo. "I felt a funeral in my brain", an Emily Dickinson poem set by Aaron Copland was the song I selected. This was my "home run" as I referred to in an earlier posting on college auditioning. Playing songs, where my brain can be focussed on text and imagery (and therefore not focussed on nerves, tough entrances, tricky intervals or other trumpet bullsh*t) is where I am most effective performing.
I'll start a different forum discussion area dedicated to song transcription so we can stick to college auditions on this one.
Sorry for the dissertation,
Mikey B |