#mse2022

MSE’s 2022 year in review

The Microbes and Social Equity working group turned 3 years old in December, and we currently have 170 members from around the globe, as well ~100 newsletter-only subscribers (you can join either list here)! MSE continues to grow and shape the future of research, education, and policy thanks to the enthusiasm and support of our members, and we are grateful to have you with us! We grew so much…

Today I've a very interesting gentleman on the podcast. My goodness, his bio is so huge. I'm not going to tell it all in this spiff ....... I am going to read out one paragraph from the front page of his website to give you a sense of what this man is about. Something big is happening in the world. Today, we're living at a time of unprecedented change, politically, socially, economically, environmentally, the old systems that have managed our lives are no longer working.

https://darrenabrahams.com/ We've lost trust in our leaders, and lost touch with our certainty. Faced with all this confusion, it's easy to feel lost ,stuck and like you don't matter Darren Abrahams What a statement open this podcast with! Welcome to the podcast. Darren, Thank you so much Sylvia. It's a real honor to be here. I'm very, very delighted To see now your second name is Abraham's so you're an opera singer. And you're very much involved with social change. In the view of therapy, working with people who have people who've experienced trauma, you've done work, I believe in some of the camps there that were in Calais in France. So they still there? The camps in Calais are no longer officially there. But there are still many, many people trying to get through to the UK, as you'll see in the UK NEWS. If you watch it at all, we have many migrants trying to cross the channel all the time right now. So it's a big, it's a big challenge. Now, I think what we'll start with is your musical history. And we'll go from there. So you're an opera singer, you've performed in some major, big stages in the UK, you've I think you've performed in my home country here in Wexford in Ireland at the Opera Festival there. So tell me how did you get into music? How did you become an opera singer? How did that all happen? Sure. Well, first of all, I think I should say that I don't necessarily just call myself an opera singer these days. Opera is a big part of my history. And I'll talk about that right now. But at this point in my life, I'm singing many, many different genres of music. So I comment I call myself a singer. Really? What genres of music are you including? So we say you can do opera? So what other genres are you interested in? I started out my musical life in musical theatre. That was my first love so and it's still actually one of my biggest loves. I love musical theater. And if you ask me, like how I got started in music, I think my very, very early on, I was introduced to music by my grandmother, who's not a musician was not a music practitioner, but loved music and loved musicals. And so from a really early age, I was kind of put in front of MGM musicals on the TV, you know, there's big kind of the 1940s 1950s big, glossy films. And I love that and really appealed to me, me and my sister, we loved that genre of music. But she also loved jazz, you know, kind of the big, classic jazz Swing, swing-era jazz, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, that kind of music.

So that was also a very big part of my experience growing up. And I grew up in a household, not not a completely English household, my mom's Israeli. And we always had people from all over the world staying in the house, because to make a little bit more money, my parents would have foreign students coming to learn English in Brighton. So there was always other languages, other cultures, so other kinds of music in my life. So it was a big, rich musical world as I was growing up. And at the age of 13, I had the opportunity to start singing lessons. And that was a classical vocal technique.

So I started to develop my voice who that classical style, but I didn't often sing in the classical style, I would use it for musical theatre and for other things, but my voice was moving in that direction. And then when eventually I went to study I studied as an actor first....... I went to university to study drama. And I did music on the side and that music had a classical focus to it as well. And then when I left university and went to London to find work, I auditioned for every musical going but the mid-90s .....Miss Saigon and Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera and all those things. And they kept on saying, amazing voice........ doesn't quite fit, don't quite know how to place it. And that was because of the kind of classical technique that I had. So I started to listen more to what people were saying to me. I got an opportunity to be in a Christmas show with an opera director. And that opera Director invited me to be in a show that he was doing he needed some with musical theater background. And then that spiralled into I got offered another opera job and another opera job and I thought okay, so the universe is taking me towards opera. So brilliant. I want to sing everything I can pray love classical music, why wouldn't I want to do that too, so I auditioned to get to the Royal Academy of Music. I went in as a postgraduate I was there for one year on the vocal postgraduate course two years in the opera department, and one year at the National Opera Studio and by the time I was spat out the other end of that whole process I was an opera singer. So that's kind of that's my musical journey but there's a lot of influences. So, you had one very important mentor, I believe a famous opera singer by the name of....... Ian Partridge, he was not actually an opera singer. He was a lead singer, and oratorio singer, you know, wonderful, wonderful singer with the most beautiful natural voice. And a wonderful teacher was incredibly lucky to be taught by him in my early years at the Academy, and he gave me a really solid grounding in natural use of the voice. But he wasn't like, yeah, he wasn't an opera singer. And he that there was a point where he said, Actually, you need to go and learn with train with people who are opera singers because that's not my style. Okay. Okay. And what led you then into musical theater? I know, there's probably a crossover between music, theater and opera and all that, like... Why do you love us? What is it about it that you love it so much? It's the storytelling. I think what I love about musical theater, which is different from Opera, is that the music in musical theatre is a conduit for a narrative, you know, the words are as important in musical theater as the song. And I think in opera, it's the other way around, is that the words are less important than the emotion being conveyed by the music.

