Why Study Music And Poetry?

…Childhood may be our greatest opportunity. Louise Glück says, “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.” Childhood is our first impression of the world and of ourselves, and is widely regarded as the time in our lives we'll be the most creative, that we are free from “cans” and “can’ts”, when the most is possible. Wordsworth says, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star … At length the Man perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day.”

Where does it go, for so many, this creativity, this belief in possibility? I’ll tell you a not-so-secret secret: nowhere. It never leaves…

Alyssa Morhardt-GoldsteinOctober 15, 2018Santa Barbara, singing, poetry, John Singer Sargent, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, Wildwood, Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim, education, music school, poetry school, symbolism, storytelling

On Diction And Evocation: In Dialogue With Soprano Nadine Sierra

Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein: So, the long-standing conversation is that poetry is music. Then there’s a lot of contention about how much that’s true, in which ways it’s true or not, the limitations of poetry that music doesn’t have, etc. Let's start there.

Nadine Sierra: I think that even with just the voice, which is a vocal instrument, it’s the most vocal that you can get (laughs), even if you’re not singing text, just speaking text, for some reason the voice gives words, sentences, stories, it gives it what music can give.

Alyssa Morhardt-GoldsteinOctober 1, 2018opera, Nadine Sierra, Mannes Conservatory, Mannes The New School For Music, NYC opera, soprano, diction, poetry, Metropolitan Opera, English diction