Singing and Teaching Early Music

VOICEOVER
Welcome to Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities, and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia.  Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimelb.edu.au.  That’s upclose.u-n-i-m-e-l-b.edu.au.

JACKY ANGUS
Hello and welcome to Up Close at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  I’m Jacky Angus.  Today’s Up Close features the life and work of Vivien Hamilton, one of Australia’s leading sopranos who teaches voice at the Faculty of Music here at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  Ms Hamilton’s expertise ranges across a wide area of music, from Monteverdi to Mozart to Vaughn Williams.  It includes lieder, art song, folk and opera.  She has a special interest in the early Italian, French and early English repertoire, and is well-known for her work in this area, as reflected in her successful performances and published discs.  As a teacher, Ms Hamilton is the director of Early Voices, the vocal ensemble, a special performance group at the Early Music Studio of the university.  This trains students to perform period music in a particular historical style, and where possible with original instruments.  Welcome to Up Close, Ms Hamilton.  

VIVIEN HAMILTON
Hello and thank you for inviting me on your show.

JACKY ANGUS
I understand that you specialise in teaching students – music students, that is – not only how to perform in the style, but also how to have the gestures and the theatre and the sense of that period.  Is that part of it; is that part of the theatre of the day?

VIVIEN HAMILTON
The theatre of the day would have been visually very splendid.  The gesture is very declaimed and very pointed and very stylised.  A lot of Baroque gesture is based on nature, on what we do naturally, but it is thrown into wild abandon at times and also given an absolute deliberate point.  I was most fortunate that at Flinders University, Professor Dean Barnett, who is the world authority on the art of the Baroque gesture, spent a good solid couple of weeks with me, training me to sing some early French cantata, and Lamento d’Arianna by Monteverdi, with gesture.  It was a very interesting period in time because you had to learn to vocally sing the ancient Italian correctly, with correct stress and awareness of stress and pacing, according to the rhetoric and the passions within the text, and at the same time to match that like a real Olympic gymnast, or Classical ballet dancer, with hands waving all over the place and pointing at a particular gesture.  It was fabulously interesting because it informed the sound of the vocal performance by actually using gesture.  In the end, what it brought out was much, much more colour – sophisticated, nuanced colour – than I think I would have been capable of doing at the beginning of the process.  That certainly has informed, as a vocalist, how I approach singing early music.  The thing about early music is that it is very important to understand the text.  It is very, very important that the listener can hear the text.  It is very important in this stylised, mannered art form that you can hear the nuances of colour that you would hear if you were having an excited conversation in everyday, like we are now.  

JACKY ANGUS
In a sense you live the part, don’t you?  What attracted you to this?  Was it your personality?  You’re obviously in your element here with this sort of theatrical type of music?

VIVIEN HAMILTON
I was very blessed to have been born to a mother who was an amateur actress – a woman of strong Scottish fortitude, and a woman who never allowed me to be shy and retiring.  Contrary to popular opinion, I am naturally quite a shy person, and I certainly was as a child.  My mother said oh no, this is not good enough for my daughter.  She was used to strutting the stage and being the centre of attention.  She trained me to be like that.  I think I had a cheerful disposition.  I think I was allowed, as a child, to have space and time to think into my own self.  If I was sitting by my bookshelf, my mother used to leave me there.  She would not interfere.  She would allow me my own world and my own dream world.  It’s through having that dream world, and saying you are the mistress of your own thoughts and your own passions. that I developed a more extroverted persona.

JACKY ANGUS
Well then you went and studied with another Scots-sounding person, Molly McGurk.  Where did that lead?  

VIVIEN HAMILTON
Molly was at the University of Western Australia.  She is a very famous Australian soprano.  In fact, she influenced me in many, many ways.  She had a particular love of French art song, which she has passed on to me.  She got me to sing such difficult stuff – Ariettes oubliées by Debussy when I was very young.  Singing lessons were just a total joy; a total joy of musicianship and fun and expression.  I then had lessons with David Mason and Jane Manning in London.  In the first few months that I was there, I decided to test the waters.  So I wrote off very bravely to a variety of different institutions saying would you like to hear me sing, I would like to have some singing work.  Of course, I was ridiculously young at the time, but funnily enough I did.  I got a contract, and therefore my British Actors Equity Card with New Saddlers Wells Opera as a chorus girl.  That was fantastic.  I worked in a production with Sarah Brightman.

JACKY ANGUS
Was that your entry into the big world?