And I really enjoy the storytelling I'm, I love acting like acting was a very, you know, I trained as an actor, I did loads of acting. For me, it was always the same thing. And it was interesting for me to enter the opera world where even though opera is an acting genre, acting wasn't it at that time, at least when I was training, it wasn't necessarily considered a prerequisite for becoming an opera. You did acting training on your as part of your course. But many, many of the singers that I was working with were not natural actors necessarily. They were amazing singers. And I came from another way around. And I think that's also why I was I love musical theatre because it's it encompasses everything you might be gathering from the way that I'm speaking. And also the way that you've introduced me is that I'm not someone who likes boxes. I'm not someone who likes to be labelled or stuck in a particular genre or a particular way of working. I like to explore all sorts of different things. And for me, music and performance is not about one style, it's not about doing one thing. So musical theater will allow you to act will a to dance, it will allow you to sing, it will allow you to express yourself in all sorts of different ways. I'm really happy to say that as my opera career progressed, more of that was available in the opera world as well. So you know, it's there in the opera world. But I think there's been a lot of influence from musical theater and film and other genres to actually support the evolution of opera as an art form. So that it's more so because I think the audience is used to watching a lot more realism.

They used to watching films, they used to watching TV, they used to watching things like musicals and plays. So when you go to an opera, it's not so acceptable anymore to just stand and sing like they did, maybe in bygone eras. So the acting part, the looking the part, the movement, and the dance, that's all hugely important, particularly contemporary opera. And looking at the whole opera, I call it a box, if you will, just to call it its own genre. Is it growing? Or is it static? You know, what way is at the moment? Because there's various opinions on classical music, the future of classical music, is it going to stay with us? Many people believe yes, it's, you know, it's a 300 year old art form, it's going to remain with us. But what about the opera in particular? Do you think it still has a loyal audience? It's holding its own?

It's a really, really interesting question. And it's a difficult one for me to answer because I don't really live in that world anymore. And adjacent to it, I have many people that I know within it, I stepped in and out of it. What I observed from the outside is that I do believe that opera still has an audience. And I think that opera has an audience into the future. The issue around opera is accessibility to it. And it's not, there has been a conversation for at least as long as I've been a professional, which the last 20 odd years or maybe even longer, that opera needs to somehow change itself to become more acceptable to a modern audience. And I don't believe that I don't think that's the case. I think opera is its own genre. And opera needs to be what opera is, we just need to be able to open the doors differently for people to be able to access it. So in other words, what you're saying is making it more accessible by maybe just explaining the backstory to opera. So for example, if I look at some of Mozart's operatic works, for example, very often you hear the title, but you don't hear the backstory. Do you think the backstory needs to be spoken about more to make it more interesting and accessible to the audience that potentially could get into it? No, I don't, because I think that work is already being done. I think that opera, every opera company, large or small, has an education or outreach department, which do amazing work. I've done a lot of my work through my career within those departments.

And I think that there's a huge amount of really creative and interesting ways to explain the plots of opera and the background of the opera and everything, all of that done. And all of that's happening. I don't think that we need to do that. I mean, we need to continue doing that we need to do it better. Maybe in some places we need to do it better. Some I think we do it really well actually, as an industry. The issue is and the issue that's that some that shifting at the moment......first of all, is around accessibility for people who wouldn't normally enter the corporate space. So how do you make a more affordable? How do you make it more inclusive? How do you have more people of color and minorities or people with disabilities potential, like more of the general population represented on the stage and not just on the stage, but also backstage, within the all the hierarchies of an opera company or a classical music company?

