Opera Canada Magazine Goes Digital

Everyone's (second?) favourite source for Canadian opera news has gone digital. Through a deal with Zinio Digital Magazines you can now get digital copies of Opera Canada for your computer or iPad. On it's face I think that it's a great idea. I've subscribed to Opera Canada in print format for years and I'm glad to see that they're catching up to the way that people want to consume their media.

The catch? Well, to start with, there's no discount for subscribers of the paper version. At $29.50 for four issues on paper, I'll be hard pressed to put out another $29.95 for the digital copies. (Confusingly, single issues are $5.95 in either format, making, um, $24/4 issues, but that's another post.) For most people I would imagine that this makes it an "either-or" proposition and with this type of periodical I just don't see the economics allowing the digital version to win. Opera Canada is an industry magazine. It's articles are being saved for posterity and reference by subscribers as opposed to, say, getting an iTunes subscription to the NY Times where you read today's news once and, should you need to check an article for something next year, you can go to their web site to read it for free. Opera Canada doesn't have a web site, (a topic I've opined on before,) so my only hope to reference something is to dig through my old copies. The solution seems simple: if you want people to read your digital version, offer it at a discount to subscribers. Opera Canada has already paid for the digitization of the issue so any subscriptions that they sell are gravy. If it were me, I'd much rather have 10% of my customers (who are already paper subscribers) subscribing to the digital version too at $2.99/year as opposed to 1% at $29.95/year, but that's just me. Other periodicals have figured it out: Rolling Stone is offered at 85% off the cover price, Hockey News is 67% off. Is there something that I'm missing here?

The other issue that I have with it is it's format. The digital version is published in a proprietary "Zinio" format locked down with DRM. While there are some major magazines signed on to Zinio, any closed system makes me uncomfortable subscribing, particularly when (as detailed above,) I'm effectively being forced to chose between it and and the paper version. Heck, even iTunes has dropped it's DRM. Combine that with a requirement to use Zinio software to read the digital version and it's still a pass for me, I'm afraid. What happens when Zinio closes up shop, or gets bought out? Do I still get to access my content? What happens when they change formats and my old copies don't work anymore? When they're locked down with DRM, I'm out of luck. No thanks, Zinio.

I love digital formats. Heck, I love technologoy more than the next guy. But I can't abide poorly implemented technology. I'll revisit the issue in a year but without any changes on the horizon, I'll stick with my dead tree version for now.

New diction resource

Diction! Ain't it fun? Well I've come across a new website/podcast at The Diction Police created by Ellen Rissinger who is and American coach working in Germany, mostly at Dresden's Semperoper. The podcasts look (there are only two right now) like they're going to cover individual songs and arias in multiple languages, and featuring guests who go over the texts as well as talk about diction in general. If she can keep it going it should be a fantastic resource as it builds!

Free Classical Singer subscription

Alright, I suck. It's kind of been a busy month and the blog's fallen by the wayside but at least I'm back with something good:

Classical Singer magazine, which started out life as The New York Opera Newsletter and was really the only place to get opera audition listing for a very long time (until Yap Tracker,) and who's forum spawned NFCS after some bad blood between some members, has a pretty great deal surfacing via their Twitter account: A free subscription to the web service.

By going to www.ClassicalSinger.com/onefree.php and signing up you get access to a number of things but most importantly the Audition Listings and the Magazine Archive. The audition listings are great because, although they're not as thorough as Yap Tracker's they are purely company submitted so you know when you send a package off to a company listed that they want to receive it. The catch is that it's only for the first month after which it's $12/year (regularly $52/year so there's that).

But for my money, the real gem is the magazine archive (which doesn't go away after a "trial" period). Here's why:

For a long, long time, before the Opera America Career Guide books (if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should!) everyone who was anyone who wrote articles for auditioning singers wrote them here. To be honest, most of it was before my day but in the short time that I've been looking through them, there are some really great thoughts put to paper from people who know what they're talking about.

Long story short, use the link. Sign up. It couldn't get any easier!

Getting singing grants

Okay, this posting frequency is just getting sad but it's a busy time of year. Hanukkah, then Christmas, then New Year's means lots of obligations and lots of singing. Who wants to count Messiahs with me?

But with New Year's coming up I want to talk about resolutions. I want to start applying for more grants next year and fortunately I've found a site that can help. What's more, it a government site so I know that there's no vested interest in the site. The only down side is that it only covers Government grants (but not just Federal - provincial too).

