Interview with Jeremy Fisher
Vocal Process Ltd |
- I find opera coaches totally amazing. It is fascinating to watch them work.
Very much. It is extraordinary. It is such a detailed job but I think that opera coaches in this country are not really appreciated. The level of knowledge and the level of hands-on information that you need is very high, very wide-ranging, very broad.
One of my real passions is singers - I married one! There’s something about singing which is very, very immediate because singers have words to deal with and to communicate with. The human voice has the most ability to communicate emotions. My other passion is making things work, so combining the two is great.
Training as an opera singer is very intense. You have drama, you have vocal technique and you have musicality. We went to see a show last night. The leading lady is a tremendous musical artist and from that point of view it was an amazing performance. She is also a very good actress. As comes to her vocal technique – there were things that I wanted to tweak because her technique didn’t serve what she wanted to do. She did it but I thought,” you’re not going to be able to do that very regularly”.
All she needed was three bits of technical information and it would have made life a whole lot easier. She would have had access to more colours, more range, more dynamics, and she would have been able to do much more efficiently what she wanted to do as an actress. And that’s fascinating, the whole business of marrying vocal technique, musicality and drama.
- So what is it exactly that you do?
I have trained as a singing teacher, a technique teacher and I have been a musician for over thirty years. I am quite comfortable working in different genres. I’m very happy working in opera, in Lieder, French song, English song, I also do instrumental accompanying as well as musical theatre. I started to do a little bit of pop now, which is very interesting.
Each of them has a musical style and vocal techniques. Well, the pop sound in opera wouldn’t work at all, you’ll be booed off the stage, and if you make operatic sound in a pop song, you’d also be booed off stage. That’s about what’s appropriate to musical style, what the job of the song, of the aria or of the scene is. That’s what I work from: what are you required to do by the style, what do you want to do as an actor and what’s the job of the song or the aria that you’re singing. It’s huge.
- If someone were to succeed in all three fields in one night, this would make a lot of people happy...
Mmm, very. I am a performer and I want to see a performance, so I want to believe that the singer is committed or the singer is in character. I want to follow the story line and the performance. And I’m not that bothered about whether technically it’s absolutely one hundred percent. I’d much rather go for the performance.
- You want to be taken away by the performance, don’t you?
For me, that’s the point. That’s why people come to a performance and actually that’s why performers can do what they do. It’s a very high-level skill to be able to do something that transports other people out of their usual world. The whole business of performance magic…
…if it has no magic in it, it’s not worth coming to?
Essentially, yes.
- What is your task then?
One of the things I really love is to take whatever the singer brings and say, "That’s working, that’s working, that isn’t working. You’re not coming across as doing what you tell me you want to do. Let’s find a way of making that work."
And it’s so interesting, because having been an audition pianist for a long time where at the recalls you can play the same song for 45 people in the same day, you start to notice how different the performances can be. That fascinates me.
I trained as an accompanist originally and it is one of the ways I think. I am a very peculiar mixture between an accompanist and vocal coach. I can do both. Ultimately, it is all about making the music work with the drama, with the performer, with the technique, to produce something that is special to that person. Each performer can sing the piece in their own way which doesn’t stretch the envelope of how the music works out of proportion.
When you write music down, frankly, it’s so vague! The only instructions that you are given are rhythm and pitch and, occasionally, speed. Sometimes, phrasing and sometimes dynamic markings which give you an idea of which emotion you’re doing but actually “piano” can be “soft and gentle” or “soft and fierce” or “soft and anything”, it’s just a guideline.
It is very interesting to me in a coaching session to get into the mind of the composer to say why it is a quaver and not a crochet. Even if we don’t know, let’s find the reason. Make a decision and see if it works.
- You mean a good composer, don’t you? How about those who didn’t really know how to write for the voice?
I think that’s when the real skill comes to it. If you can’t find the reason, make one up!
You’re right, sometimes it really isn’t obvious. Nevertheless, when anyone has spent time writing a piece like an opera, it’s very rare that it’s a one-off and it’s very rare that you just write it down and leave it. The composer and the librettist would have spent some time thinking why. Some do it better than others.
But it is about decision making for me. You have to make decisions. If you feel the quality of the work, either in the words or in the music, isn’t very strong, you have to make choices. We are going to heighten this emotion, to choose this phrase to heighten it. You make something of it.
And that’s what artists do. They can take second-rate material and make it first-rate. They can’t make it a first-rate material but they can make it a first-rate performance.
- How do composers differ?
Some composers give you a lot of instructions and you just follow them. The interesting thing about Puccini is translating the instructions. What exactly does he mean? My favourite piece to work on from that point of view is Musetta’s Waltz Song.
People think it’s a lovely song. And often when they come to work with me, they sing in the way they think it goes. Well, it doesn’t go like this. Let’s just look at the instructions. Every bar has an instruction with it somewhere.