So it's not enough just to have black and brown faces on stage. We need to have them also in the management and so like...

Today I've a very interesting gentleman on the podcast. My goodness, his bio is so huge. I'm not going to tell it all in this spiff ....... I am going to read out one paragraph from the front page of his website to give you a sense of what this man is about. Something big is happening in the world. Today, we're living at a time of unprecedented change, politically, socially, economically, environmentally, the old systems that have managed our lives are no longer working.

https://darrenabrahams.com/ We've lost trust in our leaders, and lost touch with our certainty. Faced with all this confusion, it's easy to feel lost ,stuck and like you don't matter Darren Abrahams What a statement open this podcast with! Welcome to the podcast. Darren, Thank you so much Sylvia. It's a real honor to be here. I'm very, very delighted To see now your second name is Abraham's so you're an opera singer. And you're very much involved with social change. In the view of therapy, working with people who have people who've experienced trauma, you've done work, I believe in some of the camps there that were in Calais in France. So they still there? The camps in Calais are no longer officially there. But there are still many, many people trying to get through to the UK, as you'll see in the UK NEWS. If you watch it at all, we have many migrants trying to cross the channel all the time right now. So it's a big, it's a big challenge. Now, I think what we'll start with is your musical history. And we'll go from there. So you're an opera singer, you've performed in some major, big stages in the UK, you've I think you've performed in my home country here in Wexford in Ireland at the Opera Festival there. So tell me how did you get into music? How did you become an opera singer? How did that all happen? Sure. Well, first of all, I think I should say that I don't necessarily just call myself an opera singer these days. Opera is a big part of my history. And I'll talk about that right now. But at this point in my life, I'm singing many, many different genres of music. So I comment I call myself a singer. Really? What genres of music are you including? So we say you can do opera? So what other genres are you interested in? I started out my musical life in musical theatre. That was my first love so and it's still actually one of my biggest loves. I love musical theater. And if you ask me, like how I got started in music, I think my very, very early on, I was introduced to music by my grandmother, who's not a musician was not a music practitioner, but loved music and loved musicals. And so from a really early age, I was kind of put in front of MGM musicals on the TV, you know, there's big kind of the 1940s 1950s big, glossy films. And I love that and really appealed to me, me and my sister, we loved that genre of music. But she also loved jazz, you know, kind of the big, classic jazz Swing, swing-era jazz, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, that kind of music.

So that was also a very big part of my experience growing up. And I grew up in a household, not not a completely English household, my mom's Israeli. And we always had people from all over the world staying in the house, because to make a little bit more money, my parents would have foreign students coming to learn English in Brighton. So there was always other languages, other cultures, so other kinds of music in my life. So it was a big, rich musical world as I was growing up. And at the age of 13, I had the opportunity to start singing lessons. And that was a classical vocal technique.

So I started to develop my voice who that classical style, but I didn't often sing in the classical style, I would use it for musical theatre and for other things, but my voice was moving in that direction. And then when eventually I went to study I studied as an actor first....... I went to university to study drama. And I did music on the side and that music had a classical focus to it as well. And then when I left university and went to London to find work, I auditioned for every musical going but the mid-90s .....Miss Saigon and Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera and all those things. And they kept on saying, amazing voice........ doesn't quite fit, don't quite know how to place it. And that was because of the kind of classical technique that I had. So I started to listen more to what people were saying to me. I got an opportunity to be in a Christmas show with an opera director. And that opera Director invited me to be in a show that he was doing he needed some with musical theater background. And then that spiralled into I got offered another opera job and another opera job and I thought okay, so the universe is taking me towards opera. So brilliant. I want to sing everything I can pray love classical music, why wouldn't I want to do that too, so I auditioned to get to the Royal Academy of Music. I went in as a postgraduate I was there for one year on the vocal postgraduate course two years in the opera department, and one year at the National Opera Studio and by the time I was spat out the other end of that whole process I was an opera singer. So that's kind of that's my musical journey but there's a lot of influences. So, you had one very important mentor, I believe a famous opera singer by the name of....... Ian Partridge, he was not actually an opera singer. He was a lead singer, and oratorio singer, you know, wonderful, wonderful singer with the most beautiful natural voice. And a wonderful teacher was incredibly lucky to be taught by him in my early years at the Academy, and he gave me a really solid grounding in natural use of the voice. But he wasn't like, yeah, he wasn't an opera singer. And he that there was a point where he said, Actually, you need to go and learn with train with people who are opera singers because that's not my style. Okay. Okay. And what led you then into musical theater? I know, there's probably a crossover between music, theater and opera and all that, like... Why do you love us? What is it about it that you love it so much? It's the storytelling. I think what I love about musical theater, which is different from Opera, is that the music in musical theatre is a conduit for a narrative, you know, the words are as important in musical theater as the song. And I think in opera, it's the other way around, is that the words are less important than the emotion being conveyed by the music.