CultureCanada.gc.ca is the Fed's repository of arts grants. Splitting the grants into a bunch of different categories with a handful of search narrowers, it covers, for us opera folk, not just "Music" but also "Performing Arts." There are some other resources too, and although not all of them (or even most of them in fact,) cover singers/opera, there's enough here to get your search started the next time that you have a project in mind that needs funding.

Happy Hunting!

Library book sales

So yesterday a friend (Melissa Bencic, if you're interested,) and I went down to the University of Toronto to take in an annual event that we've been partaking in for a few years now: the Music LibraryBook Sale. The reason: We went once and it saved me about $130. You see, the scores that they sell there are cheap. Really cheap. And so when I picked up a Universal Bluebeard score for $2 and it turned out a year later that not only was I hired to do that show, but that that was the version with the English translation that we were going to use, and it retailed for $130, I was hooked and we've gone back every year.

We're a good team for this: I like the opera scores and she takes things for her music school, Bravo Academy. There's no competition and if I see soemthing that she might want while I'm score hunting I'll grab it and vice versa.

That said, with us moving next week, I brought home about 20 books and scores and my wife nearly killed me. At least I brought them home in a box.

The U of T music library site is here - They list the next sale as being yesterday but I'm sure that they'll update that soon. Check out your own local university library's site - you won't regret it!

Free singing lessons. Sort of.

One of the most visited posts on this blog is the famous "Free Scores" post. Next to the home page, more people come by to see it than any other post (it helps that Google puts the link on it's first page when you type in "Opera Scores"). So when I saw this, I knew that you guys would want to see it too.

The Bel Canto Forum bills it self as a place to discuss vocal technique, building on the quote from Jerome Hines that "Every singer has to be self-taught to a certain extent." The forum part of the site is just getting started but the thing to keep an eye on is it's "Library."

The "library" section is full of links to a ton of different online public domain (read: older,) resources about vocal technique. From Domingo and Sutherland masterclass videos to some great PDFs of some of the canonical vocal technique literature there's a whole bunch of stuff there. I wish that they'd exclude the links to Google Books that don't have a preview available (what's the point?) but there are some gems here to be sure.

If the site can develop a following for it's forum, and if they can continue to add resources to it's library, then this could end up being a great site to spend some serious time on. As it is right now, it's still worth a visit though.

Finding Auditions

It just occurred to me today as I scanned my inbox that while I had mentioned YAP Tracker before, the fantastic subscription site that brings together virtually every opera audition worldwide, (email me, or leave a comment below with your email address, to get a 10% off discount,) I hadn't yet mentioned the other great place to find audition information: Equity Online.

Canadian Actor's Equity Association runs an email mailing list that forwards audition information about Equity shows that are casting in the near future. To sign up all that you need to do is go to Equity Online and fill out the form. Many of you will want to tweak your email filters to limit the number of notifications that you get about, say for instance Stage Manager calls (unless of course you're a stage manager,) but in general, it couldn't get more convenient than having audition notices delivered to your inbox.

"But I'm not an Equity member" you might say. Well good news: You don't have to be. Just remember to respect the audition rules surrounding Equity roles and you can apply to any of the postings that come through, Equity or not. Just don't go applying for too many bass roles....

Pre-eminent blog "The Rest Is Noise" shuttered.

Wow, I just heard over at the Collaborative Piano Blog that Alex Ross' classical music blog "The Rest Is Noise" is done. Over. Kaput!

This blog was one of the originals covering all things classical musical and is the adam and eve of the wide swath of thousands of classical music blogs that exist today. The good news is that it's going to stay up for people to peruse and check the archives of. The really good news is that Alex is starting a new blog for The New Yorker called "Unquiet Thoughts" covering much of the same content. Hopefully this means great things for him and his blogging and that the corporate involvement means that even more time can be spent on the endeavour.

Congrats Alex - Here's to your new beginings!

My favourite time of the blogging year

Ahh, it's that time again! Kim Whitman over at the Wolf Trap Opera Blog is gearing up for audition season. If you're unfamiliar with it this means that from now until the Wolf Trap audition tour is over, this blog should be visited daily by every singer out there, Canadian or not. Right now we're in the middle of the "Fall 2009 Audition Season Mini Course" covering everything from Depth vs. Breadth in choosing audition rep, to a guest professional every Friday weighing in on their take on auditioning. All of culminates, of course, in a daily run down of what she sees during the auditions and the famed "Aria Frequency List" detailing how many of what aria was offered at this year's auditions, (last year's is here). Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic! Go Now!

Singing Stateside - getting work (and Visas) in the U.S.

As much as we'd all love it to be true, there's just not enough work up in Canada to make a fully fledged career. If you want a chance at doing this full time, you'll have to head elsewhere for at least part of the work.

