Throughout this semester of creative workshop, we have been experimenting with different styles that we can interpret Habanera from the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet. We also rearranged the order of the verses slightly and took out on of the repeats of the melody, as well as adding in a part of the overture to the beginning. I sang most of it as written, and added the “L’amore” part from the aria over the top of the overture in the introduction. I enjoyed this rehearsal process a lot, although it did feel quite unfamiliar. I liked how we managed to change it enough to adapt it to the instruments that we had (voice, guitar, drums and trumpet) by experimenting with different musical genres, and we eventually settled on a Latin kind of feel.

At the start of the semester however, and for the first half of the year as well, I found this lesson quite stressful as it. Took me a long time to get used to it. I have never done anything similar before, and I also found it strange working with people who were not classical musicians as we seemed to have very different understandings of many things. This made me feel quite out of place as the rehearsals were definitely a lot more focused towards modern genres of music, and it took me until the last month or so to figure out how to properly integrate myself and my skill set into the way the lessons are run. I also started this subject playing oboe instead of singing, because my confidence in my singing abilities has grown a lot this year from my other classes but was not very good at the start, so the idea of singing in these classes at first made me very anxious. I found that playing oboe made me stressed as well though because of the fact most of the time I just had to improvise which is not something I have done before, but throughout the second semester especially I started to get more comfortable with this, and find ways to make it easier such as writing out little sections of melody and experimenting both around it and also finding different ways we could share it between me on oboe and my class mate on trumpet. Once we started working on Habanera however, I felt a lot more comfortable as I had a score and a structure I could refer to and build around instead of starting from nothing or just a chord sequence like before.

Another thing that I struggled with was not having a conductor. I found this hard as I had to rely on myself and my own decisions, for example when choosing when to come in and when to change from melody to accompaniment. This made me nervous as I am so used to playing in big orchestras and being shouted at if I come in in the wrong place, so I had to keep reminding myself that nothing in this scenario is wrong and that we are just experimenting, so overall this has been useful for my attitude towards music and helped me become less of a strict perfectionist and, especially when we started the Carmen section, enjoy the activity of singing instead of just trying to improve.

I also found it very interesting to see a different type of rehearsal structure to what I have been involved in before, and although I definitely only want to do classical opera and mostly enjoy the very traditional productions and I love the strict structure of classical music, I like getting to see other ways people work within the music world and I love how varied the music industry is.

Once we decided to work on a piece with vocals, we discussed different ways we could work with this. We came up with a variety of ideas such as recording vocals and laying them on top of each other, but eventually settled on taking a classical piece of well known music and making a new interpretation of it, which lead us to choosing Habanera. I think this was a good plan as although I try very hard to make sure opera is kept alive, I do appreciate that it is not for everyone so making new interpretations of pieces is a great way to get more people involved. Once we had decided on the piece, we then spent the next few weeks rehearsing it and finding different genres that it could fit into. One difficulty I encountered was trying to find words to explain what I mean when it comes to theory, and this is something that I noticed I find difficult in college. For example, it took me a long time to be able to explain what a fermata is to one of the musicians who was not trained classically, so this is something I will work on. We also experimented with different effects on microphones, different mutes for the trumpet, different pedals for the guitar and different types of drumsticks.

Overall, I would say that the main take away from this class was definitely that I have improved my attitude towards music, and allowed become less scared of getting things “wrong.” I have also realised that it it’s important to sing things for fun every so often instead of just practicing technique and my repertoire exclusively to improve. I’ve also got better at voicing my ideas, as at the start of the year I was quite worried about contributing to creative sessions and just kept my ideas to myself, and by the end of the year I made sure I shared my ideas with the rest of the group so we could experiment with different interpretations, which was especially useful because of how varied everyone’s experiences with music were.

Going forward from this class, I will aim to maintain the attitude of experimenting and having fun with practice, and I will also aim to work on being more confident in my abilities and being more open to different settings, genres and interpretations.