.cls-1 { fill: url(#linear-gradient); } .cls-2 { mask: url(#mask); } .cls-1 { fill: url(#linear-gradient); } .cls-2 { mask: url(#mask); } .cls-1 { fill: url(#linear-gradient); } .cls-2 { mask: url(#mask); } A Silvery, Shimmering Summer of Beyoncé Her tour has rivaled the Olympics in economic scale and an earthquake in its power. Sept. 27, 2023, 5:49 […] More

On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, a mezzo-soprano paced during an opera rehearsal before letting her sound loose. When she did, she appeared to shock herself — so much that she broke the fourth wall.“Whoa, whoa, that wasn’t my voice,” that vocalist, Tivoli Treloar, declared to her colleagues, and to an imagined audience. “I mean, I can’t sing like that!”A male voice in the cast parried with a hint of old-world courtliness: “Yet ’twas well sung, my friend!”Welcome to Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose.”In addition to breaking the fourth wall, Soper’s latest work of music theater, which premieres on Saturday at Long Beach Opera, also collapses centuries, bringing its source material — a medieval French poem of the same name — into colloquial and witty collision with our understanding of opera as perhaps our most artifice-strewn art form.In Soper’s script, the mezzo, who is surprised to find herself singing (and so well!), is merely required to respond to that old-world praise with a simple “thanks.” But during the rehearsal, observed by video call, Treloar sang the word as though it were a grand encore, teasing its vowel sound into generous helpings of ornamentation.From left, Bernardo Bermudez, Tivoli Treloar and Tiffany Townsend rehearsing the opera, which was originally scheduled to premiere in 2020 but was canceled because of the pandemic.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesWhen Treloar brought her “thanks” in for a long-delayed landing, others in the room laughed at her effective resolution of the comic-opera beat. Yet the director, James Darrah, wondered if she could stretch out the revelry even more on the next pass. A rehearsal pianist began the scene again, and Treloar indulged Darrah — this time earning an even bigger laugh.This playful moment of extended experimentation felt appropriate to both Soper’s work — her hyperverbal, zigzagging scores, filled with pools of tonal lushness as well as thickets of philosophical discourse — and the prolonged path to Saturday’s premiere.“Rose,” which has been highly anticipated for years, was mere weeks away from opening at Peak Performances, in New Jersey, when, in early 2020, the pandemic shut it down. It then languished until Darrah selected it for his first full season of programming as the artistic director of Long Beach Opera.In an interview, Soper described how “Rose” both extends and deviates from her earlier, celebrated pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” For one, those works, unlike this opera, didn’t have an intermission. “You do the whole thing in one fell swoop,” she said. “Whatever those Aristotelian time-place things are; it’s kind of a big gulp. For this one, the idea of a full two-act opera was interesting to me.”A rehearsal for “Rose,” in which, Soper said, “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesIn “Sirens,” Soper gave subjective voice to characters who were mere devices in Homer; in “Rose,” she again reinterprets vintage literary concepts, but with expanded ambition and scope. In the three years since its canceled premiere, Soper has worked to refine the libretto. The text, she said, was difficult to write, when creating a “really strange story that was inspired by this incredibly bizarre medieval text.”In the medieval poem, the male protagonist — the Lover — is a dreamer whose affections are aimed at the symbolic entity of a rose. When his advance toward the rose is blocked, he’s schooled on and nudged toward the right way to think about love by a wide range of allegorical characters, such as Reason, Idleness or the God of Love.Two different contributors, separated by decades, worked on the poem as it is known today. And now Soper is having her turn to augment the text. Here, a figure she calls the Dreamer initially puts the character of the Lover through the various allegorical paces. (In the original poem, the pursuer of the rose is himself a dreamer.) And in Soper’s version, there’s a mysterious yet evident rapport between the Dreamer and the Lover — even as the latter, the mezzo-soprano, is still discovering her voice within this dreamy opera world.“Part of it is about: What is music, what does it mean when you sing opera?” Soper said. “Who are these characters who think their normal language is operatic singing? What falls apart for them when they start to question that?”Christopher Rountree, left, the production’s conductor, with Soper at a rehearsal.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesAs a composer, Soper answers such destabilizing questions with a wealth of sonic reference points. She’s firmly in the contemporary classical mold, which means comfort with experimentation and extended techniques — as well as the electronic processing of acoustic sounds. But as the piece progresses, she feasts on polystylism and hummable melody.The production’s conductor, Christopher Rountree, said that, during a recent rehearsal, he had the experience of feeling “like we were solidly inside of Philip Glass.” Then, “within a second, we were in Gilbert and Sullivan,” he added. “And then, a second later, we were in a very heartfelt new-music ballad, but with a character who had not sung in that new-music straight tone yet.”“It’s amazing to see all the things that are being asked of the singers by Kate,” Rountree said. “And it’s cool that we have folks who are willing to go there.”The casting intentionally brings together vocalists from different backgrounds. The dramatic soprano Tiffany Townsend, who plays Idleness, is in the young artist program at Los Angeles Opera, where she has specialized in the standard repertoire. But, she said, she enjoys the way Soper braids different traditions together. Referring to the “Torch Song,” which is sung by Pleasure and Idleness, she said, “The harmony speaks to medieval music; but the way it’s set gives a jazz feel.”The vocalist Lucas Steele, who starred in the musical “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” on Broadway, is making his opera debut in the role of the Dreamer. He said that in Soper’s writing, he sees “a height to the language that reminds me a little bit of Shakespeare” — but also a Brechtian sense of “talking to the audience, shifting in and out of the narrative.” (The rehearsal videos that Long Beach Opera has posted online give a sense of what Steele describes: Soper’s fluid approach to allegory and audience acknowledgment.)“Because Kate is so great at when she decides to insert accessible melody into a piece,” Steele said, “I think it’s going to give the audience something to grab onto, in the moments where it may start to become a little more on the experimental side of things.”Darrah said that “at an intellectual level, I look at it and I go, Oh, she’s very aware of opera as this centuries-old art form. There’s a way that she’s referencing clichés and mocking them at times, but also using the structure.”He paused for a beat, then added, “No one’s writing music like this.”Soper hopes to record the score soon. But for now, she’s enjoying the fruition of a yearslong effort that has pushed her into new creative directions. During her training as a composer — first at Rice University, in Texas, then at Columbia, in New York — she viewed opera singers as “a different species of beautiful people, swanning around wearing scarves. And I was with the composers trying to get people to play our music. I have this distant sense from it.”“I think opera for me,” Soper said, “is a premise and an element of the story rather than an actual medium that I’m writing in.”But with “Rose,” she said, she’s finding a way to edge closer to opera’s mainstream, even as she keeps questioning it on a fundamental level.“Playing around with quote-unquote real opera singers, and lower voices, and coloratura — if something about this is more of a real opera,” she said, “at the same time I can still kind of investigate what it means to be a real opera.” More

