Crutchfield Muses on Mastery

Working with someone who was hailed as a successful music critic despite being The New York Times’ youngest in the mid-1980s could be a rather daunting challenge. This is especially true of William Crutchfield, who has achieved a stellar record of accolades and esteemed positions, including director of opera for the Caramoor International Music Festival and faculty member at all three of the famous New York conservatories—Juilliard, Manhattan, and Mannes. Not only is Crutchfield a world-renowned American opera conductor, but he is also an author of an immense amount of scholarly work on performance in Italian opera. Yet this past Friday his gentle yet confident voice commanded presence and created a comfortable environment during the master class he taught for Harvard undergraduates as part of the Office for the Arts’ Learning from Performers series.

Crutchfield’s extensive repertoire of technical musical and vocal knowledge was fluently displayed as he inspired students to push the boundaries of their own vocal abilities. Sofia M. Selowsky ’12 said she found the class both enriching and enlightening due to his extensive knowledge of bel canto, a style of opera that focuses on the power of the human voice to tell melodramatic stories. “He knows Italian opera so well and focuses on performance practice, so it’s great if you have a question about an ornament or [want to ask] ‘Should I do this here?’ or ‘Can I sing this note here?’” she said. “He will be able to answer. Whereas some people just say what they think without really having the academic research to support it, you really know he is right.”

While Crutchfield joked throughout the various performances that he was there to torture the participants, his comments reflected the rigorous manner in which he relentlessly pursues excellence. His meticulous sensitivity to qualities such as timbre, vocalized consonants in Italian words, and breathing patterns spoke to his prowess as a true maestro and emphasized the underlying idea of the piece. “Whatever your idea is—whether it is sad or angry, intimate or public—all of [the ideas] have an intensity in common because of the sheer requirement that [opera] must be heard from a distance,” said Crutchfield. “There is a total range of sounds that the human voice can make, and then there is a subset of sounds that are resonant and can be heard at a distance. The entire artistry of opera has to happen within that subset, not the whole range.” In fact, as the students sang their pieces, he often stopped them at certain points to repeat verses and shared inventive practice techniques such as biting one’s finger to ensure proper shaping of the mouth or imagining having a potbelly to ensure serenity and depth of breath.

In a discussion after the performance, Crutchfield further explained what he intends to achieve in master classes. “What we try to do is get a few simple results very quickly so that the participants can take away something useful that maybe later they can develop in their own time ... and integrate it into a more organic process and achieve it on a more long-term basis.” This artistry distinguishes opera singers from mainstream pop singers, Crutchfield says. “A mainstream pop singer has a microphone and so the physical development of the voice is not really so important and may not be important at all ... There is no need to make the voice resonant and that’s a pretty profound difference. It’s not just a matter of louder versus softer, it also leads to different kinds of color or timbral qualities in the voice.”

Crutchfield’s acute analysis was not unnoticed by the participants. “It is always interesting to hear what he says because he has such fantastic insight,” said Stewart N. Kramer ’12. Kramer further commented that the experience of the class is not only based on one’s individual performance, but also on watching the other participants and learning from them. “What I get the most out of the class,” he explains, “is watching how [Crutchfield] works with other people, how he thinks they can improve and learn from [others].” In an intimate setting of around 30 people, Crutchfield was able to give singers these attentive suggestions while sharing his love for opera.

While opera may be distant to modern performers, Crutchfield said, it is still a worthwhile endeavor. “Even though opera is not really an art form of our time, the people who wrote [operas] created a body of masterworks that, for its own qualities, demands to be kept alive,” he said. “This creates a necessity to train and develop the kind of singers and actors who can do that.” And so on Friday Crutchfield gave Harvard students a slightly better sense of technique that will equip them to preserve the genre in the future.