Europe is great. It's easier to get E.U. work visas with an offer, and German Fest contracts, if you can get one, set you up for a year of paid (hard!) work. There's a great blog by an English singer called "An Englishwoman Abroad," who is writing her experiences down. I particularly like it because it's about the experience as a whole, not just the music or house.

For most of us, though, the U.S. is definitely closer. The initial investment of flying to Miami to sing your two arias is significantly less than making your way to Dortmund to do the same. Factor in same languages and the fact that you can be home on weekends if you need be and it's a great place to start expanding. The question is how.

A lot of singers enter a catch-22 when they try to audition down south: A lot of small and mid-level houses need for you to already have a visa before they'll hear you. It costs a lot of time and money for them to arrange one for you so you'd better be pretty awesome to get them to do that. (If you're reading this blog post, instead of getting your rep at CAMI to arrange your visas, it's not you I'm afraid,) The kicker is that you need a contract signed and in hand to get a regular performing visa yourself.

So what do you do? Everybody's favourite forum had a little thread on this last week and I think that it pulls together some really valuable information. The main things to get out of it are that college teaching is a great way to get a visa, and that the American Federation of Musicians (if you're a member - most singers are not,) can help grease the wheels for a price. Some YAPs, particularly non-paying ones, can be easier to get visa for and, above all, competitions are your best friend: If you want to attract the kind of attention that makes mid and mid-upper (B) level houses get you a visa, win a competition.

Or marry an American.

Undergraduate program review

It's back to school time and Elizabeth MacDonald is going to be continuing her overview of the undergraduate options here in Canada. I was planning to write up something like this for those of you who have some 12th grade decisions to make this year but why mess with perfection - Elizabeth has already one a great job on it! Check it, and the rest of her blog, out here.

Well, hello there Vancouver Opera people!

I'm just packing up to head out of town for a little auditioning in the U.S. next week and I decide to check in on the 'ol opera blog. Imagine my surprise to find a whole bunch of Vancouver Opera people waiting here for me via the wonderful and amazing VO Operagator newsletter- Welcome!

This little blog is just a hodgepodge of Canadian opera goings on, including a number of posts involving your very own Vancouver Opera. Since you're here, I hope that you'll look around - here are this month's most popular posts so far:

1. All The Scores You Could Want! Free! (Pretty much the most read post every month, if only because it's a big draw to the blog.)

2. Apples and Singing - Well, you know about this one already - I'm pretty sure that the results are a little skewed tonight! Use the comments page on the post to add your suggestions.

3. Video of ENO auditions - Because who doesn't like to peek behind the curtain once in a while.

4. Best Free Options For Listening To Opera Online - There's that "F" word again. I do love it so.

5. 100 Posts For Canadian Opera Blog - The first milestone for this new blog.

I hope you'll hit the bookmark button, or click the RSS feeds. I occasionally come out with something intelligent, funny, or worthwhile so please stick around!

Thanks Selina!

July's most popular posts

In case you missed them, here are the posts that you loved most(s?)

1. Free opera scores (despite being a June post)
2. Free opera listening (I'm noticing a trend here,)
3. The Vancouver Opera job posting

Making opera portable

A tech blog that I follow occasionally ran an article today on audio file formats that I clicked through to with a thought to talking about the best way to convert your audio collection to digital and keep it sounding great (better than mp3 great,) without taking up a whole hard drive while doing so. Unfortunately the article was awful, mostly because it only covered a couple of options and not all of the good ones.

mp3 is a fine format. Everybody uses it. Every player plays it. It makes music small and portable. It just doesn't give very true sound (it strips away a lot of audio information,) which, for opera, is somewhat important. Fortunately there's other options and sometimes a good Wikipedia search is all you need. Here is a list explaining pretty much every audio codec in common use. Here is a list of the commonly accepted listening tests that have been run, grading them by quality. Here's a pretty good site that ran some tests using different music, including classical, to determine what works best for a lay person's ears.

Long story short, here are your best bets when getting audio off your CD (or digitally recording it from a record player using usb or line in.) :

-If you want to retain all of the sound from your CD when you digitize, use .PCM (usually saved as a .WAV file,) which can store huge amount of audio information. All of the data is there, it's just sizable, at between 10MB/minute. Slightly smaller would be FLAC or for those of you with iPods, "Apple Lossless," both of which compress audio into about half the size without any measurable loss of quality.

-If space is a serious issue, .ogg (OGG Vorbis) set at a low bit rate will do at under 1MB/minute. Just don't expect it to sound true to life.

