I have to tell you about a really remarkable moment which occurred at Carthage yesterday morning. It involved our soon-to- depart part-time voice teacher, Nancy Henninger, who will soon be relocating to Prague in the Czech Republic. Nancy told the rest of the voice faculty that she would be here to listen to the first three singers in our final juries, but then she would be going down to her studio for a few minutes because she needed to warm up her prize voice student in Prague who had a big performance that night. It took a second for it to register- that Nancy was going to be in her studio in Carthage, her student would be in Prague, but somehow Nancy would be warming her up.
It turns out that Nancy has been working with her Maria (I believe that’s her name) fairly extensively via the internet. They have to secure as strong and steady a web connection as possible, which sometimes means that Nancy’s student actually has to get in her car and drive to the top of the highest hill in town, so they have actually had a few of these voice teacher-voice student sessions while the student was in her car! For this session, none of that was necessary.
So the photograph is of Nancy’s laptop in her Carthage studio. The larger screen shows her student in Prague (or actually a smaller community not too far from Prague) – and the smaller screen in the bottom left hand corner of the laptop, if you look really close, is of Nancy at the piano. So that’s the image which her student had on her monitor in Prague. Nancy was at the piano, playing the exercises, listening as the singer sang along – coaching her all along the way about things like placement, support, position of the soft palette – all kinds of fairly detailed things fairly normal for the vocalizing at the start of a voice lesson . . .
. . . except that the teacher was in Kenosha, WI and the student was in Prague. If that doesn’t show something extraordinary about the world in which we live and work, I don’t know what does. Incredible! I guess the truism “It’s a small world after all” is coming true in all kinds of ways that Walt Disney could not have imagined in even his wildest dreams.