When Nicole Lamartine agreed to Sorensen’s first choral music director at UC Santa Barbara, she knew she was going to take on a challenge. What I perhaps didn’t expect: there are no academics on campus.
The choir, as she points out, talks about the other people who are together. What do you do when it’s not possible? Lamartine, who came to UCSB at the University of Wyoming, says you evaluate, adjust, and locate a way to make it work.
“It’s an unprecedented moment, and offering online courses that are inherently non-technological is a huge challenge,” he says. “So I talked a lot to my colleagues across the country and tried to locate practices to train a choral ensemble online.”
As the first full-time choir director at UCSB since Michel-Marc Gervais retired in 2016, Lamartine sees the show as a type of write-pending composition.
“I wasn’t necessarily looking to leave Wyoming, but the opportunities here, the location, the student population, are huge in terms of creating the program,” he said. “And it was anything that attracted me to UCSB.”
Lamartine’s delight as choir director puts her in an exclusive position to take the program to new heights. In addition to her 12 years in Wyoming, where she won the university’s highest coaching award, she has been guest conductor of foreign choirs of honor in Germany, Oman and the United Arab Emirates and nine national choirs.
He has led music meetings at home and abroad, and his YouTube channel, The Choral Eye, is a resource for choir musicians and teachers.
In addition to achieving UCSB’s flagship chamber choir, Lamartine will oversee the conduct of UCSB choirs, the women’s choir, the gospel choir and the Middle Eastern choir. He also plans to bring back the low tenor chorus of men.
And maybe I can do without the academics on campus.
“The generation we have is limited due to noise delays,” Lamartine said. “It is very unlikely to sing a Zoom call in combination, for example. And so, locating artistic tactics to rehearse and be informed of music, more individually, and then combine them into small teams for evaluation recordings or Zoom meetings where one user sings at once, is a way to go through a practice session process.”
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If the scholars cannot sing together, he said, it can still give them the chance to revel in music on a deeper level.
“This is an opportunity to deal with those forgotten spaces that we usually have in a choral essay,” Lamartine said. “Generally, in essays, we focus so much on the creation and repetition of music that we forget the vital elements of text analysis, the ancient perspectives, the cultural perspectives.
“So it’s a wonderful opportunity to really immerse yourself in those kind of choral rehearsal systems.”
If all this turns out to be a delicate task, there is no choirmaster in America more suited to this challenge. Lamartine, which is not five feet tall, is, however, one of the most productive dynamphiles of its elegance in the country.
She did not compete last year, however, she was on the five most sensitive national teams for all ages in 2016 and 2017, and placed in the International League Powerlifting championships in 2018 for all teams in her weight class, and the first for her age group. Training
Your best brands: squat, 292.1 pounds; mendacity evolved downwards, 154.9; pink earth, 352.7.
Choral music and weightlifting don’t seem to be complementary activities, but, according to Lamartine, you’d be surprised. He said by breathing the key of both.
“In the chorus, we make our sounds through our voices, it feeds through our breathing, and here in the gym, if I don’t breathe well, I don’t get up well,” he told Wyoming Public Media in 2016. “Then I simply corroborated my thought that breathing is the driving force of life, regardless of context.
Now, as she contemplates a new bankruptcy in her life at UCSB, she is determined to see her students breathe as one in the song.
“It’s my absolute commitment that I’ll track down tactics for us to sing in combination,” he said. “And I feel that making a song in combination is one of the most valuable reports we have as human beings. Even though we sing online, my purpose is to make it meaningful and impactful for students.”
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