Stephanie M. Neumann 00:00
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists, sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Stephanie M. Neumann, co-producer and audio engineer of For Good Measure, filling in as host for this episode. We continue today interviewing artistic executive director of Ensemble for These Times and For Good Measure host and producer, Nanette McGuinness [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]. Another project that E4TT has taken on, this podcast For Good Measure is another exciting project for E4TT that follows this mission. As producer and host of this podcast, would you talk about how this project came to be? What can our listeners expect in the future?
Nanette McGuinness 00:59
You know, like everything, I think there's, I have a convoluted way that I start projects, I guess I start something and it's successful and then I grow it, I think. And I forgot to say when I was talking about the women composers, partly because of the people I was working with, my very first recording, not with E4TT, was Fabulous Femmes, was of music by 19th to 20th century women composers. And as I said, I can really thank my collaborator, Sylvie Beaudette, for planting that idea. But in any case, back to the podcast, during the pandemic, early early on, so when things were really still and people were still figuring out what to do and how to survive. Starting in March or April 2020, we wanted to bring music to folks in quarantine, because there was a real dearth of that. So there was one concert we had to cancel, it was early on and there were too many forces to be safe. So instead we did an online gala, we took all our content that was already on SoundCloud, and some of it just recorded and some on YouTube, and I made sure it was all uploaded. And then we started a thing on social media called Concert Hall at Home. And everyday, we uploaded one or two clips from our archives, which was I think about 100 or 120 pieces. You remember, you were part of this. And I think it ran from March until May. And then after that we did the gala, which was... which was an amazing achievement for the group, I really have to give kudos to you and Brennan and Chelsea, the staff that we had then putting it together. Because we didn't have the tools and everything that we all have now, and the year or two of pandemic experience, so it was quite the thing. But you guys did a great job. So we had all that. And then we put together a summer series where we did, again using archived content, a 30 minute program on a theme. And as we were thinking with that, and how else to serve composers and musicians and audiences stuck at home without fresh music, we started an interview series, very short, meet the artist, which we did on YouTube. And we did 4,5,6, something like that, and then we grew it, and we started to do more of that. Because it was really successful, and people really appreciated it. And then, gosh at that point we had a number of composers and I was able to get support through the California Arts Council. So we added a season of California BIPOC women composers, which is very relevant to us. Before then we had been focusing on BIPOC and women composers. And as part of that support, we were able to take the YouTube interviews and turn them into a podcast. And since then, that's that's been what we've been doing. We're so grateful to the California Arts Council, which is supporting our next season that's coming out as well. We do have exciting plans for where it's going, we've got a collaboration with Luna Composition Lab alums, so these are emerging women and nonbinary composers. We did that this past January and we'll be doing it again next January, it's a two year collaboration, and we're going to do a mini series with the composers we chose from that. We also have the new season coming out. That's going to come out, I think you were saying in June, right Stephanie?
Stephanie M. Neumann 05:02
I think so, that that's where it's landing.
Nanette McGuinness 05:05
Right, and that's with six new composers that we've interviewed, California BIPOC women composers. And you all who are listening, if you're appreciating this, we could use your help. Sign up, support the podcast, we've got a little button that you can hit to support us. So we'd be really grateful for that.
Stephanie M. Neumann 05:28
We would. You have studied multiple languages throughout your life, as well as published a large amount of translated literature. What makes you interested in languages? And how many, which do you speak? And how do you get into translating? How did you? Yeah.
Nanette McGuinness 05:51
Yeah. Well speak, you know, some of them, I speak better than others, but that's... so I've written all my life. In addition, in addition to being a singer, musicology, which is what I got my doctorate in, is essentially doing research and writing about music, or music history, usually. So during an extended period of health issues, when it was harder for me to perform, I found myself drawn to writing for children, because I'd never lost my love of KidLit. And I also found myself drawn to book translation. So I started playing around with that. And the path to entry wasn't that apparent for doing literary translation, and I'll come back to this in a minute. I did some commercial translation, and I continued to write, and my health was restored, you know, I got better. And lo and behold, some seven years later I think it was, I'm happily singing along and doing some writing and translating, and so forth. And I bumped into a publisher who's looking for a translator, so at that point, the rest is history. I would say also, a few things. I've always been interested in languages, much as I've been interested in music. So one of my life goals from high school was to learn 10 or 12 languages. In a way I've done that, although some of them I could have learned better than others. But when I went to college, and I was undeclared, and hadn't yet decided on music, languages or linguistics were certainly in the mix of what I was contemplating, as well as math, or science or whatever. The other thing that interested me in terms of doing translation was, you have to plan as a soprano. We have a limited shelf life, there is an expiration date on a soprano when she starts singing. And I've been very lucky, my career has gone a lot longer than most, and I credit my teacher for that, for a lot of it. And that I've also been very careful on the roles I pick, or that I accept, you know, my agent, at one point wanted me to audition for Tosca, and my agent in from Milan. And I turned him down, I said that's, that's not right for me, you know, so I've been kind of canny about what I've taken on, but in the meantime, singers need to look beyond their career as a singer. You know, you go into stage managing, or you go into running a group, or you go into teaching. And some of those interested me, but I kind of have this inability to just do one thing, although I adore music and my life without it, I can't imagine. And so I was thinking, if I can't do singing, what would I want to do? Where would I want to segue my career? And so that's what I was thinking of. And then lo and behold, it, it took off, and I got healthy again, and the singing continued at that point, so that was really great. How you get into translation, you asked me that?
