Italy update and an exciting career choice

As I mentioned in my last post, this summer I had the incredible opportunity to spend five weeks in Piobbico, Italy (in the Marche region in central eastern Italy) for the Brancaleoni International Music Festival.  As school gets underway I am finally getting a moment to sit down and write out some of the most notable highlights from my adventure.

I think I have to start with the food.  I definitely learned that American food is nothing compared to genuine Italian (not American-Italian) food.  While their food is simpler than ours for sure, I came back feeling physically recharged from the cleanliness of diet I was able to maintain while there.  I learned that I do like mushrooms when they’re quality Italian mushrooms (this region is literally known for their “funghi”).  Also, Italian wine is incredible.  I hadn’t yet learned to enjoy it stateside, but there, a glass of good wine is about 2 or 3 euros (2.50-4 dollars) and at some events they’d have mid-quality wine for free (bottles here would be 20 dollars or so.)  I learned I am a definitive fan of Moscato, a desert wine I had not yet tried here but is a specialty of the area.

Socially, it was an incredibly refreshing experience.  My interactions both with the other students at the camp, with the professors at the camp, and even with the local inhabitants of the town (once I learned a touch of Italian myself) were a much-needed dose of honesty and genuineness.  Most were incredibly welcoming and unpretentious, despite the overall quality being quite high.  While I don’t know how many students from the camp I’ll be able to keep in regular correspondence with, I for the first time since arriving at Baylor have met a large number of new colleagues I genuinely hope I will get to work with more in the future.

And of course, musically it was a blast.  A large part of why I went to this particular camp was because it offered a vocal half and an instrumental half.  Since I’m planning on going into collaborative piano on the graduate level, I need to choose a specialty.  After having been at both sections, I definitely feel strongly I will be pursuing the vocal coaching/vocal collaboration track.  I enjoy chamber music and working with instrumentalists, but I felt really at home in the vocal coaching role.  In many ways, it makes a career out of some of my favorite parts of the productions in Fort Collins I’ve put on where I organize logistics, pull together a cast, and then coach that cast to create a unified concert at the end.  One of the faculty I got to work with, Howard Watkins, has been the the vocal coach at the Metropolitan Opera House for the last 20 years, and he was an amazing teacher to work with and very encouraging of my likely success in that field.

It was an incredible festival with fantastic music, gracious students, stellar teachers, and a beautiful environment.  Our lessons and classes were in a Medieval castle for goodness sake!  I am grateful to all the people who made the Brancaleoni International Music Festival possible; it was truly an incredible and transformative experience.