It’s Day Two of NATS,  and part of me is bone tired from yesterday’s gauntlet…. but the other part is exhilarated at what an exciting day it was for me both as a teacher and as a pianist.

NATS is a tough competition because it pits singers from every college and university across the state against one another with not the slightest concession given for how small your school might be or whether or not you have staff accompanists or your own music building.  For that matter, they also don’t care if you had a major opera/music theater presentation three days before the competition …. or whether or not you just got over laryngitis.  At NATS, you show up do the best you can….  and there are no “E for Effort” awards given.  In fact, one of the most sobering realities about NATS is that you can sing your heart out- maybe sing the best you ever had- and end up with nothing to show for it aside from the private satisfaction of knowing that you sang well.  But unlike solo and ensemble, where theoretically each and every singer who sings well can be given a I rating,  the rewards in this competition are just a select few slots in the semi’s and finals of each division.  The vast majority of singers walk away from this competition without anything at all to put on their trophy shelf, including very very fine singers.   (As I like to put it, there is very little riffraff in a competition like this,  so the competition really is brutally tough- and for some of our singers who are used to earning a I rating every time they open up their mouths,  NATS is a sobering reality check.)

NATS bounces around between various universities around the state (it’s far too large a competition to be hosted by as small a school as Carthage) – and whenever it’s at Milwaukee it’s especially large.   This year was no exception-  the competition is the largest that Wisconsin NATS has ever had, by a margin of one hundred singers.   As we were gearing up for the contest,  I recalled that the last time NATS was here,  Carthage walked away with only one single singer advancing beyond the preliminary round.  What made it especially dramatic and frightening was that it went down to the very last of our singers to have their results posted;  all the others had, in effect, gone down to defeat,  including several singers who had placed the previous year.   But then the posting was made for the finalists in junior men,  and the name Aaron Steckman was there!   Whew!  Carthage could rejoice that we had one singer advance into the finals.   As I thought of that,  I was moved to send an email to our students to prepare them for the very real possibility that Carthage might advance only one or two singers-  or maybe even none at all.  Welcome to the real world, ladies and gentlemen.

As it turns out,  it was a somewhat tough year for Carthage,  but three of my students did advance into the semi-finals, which was immensely gratifying to me.   A freshman named Bob Petts advanced in the Lower College Musical Theater category (which as the name implies includes both freshmen and sophomores,  so his advancement was especially exciting)…  a junior named Michael Chase advanced in the Junior Men’s Classical division ….   and a student of mine named Andrew Johnson who has been at Carthage for quite some time – having switched from an instrumental to a vocal major two years ago – advanced to the semi’s in the Adult division.   (I wish they would name that category something else;  they make it sound a little naughty,  as though a “contains mature content” warning needs to be posted.)   And to ratchet up the excitement level,  a fourth Carthage student, Alex Campea, advanced to the semi’s of Lower College Musical Theater (along with Bob), and a fifth Carthage student, Talia Nepper,  advanced not only to the semi’s but to the finals in Freshman Women – and I was her piano accompanist.  I also played for a superb graduate from UW-Parkside, Jennifer Hansen, who advanced all the way to the finals in the category of Continuing Women.   So it was a most exciting day for me.  Some memorable moments. . .

  1. *I was reminded again and again that the single scariest thing about bringing students to NATS is the all-too-real possibility that I will screw something up and have a singer be disqualified.  It can happen if you enter a student in the wrong category-  or if they show up without original copies of the music (illegal xerox copies are absolutely forbidden at this competition) – or if I were to tell them wrong information about when and where they’re performing – or if I screw something up in the registration process and inadvertently neglect to enter them at all.   It’s the kind of thing that snaps me wide awake at 3 in the morning (if barking dogs haven’t already done the trick) in the days leading up to NATS.  But saints be praised, none of my students has ever been bounced and this year extended the streak.  Which is not to say that I’m about to get cocky or complacent.

  1. *One of the strange things about NATS is that a teacher almost never gets to hear their own students perform in the preliminary rounds because we’re typically busy judging other categories of the competition- or in my case this year, playing piano accompaniments.   But I did manage to hear the performance of a high school student of mine,  Nick Huff,  and I was absolutely thrilled with how well he did.  He has a wonderful voice and sings with a maturity and expressivity well beyond his years.   He didn’t advance but according to his score he came achingly close.   But I’m just glad that he sang as well as he did.  I didn’t get to hear any of my other guys in preliminaries, but by all reports they all did well- they were prompt, polite, didn’t spit on the floor,  didn’t have their shirt tail hanging out, and oh yeah, they sang well, too.

