Voice Area Performs Abroad
France has impressionism. Spain, cubism. And Italy? Opera, of course. Over the summer, Ohio State music students had a once-in-a-lifetime experience: singing Italian operas on stage in Novafeltria, Italy, in front of local audiences.
Most of the Ohio State students who traveled to Italy this summer as part of an intensive language and music program didn't speak Italian.
That quickly changed.
Not many of the people of Novafeltria, a small city in northern Italy, spoke English.
"We had to learn Italian or not make it," says Professor Karen Peeler, who went on the trip. "If you wanted to go buy food or go to the drugstore or whatever, you had to figure out how to do what you needed to do."
With mornings dedicated to language classes and afternoons full of music lessons from Italian opera instructors, it didn't take the Ohio State group long to catch on to the native tongue.
"There was a definite a sense of accomplishment to be able to walk into the grocery store, order something at the deli counter, walk up to the cashier, pay for it, and walk out and do it all and not even think until you were done, 'Wow, I did that all in Italian,'" says graduate student Michael Hamilton.
At first, Hamilton says, he was intimidated at the prospect of taking the stage to sing in the language he was so new to, in front of native speakers.
“The highlight for me was definitely experiencing something that was so different from how we live here.” —Michael Hamilton
"It was a little nerve-wracking in the beginning to think that these Italian people who have been listening to these operas their entire lives and know them backwards an forwards were going to be sitting and listening to us sing in Italian," he says. "But they were actually quite receptive to what we were doing and were very supportive of our efforts."
After five weeks of intensive Italian, Hamilton feels more comfortable with singing in the language Peeler says is "crucial for students to learn."
"I truly understand what I'm saying and what's being said around me rather than just memorizing syllables, memorizing sounds, to make it sound like it should," he says. "It actually has a meaning behind it now."
Peeler says the music faculty "will always push to do some summer activities in Europe. I cannot minimize the value of studying abroad for any American student, but particularly for music students."
"American students tend to be very isolated," she says. "We don't have near neighbors that we can go see all the time, and we tend to think, by and large that English is the only language that you need to learn to survive in the world. The experience of living in another culture and learning to speak their language and communicate to them on their terms widens your horizons."
It's easy to want to widen your horizons when the scene is as beautiful as Peeler and Hamilton describe Novafeltria.
"Anywhere you looked in the town there was a beautiful mountain vista, there was a river running by," Peeler says. "Almost every mountain peak you looked at had a fortress on top of it, probably dating back to the 13th, 14th century."
-from the "Do Something Great" website
