Home

Over the past twenty years, I’ve been collecting ideas about singing and teaching—not just about how to sing, but about how singing and...

Welcome! This blog documents a new kind of collaboration—between ChatGPT and our opera team at Oakland University—for our 2025–2026 production of Alcina . While the opera itself was chosen before this AI experiment began, the direction we’re taking it in is entirely new territory for us. So why this project? Like many of you, I’m both excited and uneasy about the future of art in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. If a computer program can generate ideas

Welcome to the second installment of a series on teaching voice lessons in a deterministic worldview. Introduction and Reminders To set the stage, we are continuing to consider what it means if the universe is deterministic. For me, that also means the universe is incompatible with free will. I will use the two terms interchangeably in my writing. It is worth noting there are philosophers who don’t automatically link those two concepts together, though that is the most common

Who I Am, and Why I Did This I am a professor and director of opera at a state university, a position I have held for more than fifteen years. I create art on a limited budget, from a deeply student-centered point of view, and I frequently adapt or modernize works in order to promote engagement and learning. I operate in a high–resource-demand art form within a chronically scarce-resource environment. I approached Alcina in a spirit of curiosity about what AI might bring to

A snippet of revised recit. Carys Rees-Baker, soprano, and Sarah Lawless, mezzo. This post in the final entry in a series of posts about adapting the libretto of Alcina for a modern audience and performers with the help of ChatGPT. We are now in the implementation phase of the Alcina libretto.Like any new text, the act of singing a line—or hearing it land in the room—often dictates a rewrite. A line comes up in rehearsal, a student raises an eyebrow, and I end up back here

This is the fourth entry in a series on adapting Handel's Alcina for modern singers using ChatGPT at Oakland University . There’s a strange kind of alchemy to adapting a Baroque libretto for the modern stage. In our Alcina project—a college-opera re-imagined inside an influencer mansion where social media magic replaces sorcery—every translation choice becomes a philosophical one. When this process began, the goal wasn’t just to modernize Handel’s Alcina ; it was to rebuild

In this third installment of my ongoing series about AI-assisted adaptation of Handel's Alcina , we dive into one of the project’s most...

This is Part II in a blog series about using AI to create a complete libretto rewrite—from concept to organization to libretto. Where I...

This is Part I in a blog series about using AI to create a complete libretto rewrite—from concept to organization to libretto. What...

Last week I wrote an introductory post outlining some of the forces at play in singing and teaching. In this series, I want to go much deeper and examine what it means to teach and to learn singing in a deterministic universe. This first post focuses on what technique actually is under a deterministic framework. Later posts will examine: the singer’s responsibility, the teacher’s responsibility, and finally, practical teaching strategies that follow from this view. My hope i

Over the past 15 years of directing opera, I’ve found that a subset of my students needs an exceptionally clear, transparent rehearsal...

What is voice teaching, really? My definition is: voice teaching is the act of helping singers gain facility in creating expressive...

Why Callback Sides Matter As part of our upcoming Alcina production, Victoria Shively and I needed to create callback sides for all of...