CHITCHAT ALERT! We really really love this cozy, autumnal, juicy convo. Charlotte goes deep into Mercury retrograde and its effects on the Chautauqua situation we covered, Perri gets sidetracked and summarizes a weird article she read about Tiktok and the VOICE as the SOUL, and we both explore what this fall audition season means to us. Our approaches, our anxieties, the dialectic between ‘I love to sing’ and ‘auditioning is impossible’, our desire to create boundaries/perimeters/limits in our lives so we can fully explore and appreciate our immediate surroundings…. It’s all in this chat! We’d love to know how you’re feeling about this transformed-yet-somehow-exactly-the-same audition season.

Hello dearest sweetie little friends! We’re back with this month’s ~*~Patreon teaser mini-ep~*~. We have the LITERAL international Superstar Blake Jennings, who you know as @jakeblennings on Tik Tok. Last time we had him on for our YAP pt. 1 ep he was at 120k followers, now he’s at 540k (!) Literally cannot compute that number. We laugh and giggle and smile about Kpop’s similarities to the opera world, Blakes extra-operatic adventures, and a whole lot more.

IF you SUBSCRIBE to our PATREON, you’ll get access to… drumroll please… an extended video of this interview :) thats right folks, we entered the visual medium. The video includes lots of exclusive secret convos that did NOT make the cut and lots of footage of Blake’s and charlotte’s feet (NOT PERRI’S). Sub for 3.33 a month for access! We appreciate your support helping us cover the many TTA universe costs including the dr*pb*x account hehehehehehe

Like many of you, we were pretty taken aback when we heard through a leaked email that Chautauqua Opera hired former young artists to judge their 2022 prescreen applications. We emailed Steve Osgood asking for a statement, and he ended up coming on the ol pod! We expressed our concerns and the concerns of the young artist community, and he answered. It was a pretty fulfilling convo and we’re excited to share it with you all!!!! It was nice to reach behind the curtain and find a dude there willing to chat. We treated it as a fact finding mission, without a ton of commentary. We make a couple of points and question whether or not this initiative is the way to go, but we mostly wanted to take a moment to start a dialogue, build a bridge, open our ears and understand the rationale behind this decision. We hope you find this as illuminating as we did. 

When we were planning our patreon and our next steps for this fall season of our podcast / our lives, we realized that we want Thrilled to Announce to grow into a collective of radical operatic voices. We want this podcast to be a movement, a dreamspace, a home for creation, brainstorming, and the rebirth of the classical music world. With that in mind, we wanted our next steps to involve more than just our sweet little voices. So we decided to start an interview series, interspersed among our chit chat episodes & essay-style episodes, where we talk to a bunch of our cool opera friends - either people we’ve known for a long time, people who have reached out to us over the course of the past year, or people we’ve reached out to ourselves. We want to have cool conversations, hear about the awesome shit you’re all doing, and open a dialogue about what it looks like to bring your dreams and your politics into an operatic space.

Our first guest is the lovely Gwendolyn Kuhlmann. Gwendolyn is an activist, an artist, a mother, and a mezzo soprano. She lived in Berlin for 10 years, studying art song and performing in various opera houses. In 2018, she moved to Oakland, California where she worked as a utility advocate. She worked as a liaison between utility consumers and utility companies, advocating for consumer’s rights to fair and affordable utilities. She worked on preventing shutoffs for low income people. This advocacy inspired her art making in some powerful ways you’ll hear about on this teaser version of the episode. We dig into the wandering in the internal wilderness one experiences while trying to find their artistic voice and purpose that comes from within, not from external validation. We talk about the ‘winter’s journey’/ hero’s journey of being a mother in postpartum, the wilderness of being surrounded by precarious labor as a freelance singer who wants to make meaningful music, and how we use that time in our own ‘Winterreise’ to transmute these experiences and come out the other side of the woods more whole and artistically confident. It was such a powerful and invigorating convo.

Oh HEY! Welcome to a gigantic honking episode. What started as an episode about The Time Perri Broke Her Voice very quickly transformed into a manifesto on decolonizing our relationship with our bodies and remembering lost knowledge. 

From René Descartes to Resmaa Menakem, Charlotte traces the mind-body problem through the ages and connects it to why Perri had such a hard time singing in the year of our lord 2018. With the help of esteemed good friend and certified cool girl Clare Demer, we dive into the dark and depraved world of Muscle Tension Dysphonia and the ways in which the body acts as a canary in a coal mine for our sweet little inner world of emotions. It’s a wild ride!

