This week was a full moon. A time of fruition, expanding, harvesting. The week was also incredibly intense with many projects coming close to being, for students and faculty alike. Because there was also a lunar eclipse on the night of the full moon, I found myself continuously thinking about the cycles of the moon, the waxing and waning, the BECOMING (and then the UN-becoming that follows, only to start the cycle all over again).
We had some visiting guest artists who worked with our students on an incredible singer community project, a joint reading and performance (with lots of workshopping in between) of Schubert’s song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin. It was moving to witness the amount of artistic growth that emerged over just three days of intensive work on this cycle. Many students experienced profound learning, some of them truly emerging as artists for the first time. This “becoming” is always surprising and touching to witness.
In the same vein, we are in the final throes of preparation for our opera excerpts show, and students are being asked to bring their best game. Many of them are new to the art form and shy of truly showing themselves. They can become frustrated and feel blocked, but I have to keep reminding them that the growth will happen when the seed of inspiration is ready to germinate and not before. I had a deep thought that I hope I can articulate here (I said it eloquently earlier in the week, but didn’t write it down so not sure if it will come across in the same way); we are all on the same journey towards ourselves. As singers, we have the good fortune to be confronted daily with the challenge of that encounter with our deepest truth. At the end of the day, we are all marching inexorably toward the distillation of our truest, purest self, the ultimate realization of which will only happen in the moment of our death. The voice is the conduit toward this self-knowing. Each day, we take our gentle, gingerly steps towards this understanding, this accepting, this growing. This Becoming. It’s a sacred act.