Thrilled to Announce

Welcome to Classical Music Social Media Anthropology 101. Please take out your syllabus and have a seat.We take a magnifying glass, and microscope, a thoughtful gaze and point it to the strange, silly, and occasionally harrowing landscape of opera singer Instagram. Do we create our internet content, or does our internet content create us? What will we find in our search for truth in the quagmire of the algorithm? Does the internet even matter? Does the internet even care? Much like opera, the internet is living, the internet is dying over and over and over forever.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!! In this episode we discuss: - Being maximalists - Braiding our hair - This Peter Gelb op-ed - This Alex Ross article - This it girl article - The operatic it girl (does she exist) - Opera sounds alien and weird, let's lean in - SO MUCH MORE!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!! A few weeks ago we asked you guys to tell us all about your paranormal operatic experiences, and this episode is full of those stories!!! Haunted homestays, ghost cats who hate singing, vengeful on-stage spirits, prophetic pre-audition dreams, and MORE!! We’re all haunted by specters of singers past, possessed by them every time we steal ornaments from old recordings… this art form is a way of communicating w spirit; one hand holding onto the memory of all the beautiful shit we’ve made in the past, the other swimming through the murky waters of the present towards an uncharted, glimmering future...

Welcome to our MET COMPETITION EPISODE!!!! We snuck our gigantic microphones into the metropolitan opera HOUSE to chit chat with friends old and new, share our observations, and read poems to each other lol. We mediate on loss, growth, and bearing witness to joy. We had a lot of fun free associating, connecting our favorite thinkers and tarot card archetypes to our emotional landscapes. How can we incorporate thee fool into our self concepts???? How does the met exist within all of us, a looming and threatening and powerful dream? Is the met our shadow? Finally, We asked YOU GUYS what words and phrases you associate with the met competition and giggled about them. Love u!!

Hi everyone :) we are so thrilled and pumped to share our gorgeous convo w James aka hausofshmizzay on instagram. We connected close to a year ago and met irl this past fall. We’ve wanted to have them on the pod for a long long time, and we’re so excited that we finally made it happen. For those few who may not know James, they have blown up over the past year because of their posts detailing in depth discussions around vocal technique across the ages and ongoing issues in the opera industry, especially around young artists collective power. They are a voice teacher and a cultural critic. ( The Joan Rivers of opera discourse?). They have an interesting way of blending technical discussion, social critiques of the industry, and humor in their posts. We had a blast chit chatting about the role of the critic, the radical act of ENJOYING your own singing, swinging big, taking risks, honing your aesthetic ear and moral compass, working against the assumption that the singer is a perpetual student, and of course the sopranos. We hope u enjoy love u lots!!

NEW EP ALERT!!!!!!! We are so excited to share this awesome convo we had with a couple of members of the Black Opera Alliance Leadership Council. Zyda Culpepper reached out to us earlier this year to acknowledge our previous BOA episode and to suggest that the next time we talk about the org, we have some members on the pod. She was totally right and this convo blossomed and bloomed. We discussed what the BOA has been up to in the past few years, responses to their pledge, and reflections on the ebbs and flows of operatic activism. The convo spun into a larger discussion on the operatic canon, the ways in which white singers can start showing up for their Black colleagues. and so much more. We left this episode feeling thankful and excited for BOA’s continued impact on the operatic landscape. Included in this episode is Zyda Culpepper, Garrett Mcqueen, and James Dargan.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

Hello??? Hi! It’s us! We’re Thrilled 2 Announce that you all submitted so many fun questions for us to answer!! (Both the questions directed to us & musings on life in general.) Because we can’t shut the F word up, we edited it down to a 57 min lil chat because we are Good Samaritans. (The original recording was 2.5 hours???? Because we answered every q cause we love u all!! Face it!!) We have some //meaty\\ eps on the horizon in the next two months- we’re researching unions, putting together a sexy lil yap episode, and more ! If a lil Q&A speaks to you, come on in...

Hello??? We've missed you! We've been working overtime to get this Opera Company Spreadsheet finished, and it's OUT! Check our insta bio for the link. In today's episode, we're tackling way too many categories... the original recording was 2.5 hours lmao First, something objectively WILD happened with the Richard Tucker Foundation this week that led us to discuss our differing opinions surrounding the phenomenon often called 'Cancel Culture'. We have a nuanced conversation about accountability, consequence, and our place in this narrative. Do we as white people have more work to do after a Cancelation? Spoiler alert: YUP Then, we take a second to reflect on one of the most powerful conversations we've seen take place in the opera world. Mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges hosts a zoom call with five other Black opera singers (Karen Slack, Julia Bullock, Morris Robinson, Lawrence Brownlee, and Russell Thomas) to reflect on the Opera world's response to George Floyd's lynching. Finally, the spreadsheet detailing Opera Companies' responses to the BLM protests/rebellions is out. We talk though some of our categorizations, what to look out for, and some ways we've been able to think critically about this data. As always, we wanna hear from you! xoxo the TTA ladies