Cultures

This week's attachment is designed to point you towards a wider reading path and to also provoke your curiosity about the different mind-sets that other cultural backgrounds produce. We are often asked to play people of different cultures and we should research a little about those cultures if we are to play them well. Aida deals with a basic non western culture which has deep roots in Africa not in the Mediteranian. Lakme deals with a culture clash between East and West. Madama Butterfly is the meeting of two cultures and the inability of the Westerner to appreciate the Japanese customs or sensitivities. Sure, there are vast chasms between the peoples of the Western World but the chasm is even greater between the Western World and the non-Western World. The Polynesian moves with ease between the mystic past and the present real world. The Australian Aborigine, even though he has drifted to the cities, still has a great affinity for the "Great Dream Time." He still has difficulty in the concept of personal ownership. Everything is to be shared by the tribe. The Westerner is blunt to a point of rudeness. Either something is true or it is false and he doesn't hesitate to say "you lie." He still does not understand the importance of "Face". In some cultures, the lie is a protective shield placed over the unpleasantness of a difficult truth. It can be likened, in some degree, to a Westerner's 'secret." Any psychologist will tell you that to rob a person of his secrets is to rob that person of his self-respect. Butterfly, for instance, cannot survive, once she has lost face. She can no longer shield the unpleasantness of the truth either from herself, her child, her family or her servant Suzuki. Perhaps the greatest blow of all is that she has lost face not just among her peers but also among all social strata of Japanese. To play Butterfly well, and remember Puccini kept company with a Japanese woman for a good six months while he was working on Butterfly, it is necessary to understand the concept of "Face" which plays such a large role in society throughout Asia. That is why you hear the theme of the knife denoting "sepuku " (self inflicted death) when Butterfly's father is first mentioned and again when she decides, herself, to make the final sacrifice.

If you read the chapters on Chaliapin, you will realize that, like all great artists, he read a great deal. He had unbounded imagination but that imagination was fed by his reading. Gigli was also extremely well-read and it shows in such a simple expression as:

"You see, the passing from one vowel to the next is made above all MENTALLY, and without any direct, willed physical effort in this sense. I do not dwell on the physical, but primarily on the mental shaping and on the gliding-merging of vowel to vowel internally. When the thinking is correctly based, the physical part reacts and adjusts itself accordingly, with equal accuracy. My singing I create in my mind first of all. It must be so. After all, everything in this world is a product of thought, human and devine; everything made by man is the result of thought, a mental concept. And SHAPE plays a highly important part."

That latter phrase is made by a man who was always mentally prepared to sing because he spent such a lot of time in mental preparation. He never worried about the physical aspects of singing. He concerned himself only with the overall picture his singing should convey. That's the secret of communication. We have to give shape and texture to our words or we fail to communicate the picture.