Back in February I interviewed The Daffodil Perspective's Elizabeth De Brito for Castle of Our Skins BIBA Blog; a blog which does the extraordinarily important work of elevating Black Excellence in the Arts. 

• Read my interview with Elizabeth HERE
• Listen to Elizabeth's radio show The Daffodil Perspective HERE
• Read past BIBA Blogs HERE
• Check out Castle of our skins upcoming season HERE

My unparalleled voice teacher Lynn Eustis invited me to co-host her virtual summer studio class this Tuesday to talk about my FAVORITE thing, which is NEW MUSIC! I spent the week agonizing over what I felt like best showed the depth, the demand, and the arc of Contemporary Classical Music and here she is! Some things to consider:
I know that I've left SO MUCH out, but I was given time parameters and tried to stick to them as best I could. There will FOR SURE be discussion of all the composers, operas, arias, and artists that I left off.
ALSO I was reminded by Lynn that the students attending the class probably know about the "Hits". She challenged me to find works that they likely never would have encountered previously, so I tried to keep it mostly deep cuts.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
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     Happy 53rd day of Quarantine! I've been making playlists since high school and on a whim started working on this one over a year ago, adding songs to it whenever I found myself listening to something a LOT, or whenever I heard lyrics that reminded me of someone or something in my life.  I'm turning 32 in 2 weeks and can't help but CACKLE when I think about how different my vision of what life at 32 looked like even just a year ago. 
     31 has been a year of learning, growing, and letting go; of finding the positives that come with every negative situation and of realizing that I have everything I need.  
Enjoy my musical scrapbook.
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It's a brave new world and I've been spending my quarantine, among other things, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. We singers are funny in that we don't like to do anything alone. 99.99% of the time we perform alongside SOMEONE, whether it's an instrumentalist or a fellow singer. So social distancing isn't exactly on-brand for our community.

My fellow Juventas New Music Ensemble musicians and I are spending the next several weeks taking turns performing and broadcasting free concerts out of our living rooms for a new series we're calling Stay Home with Juventas. I'll be broadcasting from my home in JP on April 29th at 8PM!

As of right now, I haven't entirely landed on a program. I HATE singing along to pre-recorded tracks, because your performance ends up being entirely focused with keeping in sync with the accompaniment. So I'm exploring some other options and thinking of stepping WAY out of my comfort zone and presenting a completely solo 30 minute streaming concert of voice alone.  

It could be WEIRD; it could be UN-MUSICAL; It could also be kind of fun so...TBD on that.  
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These streams are FREE but Juventas would love your support at this time. They've been wonderful about making sure that all of us will still be paid for our canceled concerts and for continuing to create opportunities for us musicians. You can donate at Juventasmusic.org/donate-now

In addition to Juventas,I've also been keeping busy working with Boston's Opera on Tap. Last week we kicked off a Youtube and IGTV series called Pre-Opera Cocktails. These are short videos introducing each nightly Metropolitan Opera Stream and include a themed cocktail recipe and short synopsis.

Before you go check out the video I made for John Adam's Nixon in China.