-For a good balance of size and sound, try WMA9 or, if your player doesn't support it, (and it likely won't - this is Micorsoft's own codec,) mp3 at a variable bit sample. It will try to intelligently strip away the stuff you can't hear, and leave the stuff you want.

All told, this is a pretty basic run down of some pretty complex material. Heck, there are whole books and web sites dedicated to this. Hopefully though, this points you in the right direction if you're looking to digitize some music for the road. Just make sure that your music player can play the format before transferring the music or you'll have wasted an awful lot of time. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

YAP Tracker

I just did a post below where the the info was forwarded to a singer's forum by the good people at YAP Tracker. For those of you who don't know, YAP Tracker is a site that keeps track of virtually every audition opportunity from pay to sings up through to major A house auditions worldwide, but mostly concentrating in North America and Europe. It is one of the single best tools in a singer's arsenal as it makes not only finding out about auditions easier (too easy for my taste, letting everybody out there know about auditions without doing the work, but I'd rather be on the inside looking out than not subscribed when others have the info,) but it also helps you keep track of application and audition dates and has live updates as people start hearing about auditions or casting. It is $50 a year (and worth every penny,) but you can get 10% off if you send me an email letting me know you'd like to join as a part of their referral program. Write me at gtheule at gerrittheule. com for the discount.

The cheapest rehearsal scores available

I've been cast in a new opera for the fall. This is great except for two things: 1) There's no recording of the work to use for reference, and 2) The score is unavailable to purchase because, well, it's not been published yet. Now that I've gotten my hands on a PDF version of the score, it's time to start learning. But a digital version doesn't do me a lot of good on it's own right now (that's another post for later this week,) so it needs to be printed. Now, I could go to all of the trouble to set up the double sided printing on my printer, pay for ink, and babysit the print job so that nothing goes wrong, but I won't. I sent the PDF off to Staples and they'll print it, bind it, and cover it in six hours for the low, low price of $13. Now, I can't remember the last time I paid $13 for a score that wasn't from a used music sale, and even then the odds of them having what I need at the exact time of the sale is, well,unlikely to say the least. This is a revelation for me. Combine my previous list of downloadable scores with Staples or Kinkos and you have a really cheap option to have rehearsal-worthy scores for a fraction of the price, and all of it legal and guilt free since the only scores posted on the sites that I listed are score versions that have either expired their copyright and are public domain or are covered under explicit personal Fair Use doctrine (like the Mozarteum collection, having expired two years ago). Baerenreiter scores for $25? I'm in!

The best free options for listening to opera online.

Earlier I talked a little bit about where to get scores online and since it was a pretty popular post, I figured I should mention where to listen to opera online too. A lot of you may know about these but hey, if you even find one new one in here, it's a win. If you have any other favourites, let us know in the comments.

Youtube: This has clearly taken over as the standard place to find specific arias, art song, or just singers in general. I'd have never figured out Songs and Dances of Death without the ability to compare and contrast different performances. This used to require trips out to the library or CD store to pick up a bunch of CDs, but can now be done at the touch of a button. Many would decry the loss of the discovery of new artists or performances, found when looking for something else but stumbling on to something new, but the "Related Videos" tab does a pretty good job of that too. This is also the place to find your favourite "cage match" where singers are pitted head to head comparing things like High "C"s, Low "D", and even the best death scream (below).

Operacast: This is possibly my favourite place to go if I just want to listen. Hundreds of international radio stations with an online presence are searched every week and a list, separated by day of the week (GMT) is compiled, noting time, station, and planned set list. Somewhere in the world there is always opera playing. Operacast finds it, lists it, and provides the links to listen. I was going to list individual radio stations that play opera regularly but every time I found one, Operacast had it indexed and scheduled. If you only check one place out, this is it.

Podcasts: I have a soft spot for podcasts as one of my first online ventures was producing and hosting the internet's very first opera podcast entitled "Your Daily Opera". (I even had a New York Times mention for it). Podcasts are periodic radio shows that, instead of being broadcast live, are recorded and then sent out either in rss feeds via a program like iTunes, or made available online in mp3 format where they can be conveniently added to your favourite mp3 player. Many large opera companies have them as a part of their outreach where they detail the goings on within the company, occasionally featuring music, but the real gold, from the standpoint of listening to opera without much talk, are the smaller podcasts by opera lovers who feature different operas or topics week to week. Premiere Opera's podcast is one of the best for both regular updates as well as for featuring recordings that you wouldn't normally be able to hear elsewhere, but there are a ton of other great ones out there.