And I really enjoy the storytelling I'm, I love acting like acting was a very, you know, I trained as an actor, I did loads of acting. For me, it was always the same thing. And it was interesting for me to enter the opera world where even though opera is an acting genre, acting wasn't it at that time, at least when I was training, it wasn't necessarily considered a prerequisite for becoming an opera. You did acting training on your as part of your course. But many, many of the singers that I was working with were not natural actors necessarily. They were amazing singers. And I came from another way around. And I think that's also why I was I love musical theatre because it's it encompasses everything you might be gathering from the way that I'm speaking. And also the way that you've introduced me is that I'm not someone who likes boxes. I'm not someone who likes to be labelled or stuck in a particular genre or a particular way of working. I like to explore all sorts of different things. And for me, music and performance is not about one style, it's not about doing one thing. So musical theater will allow you to act will a to dance, it will allow you to sing, it will allow you to express yourself in all sorts of different ways. I'm really happy to say that as my opera career progressed, more of that was available in the opera world as well. So you know, it's there in the opera world. But I think there's been a lot of influence from musical theater and film and other genres to actually support the evolution of opera as an art form. So that it's more so because I think the audience is used to watching a lot more realism.

They used to watching films, they used to watching TV, they used to watching things like musicals and plays. So when you go to an opera, it's not so acceptable anymore to just stand and sing like they did, maybe in bygone eras. So the acting part, the looking the part, the movement, and the dance, that's all hugely important, particularly contemporary opera. And looking at the whole opera, I call it a box, if you will, just to call it its own genre. Is it growing? Or is it static? You know, what way is at the moment? Because there's various opinions on classical music, the future of classical music, is it going to stay with us? Many people believe yes, it's, you know, it's a 300 year old art form, it's going to remain with us. But what about the opera in particular? Do you think it still has a loyal audience? It's holding its own?

It's a really, really interesting question. And it's a difficult one for me to answer because I don't really live in that world anymore. And adjacent to it, I have many people that I know within it, I stepped in and out of it. What I observed from the outside is that I do believe that opera still has an audience. And I think that opera has an audience into the future. The issue around opera is accessibility to it. And it's not, there has been a conversation for at least as long as I've been a professional, which the last 20 odd years or maybe even longer, that opera needs to somehow change itself to become more acceptable to a modern audience. And I don't believe that I don't think that's the case. I think opera is its own genre. And opera needs to be what opera is, we just need to be able to open the doors differently for people to be able to access it. So in other words, what you're saying is making it more accessible by maybe just explaining the backstory to opera. So for example, if I look at some of Mozart's operatic works, for example, very often you hear the title, but you don't hear the backstory. Do you think the backstory needs to be spoken about more to make it more interesting and accessible to the audience that potentially could get into it? No, I don't, because I think that work is already being done. I think that opera, every opera company, large or small, has an education or outreach department, which do amazing work. I've done a lot of my work through my career within those departments.

And I think that there's a huge amount of really creative and interesting ways to explain the plots of opera and the background of the opera and everything, all of that done. And all of that's happening. I don't think that we need to do that. I mean, we need to continue doing that we need to do it better. Maybe in some places we need to do it better. Some I think we do it really well actually, as an industry. The issue is and the issue that's that some that shifting at the moment......first of all, is around accessibility for people who wouldn't normally enter the corporate space. So how do you make a more affordable? How do you make it more inclusive? How do you have more people of color and minorities or people with disabilities potential, like more of the general population represented on the stage and not just on the stage, but also backstage, within the all the hierarchies of an opera company or a classical music company?

So it's not enough just to have black and brown faces on stage. We need to have them also in the management and so like...