Not long ago, lip-syncing was the domain of subversive drag queens, or pop stars that the media saw as talentless. Now it’s how scrappy amateurs get famous.Sally ThurerFor several weeks, Netflix has been insisting that I watch its gender-swapped remake of the ’90s teen romantic comedy “She’s All That.” This version — naturally, “He’s All That” — stars Tanner Buchanan as the high school outcast who needs to be whipped into prom-king shape and Addison Rae as the popular girl who does the whipping. It is Rae’s first movie, but she is ubiquitous on TikTok, where her central mode of performance is breezily dancing and lip-syncing to clips of rap songs and ephemeral bits of internet video. When I finally relented and cued up Netflix, I realized that I’d never heard her actual voice.It’s not a good movie. The bubbly charm that vaulted Rae from her Louisiana bedroom to TikTok fame fizzles on a studio set. As the resuscitated plot wheezes through its paces, Rae seems to be struggling to keep up. But the meta story interested me. Rae’s trajectory recalls the arc of “Singin’ in the Rain,” the classic musical about a silent-film star who stumbles in the jump to talkies. In that movie, the star masks her horrible voice by lip-syncing to a sweet-sounding actress hiding behind the curtain. The difference is that Addison Rae became famous by overtly co-opting other people’s sounds. And it is her world, TikTok, that represents the thrilling emerging medium.Acting as if you are singing when you are not singing — lip-syncing has been an object of American popular fascination for a century. Not too long ago, it could even prompt a pop-cultural panic. Framed as a weapon of talentless pop stars and their cynical handlers, it came to represent the height of crass media manipulation. But now the opposite feels true: Lip-syncing has been refashioned as a tool of the appealingly scrappy amateur. Addison Rae can don a crop top, perkily mouth along to a lyric about Percocet and be anointed Hollywood’s new girl next door.