VIVIEN HAMILTON
Well it was.  I actually was also one of the cancan dancers because I was trained as a ballet dancer and gymnast as a child as well, so I was fairly flexible then.  So that moved on into work with Kent Opera as well.  I got a lot of stage experience.  English Baroque Opera, where I sang some Rameau and Bach.  Also, then work with the Hilliard Ensemble.  At the time I was in London, they were attempting to expand their ensemble.  They formed a group called the Western Wind.  It was a group of people that they had come across in their teaching travels, and I was one of those.  I had attended one of their summer schools.  They embarked on a contemporary music project at that stage with the composer Arvo Part.  I was actually most fortunate that at that young age I got involved, right from the handwritten manuscript stage, in the learning, recording and creating of Passio, which is one of Arvo Part’s primary and most famous choral and instrumental works.  

JACKY ANGUS
You learnt the piano too, of course, and you accompany your students now on the piano.

VIVIEN HAMILTON
I absolutely adore playing the piano.  You feel slightly different playing the piano than you do singing.  You still are in touch with your inner world and expressivity and melodiousness, but you get an access to harmony, you get an access to colour and timbre.  I love the concept of feeling timbre in the voice.  Singing is not just about singing the melody.  I’ve got off the point slightly.  I do accompany my students and I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction and insight actually into the workings of a composer’s mind by doing that.  One of the things that I feel very, very strongly as a teacher of singing is that one size does not fit all.  We have some voices that turn up at the university that are so big and so large that you think well the only place they can go is in fact on the operatic stage because their personalities, their voice, suits the large, harmonic sound world of the orchestra.  Whereas there are also a lot of very interesting young students who have got gorgeous voices, but they’ll never be opera stars.  Where do they go?  The wonderful thing about the Early Music Studio and the Faculty of Music at the University of Melbourne here in Australia is that we actually have those two streams.  We have a very happy department where both the opera and the early music school work together to support the students so that they get a lot of exposure to a variety of different styles, so that therefore they can inform themselves and make decisions for themselves.  In the end, every student is master or mistress of their own destiny.  When I teach, I’m very aware that when I’m teaching in the Early Music Studio that the students need to understand that they need to listen: they need to react to the colours of the instruments that they have, and the timbres, so that they work with other instruments and within the colour of the sound world that they’re working in.  Whereas if they then go and study art song, then their ears have to listen again.  When you’re singing with the piano, the piano has steel strings; it doesn’t have the gut strings of the lovely, old historical instruments, so there’s a different vibration scientifically and there are different resonances.  So you feed into that.  So my teaching is very much situation-based.  If a musical style demands clarity and purity, we will aim for that.  If it demands greater warmth and greater depth, we will work to that.  For me, the most important thing is that you’ve got to be as a musician – not just a singer, you have to be a musician where you have to listen, you have to have imagination, you have to have flexibility, and that all melds together.  So that means that hopefully when the singer, the young student, goes out into the big world, they are able to adapt to changing circumstances.  Because if there’s one thing I can tell you, life always changes and it’s exactly the self-same thing for a music student.

JACKY ANGUS
You’re listening to Vivien Hamilton talking with me, Jacky Angus, on Up Close at the University of Melbourne Australia.  Well now Vivien, I would like to turn to your current project, which I know is close to your heart, on Rabbie Burns.  Of course, Rabbie Burns was an 18th century poet, a long time ago, who is famous for his love poetry, and obviously influenced Scottish heritage.  Am I right?

VIVIEN HAMILTON
Absolutely.  He has not only influenced Scottish heritage, but he has inflamed the fire of a number of people across the world.  Remember the Scots; the greatest product that Scotland has ever produced is their brains.

JACKY ANGUS
And whisky and poetry.

VIVIEN HAMILTON
And whisky and poetry, but why I’m bringing that way is that the Scots have always migrated.  I am part of the Scottish diaspora, so I went out on a search.  I searched for Robert Burns and his music and his poetry, and then how that potentially migrated with the migrants who left Scotland to the far-flung regions of the world.  I discovered some fabulous music.

JACKY ANGUS
How did that affect the music in these different parts of the world?  How did the Burns heritage impact on music across the diaspora, obviously in many, many different ways?

VIVIEN HAMILTON
Well, primarily Robert Burns was a poet.  He didn’t actually write the melody.  He made his words fit to existing Scottish melodies.  The character of the Scots, if you have a song which still has the original melody, you still had the Scottish flair there.  But what a number of composers have done is they have taken the medium of the accompaniment to those melodies and infused their own musical language and style upon something that was actually created three hundred or so years ago.  That’s one form of the migration of music.  Another form is that the poetry, and the sentimentality of the poetry, infused a reaction so strong that composers were forced or compelled to write in their own style; tried to understand what the elements of that Scottish passion were, and the human passion, and then put it into their own language.  So you have composers like Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, Adolph Jenssen from the German side of things.  You have the great American art songwriter Amy Beach.  So you’ve got an American art song style using the words of Burns.  You’ve even got a Swedish song by Hugo Alfen which is very not Scottish, but there is a character there which embodies the lyrical passion of the words.  

