Glenn Korff School of Music Associate Professor of Voice Kevin Hanrahan and Assistant Professor of Voice Jamie Reimer presented at the International Symposium on Performance Science (ISPS) in Kyoto, Japan, Sept. 2-5, continuing a collaboration they have had with Australian composer Diana Blom.
Their trip was supported with Hixson-Lied Faculty Presentation of Scholarly and Creative Activity grants.
Hanrahan and Reimer collaborated on two presentations at the conference, and Reimer had an additional poster presentation. ISPS is a biennial meeting of performers and scientists that provides a platform to discuss and debate all facets of performance and the skills that underpin it.
Their first presentation, a symposium panel done in collaboration with composers Blom and Dawn Bennett, discussed the value of program notes from various perspectives.
Hanrahan examined the impact of program notes for collegiate singers. Using practice-led research, he had four college students write detailed program notes.
“They wrote it as if they were writing basically a paper for a music history class with a lot of detail and lot of analysis,” he said. “And then they had to write a revised program note for what you would expect the average music goer to a concert to be able to understand.”
They were then asked questions about whether or not they found the process useful.
“They were asked whether or not doing the revised note was useful to them, how did it change their interpretation, and in making it simpler, did that change their interpretation,” he said.
This particular line of research, using the practice-led research, was new to Hanrahan.
“This is taking what people actually do and making that the research,” he said. “So the data is what the people do, and not a controlled situation. I’m very excited about doing that kind of research because it’s very different, and I think it will be useful for many of our graduate students to follow this line of research. This is a science-based conference so it’s an acceptance of this methodology—looking at how artists create as opposed to have them do something, hook them up to some kind of instrumentation and get number data.”
Blom and Bennett explored program notes from the composer’s perspective. Reimer examined the effect of a pre-performance talk on audience understanding and enjoyment.
Reimer, in collaboration with the Lied Center for Performing Arts, surveyed patrons who attended the pre-performance talks before six of their spring concerts and got feedback on their effectiveness. She also asked if they would prefer pre-performance talks or program notes.
“That research is very interesting,” she said. “The talk is much more popular for the persons who attended the talk. I’m providing the counterpoint to what some of my colleagues are discussing.”
Their second presentation, with Blom, was titled “Consenting Adults: Composer/Performer Collaboration in the Composition Process.” Blom is writing a song cycle for Reimer and a song cycle for Hanrahan and documented their conversations, correspondence and feedback throughout the process.
“This is just one way to compose,” Reimer said. “Some composers don’t want a performer’s opinion at all. They just want to write. But Diana likes the collaborative element of composition so she has written a paper about the process, and Kevin and I have contributed to that paper.”
Since Blom is in Australia, and Reimer and Hanrahan are in Lincoln, they have relied on technology during this composing process.
“It’s been interesting,” Hanrahan said. “At this point, it’s been her sending me a score, me singing through it, and me writing back to her via e-mail. We’re planning on doing some Skype when we return from Japan.”
Reimer said the whole collaboration has evolved between two groups of people on different continents by means of technology.
“It’s just remarkable to think that we’re making art across oceans, and that it’s going to turn out to be beautiful and lovely and expressive, and we’re not even in the same geographical land mass,” she said.
Hanrahan first met Blom in 2012 when he was invited to sing in Sydney, Australia. A colleague he met earlier in 2006 was completing her Ph.D. at the University of Western Sydney, and had Blom as her chair.
That led to Blom coming to UNL in 2013 as a guest artist and for a recital on Contemporary Australian Art Song. When another colleague was unable to come to perform with Hanrahan, he invited Reimer to sing the soprano part on the concert.
Reimer and Hanrahan both traveled to Sydney the following summer to do additional concerts, and Hanrahan recorded Blom’s “The Library” and “Here Now at the End of the World” for Blom’s CD.
“From that collaboration, we talked about wouldn’t it be nice if we had more songs together,” Hanrahan said.
That led to a presentation at the International Society for Music Education conference in Brazil in 2014 before the presentations in Japan this year at ISPS.
Hanrahan describes Blom’s music as “complex, but simple.”
“Her melodies, in and of themselves, are not always easily approachable, but the way she writes her accompaniment, it really does make the melody fit and easier to sing. She really understands how to marry an independent accompaniment and an independent melody in a unified way, which is the hallmark of a true art song,” he said. “It just moves in a very interesting way. . . . I get to sing wonderful music that she writes for me. It’s nice to have someone who wants to create art for you to sing and asks you questions about how to do things.”
Reimer said Blom is very sensitive to text.
“She’s really smart when it comes to text setting,” she said. “She’s contemporary in that she’s perfectly comfortable in using extended harmonies or atypical intervals, but they sing really well. She writes really lyrically and expressively. She gives the singer everything they need to tell the story, which I appreciate.”
Reimer’s third poster presentation is an evolution of the research she has done through UNL’s Peer Review of Teaching Project and involves the use of social media and reality television in training characterization of opera singers.
“I’m helping these 18-20 year-old singers understand and make real characters who are from a different time, a different age, a different culture, a different socio-economic status,” she said. “We have to find out how they are real people.”
As part of her Opera Techniques course, her students do things like Tweet the entire plot of an opera as their character or film a confessional video as their character like what is used on reality television.
“All of a sudden in makes that character more real for them instead of someone they don’t understand or know anything about,” Reimer said. “I have the data that proves that this is actually effective as a teaching method, and that is displayed in poster form.”
Reimer likes that their research will be shared with a larger audience.
“I like the idea of sharing the innovative teaching methods that we’re using here with a wider audience and an international audience,” Reimer said. “I think the techniques that I’m using in my class can be applied to other classroom courses.”