@addisonre HES ALL THAT NETFLIX FRIDAY ♬ original sound – Tristen🧃 How did we get here? Lip-syncing was so ubiquitous in early musicals that in 1952, “Singin’ in the Rain” relied on it even as it critiqued it: Debbie Reynolds, playing the actress who sings for the star, was herself partially dubbed with the voice of the unheralded singer Betty Noyes. But while films were using lip-syncing to build pitch-perfect Hollywood numbers, drag performers were doing it out of sly necessity. As Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez detail in “Legendary Children,” their cultural history of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” drag shows were criminalized in early 20th-century America, and evading harassment meant performing at underground clubs and house parties where live music was often out of reach. While movie musicals hoped their lip-syncing created a naturalistic illusion, drag leaned into the artifice, building a commentary on the source material by challenging its gender norms.In mainstream spaces, that artifice has been eyed with suspicion, wrapped up not just in homophobia but also a fear of technology, which might threaten to reprogram the essence of human culture itself. As the Christian Science Monitor asked in 1990, “Is advancing technology leading us into a musical world where nothing is ‘real’?” Occasionally, that tension builds into a culture-wide authenticity crisis.In the early ’90s, the German pop duo Milli Vanilli scandalized the record industry by lip-syncing to uncredited studio singers, Pavarotti was sued for lip-syncing to himself at an Italian concert, and state lawmakers introduced a flurry of bills attempting to regulate dubbing. The pattern repeated itself in 2004, when Ashlee Simpson was pilloried for her lip-sync fail on “Saturday Night Live,” an online petition begged Britney Spears to actually sing on tour, and Elton John said that lip-syncing artists “should be shot.” Finally, in 2013, the controversy reached the Capitol, as journalists grilled Beyoncé about singing with a prerecorded track at Barack Obama’s second inauguration. This time, when she explained that she was a perfectionist using an approved industry tactic, the press actually applauded.Lip-syncing has since swept American culture both high and low. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” busted drag performance out of gay clubs and cabarets and into America’s living rooms. Along the way, it made campy spectacle into a mainstream vehicle for telling personal truths, and fashioned drag queens into, as my colleague Shane O’Neill has put it, the cultural avatars of being yourself. (So successful was the show that it was swiftly co-opted into heterosexual cringe, via the celebrity reality competition “Lip Sync Battle.”)It is now perfectly acceptable for pop stars to lip-sync in live performances, as long as they supply a fantastical enough show in return. This spring, lip-syncing even ascended to the opera: In Opera Philadelphia’s short film “The Island We Made,” the “Drag Race” winner Sasha Velour appears as a spacey maternal spirit, channeling the singer Eliza Bagg’s voice through her glittery red lips. And this fall, you can take a Zoom lip-syncing course with the performance scholar M.B Boucai, integrating the psychological gesture technique of Michael Chekhov and the mime tradition of Jacques Lecoq.Even as lip-syncing reaches new artistic heights, TikTok has democratized it, encouraging its billion global users to casually sing along. The app accommodates performance styles as disparate as Rae executing basic cheerleading moves and a girl mouthing the Counting Crows’ “Shrek 2” track “Accidentally in Love” over youthful images of the Unabomber. On a crowdsourced app, it makes sense for the central creative feature to have a low barrier to entry. Just as Instagram made everyone a hipster photographer with its vintage filters, TikTok turns its audience into experimental mash-up artists, with self-conscious nods to artifice baked into the experience.Besides, as our experience grows increasingly mediated, we’ve come to appreciate the skills