OMG hi we love this lil chit chat!!! The perf balance of the Big Three: ~~~Current Opera Events~~~Skincare~~~Theory~~~

! Pls consider going to our link in bio to sign the petition to support the demands of Eastman’s Black Student Union in supporting Jahshanti Henry! He was racially profiled by a public safety officer at his own school! He’s a flute STAR and we want to support him in this moment <3 !

Char is knee deep in the very fricked up budget cuts by the administration/board at Ithaca College which include cutting the entire Masters of Music in Performance for every instrument, Conducting, Composition, and Suzuki Pedagogy as well as a TON of faculty. Getting the lil gears turning with the connections between part time/adjunct faculty in higher ed and young artists… !!!PRECARIOUS LABOR!!! UNDERPAID OVERQUALIFIED AND OFTEN EXPLOITED!!! NOT HOT!!!

Perri has taken an econ CLASS and read BOOKS and read ARTICLES this spring and is here to tell us about how UBI is potentially very cool and very sexy. Charlotte agrees, so now we, as a nation, have UBI. It was that simple :) Congress passed it! Nature is healing :)

Char has a lot of feelings about non-U.S. SPFs that she got from another Charlotte… @charlotteparler. Not her alter ego. Our Charlotte is not a skincare chemist and esthetician…. But she is in her heart :) Also, non-U.S. toothpastes. Charlotte is feeling unpatriotic in her body care routines!!! Perri likes Biologique Recherche… also not American… what happened to Freedom Fries and supporting ur Nation???? We are cancelled :(

The one year anni of the podcast is July 2nd… some hot things might be happening…. Stay Chuned

Hello sweet and beautiful friends : ) we decided to spend this week’s Chitchat chitchatting about Black Opera Alliance. They’ve been working tirelessly on the Pledge for Racial Equity and Systemic Change in Opera, including the recent release of the first Insight Report tracking the progress of US Opera Companies in acknowledging, signing, and committing to the pledge!

We spend this episode talking about BOA’s mission, the Pledge, the first Insight Report findings, as well as BOA’s response to Tulsa Opera’s decommissioning of Daniel Roumain. Link to the first Insight Report, to donate to BOA, and the website to request a copy of Daniel Roumain’s aria is in our bio!!! Come chitchat with us : ))) xoxoxox

Guys… we have…. A new…. Idea! And it’s now Aries season so we Immediately Did It. We are going to start doing teeny tiny mini episodes ~interspersed~ between our longer essay-style Bad Boys.

As horse_ebooks famously tweeted back in 2012, “everything happens so much”. We wanted a format where we could talk about all the wild shit that happens in the opera world and discuss the Hot News Items you send our way. We’ll also be doing some fun interviews and smaller scale things. Lots has already happened since this recording, but here’s our first lil ep. This is casual !chit chats!

We’re talking about Oberlin LITERALLY putting all white people on a flier for a Black History Month concert, the famed and Internationally beloved :) Boris Martinovich Competition :), arrests in the opera world, and some other GOINGS ON… tune in.. it’s vibes… it’s chill… smoke a j while you listen… jk if you smoke ouid while listening to this episode we WILL find out and we WILL citizen’s arrest you…

Welcome to CHITCHAT!

Hi everyone, guess what : ) we recorded an episode of our podcast : ) welcome to SEASON TWO BABY!!!! In honor of Valentine’s day, we discuss a very special type of love on today’s ep.. the love between friends : )

Your intrepid hosts discuss the unique temporal experience of friendships in opera, the duality of the Young Artist Experience, and the importance of holding contradicting truths in your body.

Truth 1: The opera world is exploitative and we have to Change Things. Truth 2: We have cultivated meaningful, life-altering relationships while working in this industry. These two realities exist within us, one no more true than the other. We must live with these incompatibilities if we want to forge forward and build a future we all deserve to live in. Charlotte dives into some delicious Friendship Theory, and Perri tries to explain dialectics even though she hasn’t read Hegel in like five years.

Hey cutie.. We’re bringing you a two part series on the history of YAPs and the YAP system’s exploitation of our l a b o r and sanity.

In this first ep, we share some of our stories from YAPs and ‘Pay To Sings’, and we listen to many of the stories you sent in. We brought on our favorite decorated YAP Veteran @jakeblennings to break these down with us. We want to create a space where we can all openly express our frustration with this broken industry without fear. The only way we can properly grieve, feel frustration, and dream of a better world is in a net of support that we actively build with one another! Out loud! We are not alone, you are not alone. We want to continue to build this community of dreamers- continue to send us voice memos!

Critique is good, critique is sexy, critique is hopeful. We love u.