Music on the Move

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By Leigh Anne Gullett

What is music? Is it the clear, lyrical sound of a soprano voice? Does it come from those who have spent years under intense tutelage or from a toddler beating a steady rhythm on kitchen pots and pans?

For three UTSA music instructors—William McCrary, Linda Poetschke and Dave Sebald—the answer is all of the above and more. The power of music to soothe, to excite, to move the soul finds expression in myriad forms, both in and out of the classroom. Here, we highlight three of COLFA’s many successful music programs that approach music in different ways.

For McCrary, an associate professor in the music department and director of UTSA’s Lyric Theatre, music, for the moment, is a children’s story. Always involved in children’s theater, McCrary teamed up with the Opera Guild of San Antonio about six years ago to bring Opera to Go to San Antonio schools. By 2009, the program was reaching as many as 500 students.

McCrary has eight UTSA students performing The Pied Piper of Hamlin three weeks out of the year, with children from each school playing rats and townspeople.

The schedule is grueling. The Opera Guild books and plans the performances and pays each student a stipend for their work. The students earn every penny. Once they are selected for the production, they log countless hours learning the opera and rehearsing. There are 5 a.m. wake-up calls for 6 a.m. rehearsals. Finally, there is the intense performance schedule—last year there were 30 performances at about 20 schools—crammed into less than a month. At times, that meant as many as three performances a day. Hard work aside, for both the college students and their audiences, the experience is priceless.

McCrary says many of the students involved in the production are actually music education majors rather than music performance majors, but he tries not to differentiate between the education, music marketing and performance students. He sees no reason why a high school music department couldn’t stage its own opera someday and calls the process an incredible education tool.

While the program’s fairy tale operas can be whimsical and fun, one of its first performances, the opera Brundibar, can only be described as life altering. Brundibar is a children’s opera composed by Hans Krasa and first performed by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II. Krasa, along with many of the opera’s original performers, were transported to Auschwitz where they either died or were killed. Brundibar, however, lived on with its triumph-of-good-over-evil storyline. More than 60 years later, McCrary and his band of students traveled to Terezin and became the first Americans to perform the opera in its tragic birthplace. As fate would have it, two Theresienstadt survivors, one who had been in the opera’s original production, were able to see the performance. "The Brundibar experience for our students was once in a lifetime," says McCrary. "Everybody was crying. I still to this day have not been able to figure out how to express it. It’s one of those education experiences as a teacher that you just can’t re-create."

McCrary says he plans to bring Brundibar back as part of the regular rotation of three or four operas his students perform. With the continued support of the Opera Guild of San Antonio, McCrary can keep the opera show on the road, switching performances every two years.

Summer voices

UTSA voice professor and renowned soprano Linda Poetschke delivers a life-altering experience to her students as well, but her training is more like music boot camp, blending physical endurance training with intense vocal training. Her summer voice institute is in its second year; this summer, 30 students took part in the intensive four-week program in Taos, N.M.

Like McCrary’s opera program, the schedule is demanding, with weekly performances and a challenging curriculum. Four teachers and four coaches team up and rotate the students through a variety of lessons. When they start going on auditions, the students have to be able to present four or five arias in Italian, French, English, Czech, Russian and German. Poetschke’s instructors make sure they are ready. When they aren’t working on improving voice or language skills, students are tending to their physical well-being with an hour of exercise, ranging from Pilates to hiking, each day. They meet with exercise and nutrition experts and are served nutritionally sound meals with an eye toward teaching a healthy, disciplined lifestyle.

"People don’t realize it, but singing is an athletic endeavor," says Poetschke. "It’s like a gymnast trains for years or a runner trains for years. They have to be disciplined in that training. We try to help them with that. We really try to help them with life issues as well as the obvious issues they encounter as singers."

Part of the help is one-on-one consultation with a performance psychologist. The psychologist addresses issues such as performance anxiety and negativity. The instructors work on the students’ language skills, their movement and acting, and their voice. Every weekend, the students perform and gain instant feedback from a panel of teachers and coaches.

"When they come out, they have a lot of tools, even if they don’t realize their dream of some day performing with an opera company," says Poetschke. "There are so many talented singers and there aren’t that many places to perform, so that’s why we want to keep it going. You never finish learning. You still have so many lessons to hone your craft."

Their own music

Music isn’t only for the classically trained, according to UTSA associate professor Dave Sebald. In his world, anyone can create music. "You’re not limited now," he says. "Whereas a hundred years ago only specially trained people could create music, anybody can create music now."

As director of music technology at UTSA, Sebald teaches digital music production. He also takes his class to San Antonio Independent School District classrooms where they teach acoustics, digital audio theory, synthesis, and sound and audio engineering. The students get an in-depth base of theoretical knowledge and are creating their own audio files in the very first week of class.

"This is a unique program," says Sebald. "You’ve got to hand it to [SAISD for] really taking the bull by the horns and investing a lot of money to get it to the kids."

The students’ music is put on a Web site, where other students judge the pieces they like the best. Sebald hopes to one day create a CD or a Web site with a compilation of the students’ best works. Mostly, he wants students to have the chance to make their own music rather than simply learning and performing someone else’s masterpiece. Plus, it’s music for the masses. "Now you can get directly to the heart of making music without having to filter it through 20 years of developing technique," he says.

Sebald sees value in every musical creation, regardless of its depth or brilliance. For some, creating music comes easily, he says. "But does that make students who create more ordinary music less [musical]?"

While one creation could be the equivalent of a Beethoven symphony, another could be as simple as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," he says. But ultimately, "it doesn’t matter. They’re all their own creation. There’s more to music than just playing somebody else’s march."

So what is music? It’s everything from the sound of a toddler banging pots and pans to the wail of an electric guitar. And that, the UTSA musicians say, is what makes it so wonderful. There is music everywhere.