of the people who do the mediating. Much of TikTok’s charm derives from its lo-fi aesthetic, its janky green-screen effects and shaky hand-held shots. There is no longer some suspicious Hollywood power broker pulling the strings. (Or if there is, he has swooped in later, after the TikToker is already internet famous.) The app has taken all of the hallmarks of Hollywood manipulation — dubbing, but also airbrushing and C.G.I. — and put them in the user’s hands, where they have employed them in hypnotic, surprising, occasionally beautiful ways.In the drag tradition, lip-syncing freed the body of the physical demands of singing, cracking open stunning new visual possibilities. Lip-syncing on TikTok is less about testing the limits of the body than exploring the boundaries of the phone. Some of the app’s most interesting content is made by young people broadcasting from under their parents’ roofs, and in a sense they are practicing their own kind of clandestine burlesque, playing with their identities amid nondescript backgrounds The tech may be new, but the performances are as pure as singing into a hairbrush.Addison Rae is not a standout lip-syncer, but that is not the point of her. A drag queen lip-syncs with spectacular effort and razor-sharp precision, but Rae telegraphs the opposite, wearing the practice with a flirtatious lightness and evincing the middling technique of an amateur. Her following on the app (84.6 million) feels unjustified by her skill set, but her approachability is part of the appeal. Perhaps you could be her, if you were born with superior tooth enamel and a preternatural awareness of your most flattering angles. Which is not to say that the actual job of TikTok star is easy: When Rae failed to post for a week in 2020, internet headlines speculated that she was pregnant, or dead.Rae’s earliest TikToks are staged in carpeted rooms featuring bare walls and inert ceiling fans, but as she rose in popularity, her backgrounds grew increasingly glamorous — Hollywood group house, infinity pool, Kardashian inner sanctum. The early frisson of her videos, which played off a girl next door unexpectedly surfing the cultural currents to stardom, has dimmed. Now that the self-reinforcing TikTok algorithm has ensured her hegemony on the app, she is swiftly invading more traditional entertainment spheres. You can find her on YouTube, where she sings the brief yet tedious pop single “Obsessed”; at Sephora, where she sells her branded makeup line; and now on Netflix, which has signed her to a multi-picture deal.Boucai, the Zoom instructor, told me that lip-syncing accesses a transgressive remixing tradition developed among marginalized communities: “It’s a way of being able to perform yourself through what you can’t be — through the impossibility of what you can’t be.” Drag rests on heightening and exposing the contradictions of identity, and the best TikTok material does the same. But the app also serves up a buffet of content that only smooths those contradictions into unnerving new forms.In a piece for Wired documenting the evolution of digital blackface on TikTok, Jason Parham observed that Black culture “works like an accelerant” on the app, driving the popularity of white creators who virtually port Black sounds through their own bodies. Here the casualness of a lip-syncing performance becomes discomfiting: For a white creator, Black culture can be assumed and shrugged off with the ease of a costume change.Speaking of bad makeovers: “He’s All That” should represent Rae’s debut as a fully formed star persona, no longer borrowing other people’s cultural expressions but staking a claim to her own. Instead she looks stilted, vacant, lost. A cleverer remake of “She’s All That” (itself a take on “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady”) might have taken a lip-syncing TikTok star and refashioned her into someone who had something to say, maybe with the help of a disciplinarian drag mother. Instead we have Rae, just going through the motions. Through figures like her, lip-syncing has finally become not a scandal, or a triumph, but a bore. More