JACKY ANGUS
Apart from being a great lover, and well-known for the admiration in which he was held by the ladies of Scotland, he always struck me as representing the modernity of Scotland and the common sense – a man’s a man for all that.  Can you tell us a bit more about what Rabbie Burns meant in context, and also how that gets into music as well?

VIVIEN HAMILTON
I think the really interesting thing about Robert Burns is that he was an individualist.  He was a man of the people.  I have visited Mauchline, where he wrote a lot of his famous poetry.  It’s a tiny wee room.  He was impoverished.  He was a hypochondriac.  He had lots of children.  He was just determined to break through the boundaries.  You know, why should I be limited in the way that I live just because society demands it?  His poetry is all about breaking down the mores of a restrictive society.  Of course, we had the Highland Clearances in the years before he was born.  It was all about the art of common sense: this sense of going from the collective idea, where everybody believes what their master tells them, to the rise of the cult of the individual.  He was very much someone who was at that stage in the development of society.  We, in Western society, take our rights as individuals for granted, but in those days that was not the case.  He was very much dependent upon patronage.  What is absolutely fascinating is that when he was involved in trying to create the Scots Musical Museum, which he did in partnership with the publisher James Johnson in the late 1780s and 1790s, that project was like any arts project that we have today: you start off with an idea, you work your butt off and you get it together, and you see if people like it.  It was originally that that project was meant to be a one volume pocketbook of music and poetry, fitted together so that you could put it in your back pocket and take your Scottish songs wherever you went.  Well, the public prescription was so strong that it ended up being a six volume set.  

JACKY ANGUS
That’s wonderful.  What about your project on Rabbie Burns?  What is it you’re actually doing with the inspiration of his poetry on music?

VIVIEN HAMILTON
Well, I am a singer, so my passion is that I would like to share my voice through the melodies and the music and the poetry of Robert Burns.  So this CD is going to be a very personal and yet wide-ranging selection of music by a variety of different composers from around the globe.  There will be some German lieder.  There will be some French art song.  There will be some Scottish composers’ attempts to infuse a more modern language underneath the Celtic melodies.  You’ve got more operatic-like arrangements by the English composer Benjamin Britten.  I’ve got a charming little Victorian parlour song on My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose by the Australian female pianist composer of the early 20th century, Esther Kahn, which is quite charming.  So the CD is aiming to actually bring to an audience an enjoyable mix of recognisable Scottishness with colours of culture and musical style perhaps infused by a later generation of musicians, and certainly a more foreign generation.  So there will be a mixture of the new and the old.

JACKY ANGUS
Well Vivien, we would love to hear you sing.  What would you like to sing for us?  And tell us a bit about it too.

VIVIEN HAMILTON
I fell in love with this melody from the Scots Musical Museum.  It’s called Willie's Rare and Willie's Fair.  It’s a very ancient melody.  The melody, of course, is not by Burns, but he certainly collated it and fitted the words together with it.  It speaks of the highlands and the lochs and the birds and the heather.  That’s all I can say really.
[Performance of Willie's Rare and Willie's Fair]
The next song I would love to sing is one of my favourites, and it’s by the wonderful Henry Purcell, who actually lived from 1659 to 1696, which is exactly 100 years before Robert Burns.  It’s amazing.  It’s called If Music Be the Food of Love.  It’s based on a text which comes from Shakespeare.
[Performance of If Music Be the Food of Love]

JACKY ANGUS
Thank you very much Vivien Hamilton.

VIVIEN HAMILTON
Thank you very much Jacky.  It has been a pleasure.

JACKY ANGUS
More information on this episode, including a full transcript and related links, can be found at our website at upclose.unimelb.edu.au.  We invite you to leave your comments on this or any other episode of Up Close.  To do this, just click on the add comments link at the bottom of the screen.  Up Close is brought to you by the Marketing and Communications Division, in association with Asia Institute, at the University of Melbourne Australia.  Up Close is created and produced by Eric van Bemmel and Kelvin Param.  Audio engineering by Craig McArthur. Theme music performed by Sergio Ercole.  This is Jacky Angus thanking you for joining us on Up Close.  Until next time, cheerio.

VOICEOVER
You’ve been listening to Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia.  Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimelb.edu.au.  That’s upclose.u-n-i-m-e-l-b.edu.au.  Copyright 2009 University of Melbourne.