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///A thread on what classical music can learn from the outpouring of music sharing that is happening right now.
1. Seeing all the videos of singing lately - from classical musicians who don’t usually share videos, to people on balconies, to doctors and nurses singing for patients – makes me so exquisitely happy.
2. Singing is the perfect shared human experience. It gives singer and listener physical pleasure and happy brain chemicals. It transcends time & space - meaning, it lifts you out of the scary shit for a minute.
3. I used to teach a summer course at UCLA when I was in grad school – intro to voice for non-music majors. It was masterclass style, so everyone had to sing for the class every week and there was a recital at the end.
4. I’m telling you, it’s probably my favorite job I’ve ever had in my life – pulling sound out of engineering majors and the like. Showing them how to make NOISE. ARTFUL NOISE. Communicative noise 
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5. Students would sometimes get up the first class and move their mouths without even making audible sound. And by the final they were singing to the back of the theater. Alone.
6. It makes me so sad when people don’t sing because they don’t like their voices. I don’t care what the quality of your voice is - no one should be robbed of the physical and emotional experience of song.
7. And as this horrible pandemic is showing us every night on the news - human beings LOVE SINGING. It comforts us! It entertains us! It soothes us and makes us feel deeply!
8. Furthermore, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my industry should be sharing more music as a constant enrichment, outreach, and marketing practice. Not cynical marketing – smart marketing that makes the amazing shit we do accessible.
9. Not programming more events - not creating streamed productions people can go buy tickets to in theaters – sharing more music to be proliferated across the world online. For free. Easy. Accessible. Discoverable without investment.
10. That is how we become relevant. How we become something people need and will fight for.
11. Passionate love for what we do is what will translate into the funding that will sustain it. Not shaking them down at the door before we let them in.
12. Tickets to see Beyoncé on tour these days are much more expensive than your average opera ticket. So you think she gained her following by not allowing her audience to see what she does until they pay their $500?????
13. No!!! She shares easily accessible, wildly creative, special music constantly. And then people clamor to see her deliver it in person.
14. The anti-music-paywall thread by @nonstandardrep has had me thinking along these lines – we should always be sharing *more* music. Making it *more* accessible. That’s how you get people to fall in love with your art – by letting them experiencing it.
15. I’ve said this over & over again – until the opera world solves the problem of not sharing videos from live productions as they happen (because of union orchestra contracts & other things) – we will not build our audiences at the same rate as every other form of entertainment
16. We have to figure this out. We have to make sure musicians are adequately compensated but we HAVE to share the music we make or we are going to turn to dust.
17. Why should people TRUST US that it’s good before they come? Why should we set up every single thing in our industry as transactional? Why on earth would we hoard the art that we make?
K that’s it don’t yell at me, let’s just figure this out. Thx bye.