Beethoven on Demand: The entire Naxos and Marco Polo music catalogues, along with 70 other independent classical labels on one site. Brought to you by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra by way of their email club. When you sign up you get unlimited access to over 2300 opera albums, along with 32,000 other classical, jazz, and other albums totaling almost half a million tracks. I've traded my email address for worse, to be sure!

Metropolitan Opera On Demand: I was only going to list the free options on here and the Met only kind of fits the bill. They have a 7 day free trial that is fantastic. The only downside is that you'll be tempted to stay on to the tune of $15/month. If you're going to try out a paid service, you could do worse than this beautiful, easy to navigate, fairly comprehensive offering from the Metropolitan Opera. For my money, the real value is in the "Rental" option where you can "rent" specific operas for $3.99 or $4.99 in HD (provided you have the hardware specs to pull down the video at that bandwidth.) Think of it like the Met operas in the theatres, only on demand, albeit on a smaller screen. They also have some free arias if you just want to check it out, no registration required.

Opera Radio: Temporarily offline due to the new online radio fees that were put into place earlier this year. Hopefully a recently released settlement will breathe new life back into it.

This should be a good list to get you started but, as I said, I'd love to hear more. Use the comments to let me know.

Don Giovanni scream-off via Youtube:

Non-Canadians performing in Canada

Here's an interesting article (free registration required,) from the Canadian Tax Journal that would have been better included in, say, March, but still makes for valuable reading. It's titled "Performing in Canada: Taxation of Non-Resident Artists, Athletes and Other Service Providers," and covers the basics of what applies, what doesn't, and how to pay whom when the time comes. For performers, and opera is no exception, there's a lot of confusion about employee vs. contractor, which government gets paid first, and others. It also delves into the repercussions of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet tax decisions that made news a couple of years ago. File this one away for later.

Scores! All the Scores You Could Want! Free!

Last year I moved to Burlington, ON from Toronto. It was a small move but resulted in, among other things, an interesting inconvenience: There's not an opera score to be found in the city library, nor those of the surrounding cities of Hamilton or Oakville. By contrast, I was used to a public library system with a monstrous number of scores spanning the entire vocal repertoire. Can I order scores online, or go into Toronto to buy them (there's no real music store to speak of here either)? Sure. But when I'm just doing some research, listening to a new (to me) work, or figuring out if a role I've been offered is right for me, the cash outlay is just not always viable. Luckily for me, there's an incredible (really, there's no other word for it) wealth of free opera and vocal scores available online.

One of the most popular is the Indiana University database. Available in quick scan versions or in larger copies that one can work from, their list is amongst the best for commonly performed opera. They're not easily downloadable as the images are all in .gif format but when I need to take a look at Massenet's Don Quichotte at 3am, there's no better place. In the same database, there's also a huge listing of scores for art song, choral, piano and more.

IMSLP's database has lists of hundreds of composers with thousands (more than 30,000 to date) of works, a huge number of them operas, with (typically) PDF formats of scores. One ofmy favorites simply because of the PDF format allowing easy download and portability. A list of composers is here.

The yummiest colletion around is the Mozarteum's complete works of, well, Mozart. The treat here is that they are all scans of the notoriously beautiful and highly accurate Baerenreiter scores. If you just click on "view" then youget jpg versions but if youfirst go to the scores' Tables of Contents, the downloadable PDF versions become available.

There's the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek online ,which has it's English site here. It can be tricky to navigate as parts of the site haven't yet been translated but if you can get through the site your rewarded with nice scans of some beautiful scores. For an example of what I mean, here's a complete list of Handel works. Click on the links to see the scores.

If that's still not enough there's the Eastman Music Library's online collection, also in PDFs.

Finally, UCLA hosts the Sheet Music Consortium (sounds kind of sinister to me....) but has a searchable database of not only the above mentioned IU database but also of UCLA's, Johns Hopkins', and Duke's digital holdings.

That's a pretty good list to get you started. UCLA also has a list of other, smaller, resources thatis a fantastic treasure trove if you can find what you're looking for above. Happy hunting!

Resource sites singers should know

I think that I'll post some of these every once in a while. Singers, especially young singers (not that I'm an old man myself yet,) should know about stuff like this.

The Aria Database:

Exactly what it sounds like. A somewhat comprehensive list of opera arias, complete with range and Tessitura, midi sound files translations, and more. 139 bass arias alone!


Role Classification Databases:

The ones at AGMA (the US singers union) and at CAEA (the Canadian singers union) both keep a list of roles, voice types, and role sizes. A fantastic resource to get an idea of role size, particularly when researching a new role. The AGMA one is a little easier to navigate as it's just a drop down menu. The CAEA ones are appended to the "Opera" agreements which can be found here.