Until this week, I’ve never felt like I could relate to a shirt.

That may be one of the weirdest sentences I’ve every typed out that has been based completely in reality, but it’s true. Okay, so let me explain before I start getting a bunch of concerned looks. I think one of the coolest things about music is that it can make you experience things you’ve never felt before, can take you to places you’ve never been, and can capture emotions fundamental to the human experience. It is an endless playground for artists to continually redefine and reinvigorate the same emotions and narratives, and to make space for new ones.

I was listening to an album this week by The Belle Brigade, a sibling band formed by two of composer John Williams’ grandchildren, when I came upon their song, Shirt. Let me be clear – this song is actually, completely about a shirt. The whole song is about a shirt, but it is also a wonderful metaphor for feeling worn out and being taken advantage of by people and by love, and about finding strength in your resilience. It’s a wonderful gem about coming to terms with your struggles and with your weaknesses, and about taking ownership of who you are. It was a song I didn’t know I needed this week, but I haven’t been able to stop listening to it.

It’s so cool, and such a testament to the talent of musicians and the power of music when such a simple metaphor can make such a powerful statement.

Listen to Shirt on Spotify here!

Okay, this isn’t actually going to be a poem or anything, I just don’t think I’ll ever find such an amazing, open, and enriching experience as blogging for Ink. Despite the hard work of my English professors to make me a better writer and thinker, my year and a half with this blog has grown my writing by leaps and bounds by allowing me to explore my passions and critically think about my everyday interactions with forms of art. I’m so sad to say that this will be my last post, as I am graduating in almost exactly two weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

Ink has allowed me to be an expert on whatever I want to be — from tattoos to trees to Manet and Picasso, I have been able to teach myself how to analyze all types of art and make them relevant to myself and hopefully my readers. Once I settle in wherever I end up, I hope to continue to blog in this way because I have never experienced such traceable self-growth in such a short period of time and I never want to stop exercising my critical thinking muscles and artistic impulses.

But enough blubbering already, there is so much wonderful art around us all of the time that I challenge everyone to embrace it, contemplate it, internalize it, and even write about it. The guidelines for this blog were simply to write art and write about art and it’s amazing to see where each Ink blogger took those instructions and follow all of our journeys of self-reflection and exploration of the wealth of the world. I can’t wait to see what the next group of bloggers will bring. Thank you Arts Ink for an amazing couple of years!

If I have not said it before let me make this clear: I love spectacle. I love the all inclusive nature of spectacle; how it combines singing, dancing, lights, sets, costumes – essentially everyone and everything into it’s world and leaves the audience agog at the sheer magnitude of the production. To many in the classical world, spectacle is a cheap trick which impeaches the purity of the music, yet, in the musical theatre world spectacle is a given.

Saturday night I attended the opening night of The Merry Widow at the Detroit Opera House presented by Michigan Opera Theatre and yesterday night I attended the final dress rehearsal of The Music Man at the Power Center presented by the University of Michigan Musical Theatre Department. As I sit here thinking about the pieces which I have seen this week, I cannot help but think about the 2/3 full opera house on opening night compared to a 2/3 full Power Center during a dress rehearsal that was only opened because every single other performance sold out weeks ago. As I sit here, I can’t help but wonder why.

Ignoring the obvious oversimplification that modern people do not like opera, and ignoring the factors which are beyond the scope of this blog post such as substantial differences in ticket prices, location and accessibility of the theatre, the use of foreign languages etc. I think the biggest problem opera has when “competing” with musical theatre is the perception of Park-and-Bark singers in unrealistic circumstances screeching about their lives for a minimum of 2.5 hours.

This perception is there for good reason as unfortunately, many opera productions turn out that way. And frankly, I think it’s because opera houses aren’t expecting enough from their singers.

For a “dying” art form, opera is oversaturated with singers deluded with notions of becoming the next Pavarotti and stuck with no back up plan, but thousands of dollars of debt. Most of these singers are incredibly talented. Most of them have good diction and are fluent (or at least conversational) in the languages they sing in. And most of them continue to barely make ends meet as they live gig to gig, supplementing their income by teaching the next generation of opera singers.

As with anything in life, when you have more people who want a position than you have positions available, you are able to ask more of the canidates. You can extend the requirements from a good voice to a great voice, from 1 semester of ballet (which did not do much more than have the singer realize how bad they are at dance) to years of dance training and Park-and-Bark singing to acting that makes you love and feel for the character. This is what musical theatre requires and I see no reason that opera should be any different.

Yes, it is a lot to ask of a performer. But it is a lot to ask of an audience member to spend $200 on a ticket just to see you sing. If it is only about the voice, as some claim, strip away the costumes and the sets and lower that ticket price down to $100. But if a performer wants to transport the audience to a different time and a different place, I cannot be sitting in the audience noticing your unpointed feet or floppy fish hands as you dance, or the dead expression in your eyes as you sing about how happy you are.

I love opera. I think it is a complete art form but so often this seems to be forgotten as Park-and-Bark infiltrates its way into otherwise stellar productions. If we as artists want the tradition of opera to strongly into the future, we must embrace spectacle just as musical theatre has or soon opening nights that play to 2/3 full halls will dwindle down to shorter runs and fewer productions.

“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes… Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.”
Arshile Gorky

“There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.”  Dave Brubeck

Rock guitar lore renowns Jimi Hendrix as one of the great improvisational soloists in a live context. Although untrained in technique, Hendrix’s love of the instrument led him to develop a consistent and recognizable style, mixing a blues sensibility with an electrified, hard rock sound.

Most notable about Hendrix, perhaps, was his energetic live performance. During his live shows, Hendrix would perform unprecedented feats of spectacle, such as, playing his instrument behind his back, lighting his guitar on fire, or even finishing solos by strumming with his teeth. These antics never interfered with or compromised the distinct psychedelic quality of sound which made him famous.

Hendrix’s live performances are noteworthy not only for their spontaneity, but also for their cultural resonance and legacy. His music re-interpreted classical performance tropes of spoken word poetry, soulful blues, and improvisational jazz, culminating in a psychedelic experience unparalleled by Rock and Roll peers of the time.

Psychedelic Rock re-interprets traditional harmonic melodies with electronic distortion and amp feedback which catapult sound waves to unpredictable frequencies. Much like abstract painting broke apart traditional painterly form into a symposium of color and form, reinterpreting the process by which the medium affected audiences.

Psychedelic music and Abstract painting parallel one another in their desire to transcend the limits of their respective mediums by questioning the basic function of their constituent mechanisms of expression.