I work so often on this particular aria. It’s a standard showpiece, so it’s very famous. Often people think they know it, so they don’t read the instructions. He says, “rallentando” at a very particular point, he says, “a tempo” at a very particular point, and then he says, ”ritardando”, and then he says, “ritenuto”, and they all mean different things. It is fascinating.
It is a miniature work of art in terms of musical instruction because everything is there. And when you actually sing every instruction, the whole piece just slots into place. And when you don’t sing every instruction, you start pushing the boundaries of the piece too far - and sometimes it just doesn’t work. Then you have to work very, very hard to make it work musically.
Puccini's instructions are so specific. Five types of “slow-down” and you’ve got to know which one’s which. One is a gradual slow-down, one is a sing-slower-from-this-point, one is a start-getting-slower-and keep-getting-slower, one is a start-getting-slower-and-get-to slower-speed-and-then-hold-it…
- Does any other composer do things like Puccini? A modern one perhaps?
I think it’s when you start getting into the twentieth century composers, like Berg, it becomes very interesting because Berg gives various instructions that you have to translate for the voice. First you have to understand the style of music with all your musicianship and then you have to find how it would work vocally. One of them is the difference between Sprechstimme and Sprechgesang.
The coach has to help people understand why some things happen. When you understand why things work, why he’s chosen to write a duplet in nine eight suddenly changing the rhythm, first of all it is much easier to memorise and secondly as a performer you feel much more confident in what you’re doing and therefore you are going to sing better. You are behind what you’re doing.
Sometimes you can tell that somewhere in the middle of a scene the performers don’t know why they’re doing something. You can hear it in their voices. They back off slightly. They stop being behind what they’re doing. They leave the performance and then they step back in when they know what they’re doing again.
- What do you mean by committing to a performance?
When the singer is really on form. Most of the time people say “on form”, they think vocally. It’s not! It’s about commitment, knowledge and background. Knowing what you’re doing, making your decisions and committing to that particular performance. That’s what I do: helping people to commit to their performances.
To commit to a performance doesn’t mean to have to feel things very strongly and expect that they will communicate themselves and the audience will understand the character.
When the feeling does come in to it is in the rehearsal. If you’re playing someone who is angry, be angry in rehearsal and notice what the physical signs are: do you clench your fists, do your shoulders raise, do your eyebrows go up, do you stand very still or do you pace up and down, what does your voice sound like, what are the things that you do when you are angry?
What you then do in performance, you reproduce the physical signs but you don’t do the emotion and you are totally in control of it.
People say that it is cheating because it is not feeling it. That’s right, you are not feeling it but you are showing it. If you want to leak emotion into it, that’s fine. But you’re doing it from a controlled point of view. You are still demonstrating the physical signs of it and they are your physical signs. But you’re not actually getting angry and for me that’s more efficient. It works far better. If you get emotional, you risk loosing control of your vocal capacity.
That’s why you’re singing an opera and not acting in a drama. You can get away with it acting in a drama because you are not sustaining sound. If anything, the difference between singing and speaking is sustaining sound almost always at a higher pitch than the one you speak. Almost always we speak at the bottom quarter of our vocal range. There is no operatic role that sits entirely where my speaking voice lies. You are always singing above your speaking range.
- What singers do you listen to with pleasure and satisfaction?
Callas. No question. If she makes ugly sounds, I don’t care. Every utterance that she made had a reason. She knew exactly why she was making those sounds and saying those words. One of the things I might suggest to a singer is to listen to Callas for her understanding of the character and you know every second of the way what emotion she’s going through. As she is very musical as well, when she decides to pull a phrase apart, you know that she’s thought it through. You know that she’s decided to do it for a particular reason and you can work out the reason from the way that she sings.
Bryn Terfel has the same standard of musicality and he is not afraid to change the sound that he makes, to experiment. He marries drama and music extremely well. His Falstaff was fantastic. Annick Massis in Comte d’Ory was fabulous. Not only vocally but also in the sense of fun. Diana Montague who is such an intelligent singer. Ann Murray was amazing in Ariodante.
- So you don’t believe in intuitional singers?
I wouldn’t go that far. What an intuitional singer has is gut ability, communication on the gut level. That’s a very special thing. It then depends what they do with it. As a communication tool that’s tremendous.
- When you’re not dealing with music, what do you do?
The voice training company I run with my wife actually takes quite a lot of time. It started as a hobby and it’s ended as a website. I have never hit such levels of screaming frustration as putting that website together. I’ve read about all the technical things but never actually experienced them before. I spend hours on the net clicking things, “oh, where does that lead?” Love it. Really love it. Love the downloads.
I love going to places on water. That’s a real relaxation to be near water. I’ve recently discovered that during our visit to Stockholm.
Then, I like good shops. I’m a shopper. It’s quite unusual in a man, but I’m a shopper. And good food. Have you ever met a musician or a singer who doesn’t like food? I do a lot of touring and I remember all the venues by what we were given to eat. Not by that church or by that stage but by that beef casserole with dumplings. I specialise in desserts, cakes and pies myself. Although my pastry is not brilliant, my cakes are very good.
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