Stephanie M. Neumann 09:20
Yeah, how did you get into it?
Nanette McGuinness 09:22
Yes, so I started doing just kind of commercial translation, and kind of looking around and as I say, I bumped into a publisher. And since then, publishers have asked me to translate. My note, the traditional path for becoming a translator is you get a degree, or you're in academia teaching a specific language. And you write, you find an amazing author in your original language, your source language, and you try and write grants and get a publisher to take it on. But that wasn't my path. Mine was sideways. But it has worked for me and since then, people have been sending me books, sometimes agents and publishers they would like have published in the US, And so I've learned how to pitch those to publishers, when I have time, because I often don't have time, and have had some success with that as well. So that's really fun. In terms of the languages, you asked me which ones I speak, or which ones I've studied, so I spoke French before English. My mom was a French English major and a francophile. So that was actually my first language, and I picked up English very soon after, so I was bilingual very early on. And then at a certain point, we were speaking it less at home, and I had to kind of relearn it more at school, but it's always in there. I took Latin, in junior high and high school, I took Spanish in college and German, you know, adding my languages. And then when I was in grad school, you had to pass a pre-language exam, I think, French, German, Latin because a lot of the secondary stuff was in other languages. So that wasn't a problem, I had to brush up the Latin. And I continued with the German because the topic I'd chosen for my dissertation, Orlando di Lasso, 16th century composer, a lot of the secondary material was in dense, academic German. So I wanted to improve my German. And then I started Italian for singing. And then the rest of the languages come from learning them to sing in them. I have sung in languages I don't speak at all, so Polish and Basque, and Auvergnat, for that matter, which is a historical language. But in general, when I sing in a language, I like to take six months, a year or a year and a half and learn to know the language and the structure so that it feels... I wouldn't say native, but I feel competent in it as I'm communicating, because again, I want to communicate meaning, not just word word word word.
Stephanie M. Neumann 12:14
Yeah, I'm sure it influences you as a singer, and all of that, you know, how you came to be, came through that versus others who have learned languages a different way through starting off in an opposite way. Or, you know, so?
Nanette McGuinness 12:30
Well, I was really lucky. You know, when I was performing in Italy, the stage director spoke French, and it grew out of a summer workshop that I had done. And the conductor asked me if I wanted in interpreter, and at the time I'd studied some Italian and I said to the maestro, if you've got the patience, Alfredo can always translate for me if I get stuck. But if you've got the patience, I'd like to improve my Italian and and really learn it. I've always had an ear for languages, probably because of the music. But I was really honored and touched and surprised. When we did, I was doing Bohème. And so I was doing Musetta, I like Mimì better than Musetta, it's more of a core role for me, but Musetta's a lot of fun too. And so I was doing it, and at the the sitz probe, I think it was, in Genoa, and the orchestral musicians came up to me at the break, and they're like, rattling off in Italian. And I'm still just working on the whole thing, right? And I'm like, you know, and they were like, Oh, but you speak it, you know, you sound so good you speak it so well. And that was a real compliment, to me. So, you know, and it's been interesting being, having the multiple languages, you know, that when I was performing Mimì in the Czech Republic, the tenor was Russian. And we didn't have, it was a small theater so we didn't have a prompter. And he was forgetting the words. And so in that particular point in the staging, this isn't the love duet, you know, and I have my back to the audience at that point because he's singing to them. And I'm, you know, cueing him, mouthing him the words in the Italian a couple of times when he got lost on his words, the music he never had a problem with, but you know, he didn't. So that that was, that was a fun experience, too.
Stephanie M. Neumann 14:23
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Nanette McGuinness, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button, and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax deductible donation, please visit us at www.e4tt.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times and designed by Brennan Stokes, with co-producer and audio engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts, and tune in next week "for good measure" [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS].