The eagle-eyed read­er will already have noticed that at some point since my last blog post (a mere 1,364 days ago), my web­site has under­gone some major changes.

It’s not that I haven’t had any thoughts worth shar­ing dur­ing that inter­im.  (And here, the dis­creet read­er will refrain from com­ment­ing on the “share-wor­thi­ness” of any of the posts archived here.)  It’s that, since 2020 or so, life has been… (checks notes) …pret­ty effed up.  On a glob­al lev­el, we’ve had a pan­dem­ic, an unpro­voked hos­tile inva­sion, and a geno­cide.  Nation­al­ly we’ve had a cou­ple of (may I say) hor­ri­bly antag­o­nis­tic pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, nei­ther of which seems to have had any sig­nif­i­cant effect at all on the 3,633 mass shoot­ings we’ve expe­ri­enced dur­ing those 5 years.  And the fact that start­ing work toward a sec­ond Mas­ter’s Degree at age 50-some­thing has unex­pect­ed­ly pro­vid­ed a kind of respite from the stress­es of some of the oth­er goings-on in my par­tic­u­lar sphere of life expe­ri­ence says less about the degree pro­gram than it does about my abil­i­ty to man­age stress.  (Or, you know, not.)

My writ­ing pro­fes­sor at Dick­in­son divid­ed writ­ers into two essen­tial cat­e­gories: “ekers” and “gush­ers.”  I’m an eker—it takes me a loooooong time to fill a page, but the words that do make it to the screen are there because they’ve earned it, hav­ing been select­ed and con­tex­tu­al­ized and arranged inter­nal­ly before my fin­gers even began to move on the key­board.  (“Gush­ers” are the folx who can fill a page in min­utes, gods love ’em, and then go back to edit, reor­ga­nize, and final­ize at a more leisure­ly pace.  Not that I’m jeal­ous.)  So for me, the act of writ­ing usu­al­ly requires a peri­od of intense, focused thought.  And that’s some­thing I haven’t had the lux­u­ry of expe­ri­enc­ing for a while now.

But sor­ry.  This is a post about the web­site.

The site has more of a bent toward “David as teacher” than pre­vi­ous ver­sions.  While I’ve always “been a singer” (is that the under­scor­ing to A Cho­rus Line I hear faint­ly in the back­ground?), it has­n’t been until recent years that I’ve been lucky enough to work with voice teach­ers who, beyond being teach­ers I could respect pro­fes­sion­al­ly, were teach­ers I could respect as human beings.  These are folx who approach edu­ca­tion as a col­lab­o­ra­tive event.  Folx who mod­el fal­li­bil­i­ty, imper­fec­tion, and lim­i­ta­tion as essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tics of men­tor­ship.  Folx who under­stand that my exis­tence as a singer is—has to be—very dif­fer­ent from their exis­tence as a singer.  Folx who are the kind of teacher—the kind of human—I would be proud to grow into.

I have the CCM Vocal Ped­a­gogy Insti­tute at Shenan­doah Con­ser­va­to­ry large­ly to thank.  It was there that I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet, learn from, and spend time with Ali­son Crock­ett, Ed Reis­ert, Jack­ie Zito, Jess Bald­win, Julie Dean, Kathryn Green, Mar­celle Gau­vin, Mar­ci Rosen­berg, and of course the inim­itable Matt Edwards.  These, to the one, are teach­ers who put the human­i­ty of their stu­dents first, and adapt their cur­ric­u­la to fit the stu­dent.  They under­stand that great art comes from whole humans, and that tech­nique is mean­ing­less with­out artistry and integri­ty.  They’ve made it pos­si­ble encour­aged me to grow more con­fi­dent in my own com­pe­ten­cy (and unique gift­ed­ness) as a voice teacher, and been gen­er­ous in shar­ing the tech­niques, images, and strate­gies that have served them well through their own careers.  Thanks large­ly to these folx, “voice teacher” is an iden­ti­ty I’m grow­ing quite com­fort­able with, and quite proud of.

Oops.  Sor­ry again.  Web­site.

Why the change?  Well, web­sites (like many sys­tems) don’t usu­al­ly so much change over time, as they do add new code to tweak and cor­rect and hide the effects of old code.  (I’m remind­ed of the time, ear­ly in my life as a licensed [pre-GPS] dri­ver, when I drove from Bal­ti­more to Wash­ing­ton by first dri­ving to my home in Columbia—two routes I knew well—rather than sim­ply learn­ing the “new” route that would have saved me 30 min­utes.)  So it’s impor­tant some­times to take stock of the things one wants to pre­serve, and then start from scratch with those essen­tials, let­ting the clut­ter dis­ap­pear into the past.  The site should be run­ning a lit­tle faster now, and while I’ll prob­a­bly con­tin­ue to make occa­sion­al style tweaks for a while as whims direct, it feels good to have a fresh, clean palette to work with.

Not that any of us could ben­e­fit from apply­ing that metaphor to oth­er areas of our lives.