Instagram

The Duo of the Year winner at the 56th annual Academy of Country Music Awards notes it ‘is no one’s fault’ that the audio didn’t sync with their lips during the television broadcast.

Apr 19, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Dan + Shay has offered a clarification after they were accused of not singing live at the 56th annual Academy of Country Music Awards. Denying the lip-sync accusations, the country music duo blamed technical issue for the mismatch between the audio and their lips during the televised broadcast.

Apparently learning of people’s complaints about their performance, Dan + Shay quickly took to their official Twitter account to address the issue. “apparently there was an audio/video sync issue on the television broadcast,” they wrote in a statement.

They admitted they’re “bummed about it, but it happens, especially when performances are happening in multiple locations.” Not holding a grudge against the Academy of Country Music, they still sang praise for the show’s organizers “for pulling off a great show.”

Dan + Shay addressed technical issue during their ACM Awards performance.

Dan + Shay shared a longer statement on their Instagram page in which they wrote along with a clip of their performance, “hey y’all, just wanted to take a quick second to address this. there was a technical difficulty during the television broadcast of our @acmawards performance, and the audio/video was out of sync. it’s just one of those things that happens sometimes, especially with performances being filmed in different locations and is no one’s fault.”

  See also…

“we were bummed when we found out, but honestly just grateful for the opportunity to be there,” the added, “gotta give major props to the @acmawards and everybody at @cbstv for putting together an AMAZING show, given the crazy circumstances of a global pandemic. thanks so much to our fans for the kind words and support on social media tonight, and for being patient with the whole situation. we love y’all and are so grateful for everything you have given us.”

Dan + Shay was billed as one of the musical performers at the Sunday, April 18 ceremony. They delivered a smooth rendition of “Glad You Exist” from the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, but fans couldn’t help noticing that the audio and their lips were not in sync during the performance.

“Dan and shay was like me doing karaoke after three beers,” an unamused viewer tweeted. “Well we know Dan And Shay’s performance was prerecorded,” another suggested. “Either the stream on my tv is off or This is REALLY bad lip-syncing by Dan and Shay. Yikes!” a third one speculated, while another remarked, “Dan and Shay need to learn their lip-syncing skills better because that performance was way off.”

The technical glitch during their performance aside, Dan + Shay still had another reason to be proud that night as they were awarded with Duo of the Year title, winning it over Brooks & Dunn, Brothers Osborne, Florida Georgia Line and Maddie & Tae. It marks their third consecutive win in the category at ACM Awards.

“to win duo of the year for the 3rd year in a row…truly speechless,” they said in the statement posted on their Instagram page. “hope y’all have a great night, and seriously, thank you. we’re the luckiest guys in the world.”

You can share this post!

Next article

‘Survivor’ Star Sunday Burquest Dead After Losing Battle With Cancer

Related Posts More

The sophomore guard is prepping collaborations with hip-hop heavyweights like Lil Wayne and NLE Choppa as she helps L.S.U. defend its basketball title in the N.C.A.A. tournament.When Flau’jae Johnson helped lead the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team to a national championship last April, in her first season on the squad, she ascended to the top of the sport. The win, the school’s first title, also vaulted her as a hip-hop artist, lifting a career that has found her teaming up with rap royalty.At least twice in the past year, Johnson staged rap performances within 24 hours of a game or a practice, in one instance opening for the chart-topping rapper and singer Rod Wave in Atlanta after traveling from Louisiana on a day off from the court. She walked offstage to body cramps after another performance in November; she had scored 17 points in a game hours before her show.“I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” said Johnson, 20, a sophomore guard who averages 14.2 points per game and over 62,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. “If you want to be a legend at something, you’ve got to do something nobody has done before and execute it at a high level.”Johnson’s two careers went into overdrive over the past year, and she’s balancing both as L.S.U. prepares to defend its title in the N.C.A.A. tournament, starting with its first-round game on Friday. The same day, Johnson plans to release “AMF (Ain’t My Fault),” her new song with the rapper NLE Choppa, who last year asked her and her L.S.U. teammate Angel Reese to appear in the video for his single “Champions”; they made cameos alongside other top athletes including the boxers Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Mike Tyson. Johnson then asked NLE Choppa to collaborate on “AMF,” which will premiere on Snapchat through a partnership with the social media platform.Johnson often composes lyrics during flights to away games and records songs in between basketball practices.Carly Mackler/Getty Images“She’s redefining and showcasing the renaissance and the revolution that is possible in women’s sports,” said Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan. “She’s showing not only how you do it, but how you do it masterfully without compromising one for the other.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More