  1. *I did have three singers advance, which was thrilling-  and actually as results were first coming in yesterday morning, three of my first four singers made it….  which of course had me swept up in euphoric confidence that it would end up being 7 out of 9 or 8 out of 9 by day’s end.  But no,  that glorious script written in my imagination didn’t play out as I hoped,  but 3 out of 9 is still a marvelous showing and I could not be more pleased.   And for each of them it was a very special triumph.  I’ve already mentioned how nice it was to see freshman Bob Petts advance in a division with both freshmen and sophomores,  and Bob is the kind of serious, smart student who will learn a whole lot from this experience.   Michael Chase is spectacularly gifted but has struggled with various issues and distractions – as so often happens with gifted collegians – so to see him do this well was thrilling for me.  And Andrew Johnson, God bless him, is a real newcomer to all of this and I couldn’t be prouder of him for coming so far in such a short amount of time.  He is a gifted pianist and saxophonist but there is no question whatsoever that is heart is in singing,  and his gifts for it are truly exceptional.

  1. * I had two rather remarkable experiences as I was playing for people.  The first happened in preliminaries when one of the musical theater students from Carthage realized that her teacher had neglected to bring the book which had the song “Moonfall” by Rupert Holmes in it.   She frantically checked with all the other musical theater singers from Carthage, but none of them happened to have that book,  and the rules prohibit me from playing from the xerox copy.   With time running out,  I finally took the xerox copy and went measure by measure,  writing out the basic harmonic chords (I didn’t have manuscript paper,  or I would have tried to write out the melodic line) and I ended up faking the accompaniment as best I could, using that little grid.   It wasn’t perfect (neither was she- she skipped a whole verse) – but at least she wasn’t disqualified and she ended up delivering a fine performance.

The second remarkable experience still has me shaking my head in wonder that it actually happened as it did.  It was semi-finals for Continuing Senior Women, and I was playing for Jennifer Hansen,  a really capable singer who has been in finals before and always a contender for top honors.  For all the performances in semi-finals and finals, each singer is strictly limited to six minutes.  (You get 8 or 10 in preliminaries, depending on what division you’re in.)  You have to sing a substantial part of two different pieces but otherwise you get to fill those six minutes as you choose-  and Jennifer chose to sing two of her four songs in their entirety and leave it at that.  (Many singers elect to start a third song, but they’re almost always stopped before they’re done because time is up-  and that always feels a bit weird.) Anyway,  she planned on just the aria from Handel’s Alcina and an art song by Richard Strauss.  And that’s what she did,  singing both marvelously.   We got to the end of the second piece and she stood there waiting for the judges to say “Thank you” – which in turn is the signal for the audience to applaud.  Instead,  dead silence.   She looked around a bit nervously – and then one of the judges asked the time keeper “how much time is left?”   She replied “one minute, forty seconds” – and the judge asked “can we hear something else?”   Gulp!  Jennifer replied that her other two musical scores were back out in the lobby – and had this sort of hesitant look on her face – and this awkward silence hung in the air for a second or two.  That’s when I piped up “I can do the Barber”  (without music) …   truly not out of any desire to show off but just because it felt like she was going to be counted down somehow if she didn’t comply with the request.   So we did it-  and she sang it gorgeously…. almost as though the sheer surprise of the moment triggered something and she was tapping into a whole new well of emotion and spirit.   It was stunning,  and it was really fun to play a little part in making that moment possible.

  1. *There were other lovely moments through both days of the competition,  but the one I want to single out happened a few moments before the above photo was snapped.  It was when David Duncan hugged and congratulated Michael Chase for advancing to semi-finals,  a feat which David achieved last year but not this year, even though I strongly suspect that David sang even better this year than he did last year.  Such is the unpredictable nature of this kind of competition, in which there is no way to know how things will go and especially how the results will turn out.   I should add that David and Michael are classmates- and thus competitors because they were singing in the same division.   That moment of graciousness is maybe what I will take away from 2010 NATS more than any other.   Because when it comes right down to it,  this whole business of singing cannot be about winning and losing, succeeding and failing, or about any of the other rather arbitrary measuring sticks by which we distinguish between various singers and their accomplishments.  It needs to be about wonderful singing for the sake of singing wonderfully,  and letting the chips fall where they may. . . and about being big-hearted enough to rejoice in the successes of others.   And when we see examples of that like I did yesterday afternoon,  it makes me very very happy to be doing what I’m doing and doing it where I am with the young men I am privileged to have as my students.

 

I am a very lucky man.

P.S.-  Talia Nepper finished second in Freshman Women.  Jennifer Hansen finished second in Continuing Seniors.   And in a lovely bonus,  the very last singer we heard this afternoon was Scott Frost,  a student of mine when he was in high school, where he was a treasured part of Polly’s choral program at Tremper.  He finished second in Upper College Men’s Musical Theater.

Pictured above:  left to right,  David Duncan, GB, Michael Chase.