Classical Voice and Opera Studies

UPLOrc debut performance, 2019 UP Music Festival (School of Arts)

Stage Technique class in your living room (Classical Voice and Opera Studies)

art-based activities that suffered during the lockdown. Any opportunities to participate in such activities were highly sought after, but rare. Why rare? Re-visiting irony, it is again technology, or rather differing levels of it, that means it becomes almost impossible to do a live-broadcast jam with a live acoustic ensemble over the Internet. Latency makes this a troublesome beast. But, through browserbased network platforms that do not stream audio but rather trigger local engine-based beeps and blips, they were suddenly able to jam (live code) with anyone around the world over standard Internet with almost zero latency. Thus, on 3 December 2020, UPLOrc participated in an online international event featuring laptop orchestras from all around the world. UPLOrc were second on the programme captured here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=fd83R6gTgxY&feature=youtu.be.

Voice and Opera Studies programme are of a practical nature and require in-person teaching, either one-on-one or in small groups. Thus, the challenges that they faced when they had to move to online teaching was how to diagnose physiological and vocal aspects that needed to be addressed successfully and finding effective ways of demonstrating corrections and improvements within a constrained audio and visual environment. Critical details were inevitably lost on both sides owing to inferior sound quality.

The teaching mode for Classical Voice had to change from synchronous to asynchronous, mainly owing to Internet latency, which meant that the lecturer could not play along on the piano while the student sang, as they would not sound together. Students had to send recordings of themselves to the lecturer, who would evaluate the recording, write detailed comments and discuss these during online class, when the student could try to implement suggestions to improve elements ranging from technical to language issues. This mode of teaching resulted in twice the amount of time invested in each class by the lecturers, and the full-time lecturer had an even greater appreciation for the commitment of the parttime lecturers who assisted in the programme.

An integral aspect of preparing voice students for the workplace is Stage Technique classes, which form part of their First Instrument module (MEI). These classes culminate in an annual opera production that is staged in the Aula theatre. The lecturer who teaches these classes and also directs, designs and produces the productions, Mr Tinus Spies, found creative ways of teaching these classes online, while students could still learn from one another and have a sense of community during the classes. It was also a steep learning curve for him, as he started to research technologies and ways of creating a virtual opera, which resulted in a proposal for his doctoral studies.

The department certainly saw a measure of success through the implementation of these altered teaching modes, but this can never fully replace in-person teaching in the programme.