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(Opera music, singing)

Michael Hamilton: We were literally just dropped into a world that was totally foreign. No one in the town really spoke any English, but they were comforting in their attitudes. The whole town was really happy that we were there, and people really circled around us to help us with this experience.

Karen Peeler: People were lovely. They loved this group. They were very welcoming and opened their homes and their town and their businesses to us. We performed in their Theatre Sociale, which is their main little civic theatre that holds about 400 people. It's just a darling little horseshoe. Right across the street from that is a school that must be 300 years old. It's a boys' school in the winter but in the summer it belong to our lessons and classes.

Students live within walking distances of all of us these areas. All of these places were just a couple of blocks from the main downtown piazza. So we really took over that little town and got to know it very well in five weeks.

I observed in their singing a change in the way their Italian sounded--very subtle changes in vowel production or the way they roll their r's or just the way they shape their mouth. Guided by these fabulous Italian opera coaches that we had from the Rossini Conservatory in Pesaro.

(Teacher speaking Italian)

You can study in a classroom languages and diction forever and the difference that can be made by living in the culture and hearing it on a daily basis, just for a month or five weeks as we did, is huge. The opportunity for students to go abroad for the summers or for a year or for part of their study is invaluable.

Hamilton: It was a little nerve-wracking in the beginning to think that these Italian people who have been listening to these operas their entire lives and know them backwards an forwards were going to be sitting and listening to us sing in Italian. But they were actually quite receptive to what we were doing and were very supportive of our efforts.

(Music)

Hamilton: It's a very different lifestyle but the highlight for me was definitely experiencing something that was so different from how we live here.

(Dinner conversation)

Peeler: I'm very happy to be at a place that will make this possible, not only for them to go and to facilitate them getting college credit for it but will support them financially. Each one of our students got a very nice support grant from the College of the Arts to make this trip. If a student can avail themselves or this opportunity for one quarter, or for a summer, or for a two-week experience, their lives will be richer. Not only from an education standpoint, but from a human standpoint.

 

Most of the Ohio State students who traveled to Italy this summer as part of an intensive language and music program didn't speak Italian.

That quickly changed.

Not many of the people of Novafeltria, a small city in northern Italy, spoke English.

"We had to learn Italian or not make it," says Professor Karen Peeler, who went on the trip. "If you wanted to go buy food or go to the drugstore or whatever, you had to figure out how to do what you needed to do."

With mornings dedicated to language classes and afternoons full of music lessons from Italian opera instructors, it didn't take the Ohio State group long to catch on to the native tongue.

"There was a definite a sense of accomplishment to be able to walk into the grocery store, order something at the deli counter, walk up to the cashier, pay for it, and walk out and do it all and not even think until you were done, 'Wow, I did that all in Italian,'" says graduate student Michael Hamilton.

At first, Hamilton says, he was intimidated at the prospect of taking the stage to sing in the language he was so new to, in front of native speakers.

“The highlight for me was definitely experiencing something that was so different from how we live here.”
—Michael Hamilton

"It was a little nerve-wracking in the beginning to think that these Italian people who have been listening to these operas their entire lives and know them backwards an forwards were going to be sitting and listening to us sing in Italian," he says. "But they were actually quite receptive to what we were doing and were very supportive of our efforts."

After five weeks of intensive Italian, Hamilton feels more comfortable with singing in the language Peeler says is "crucial for students to learn."

"I truly understand what I'm saying and what's being said around me rather than just memorizing syllables, memorizing sounds, to make it sound like it should," he says. "It actually has a meaning behind it now."

Peeler says the music faculty "will always push to do some summer activities in Europe. I cannot minimize the value of studying abroad for any American student, but particularly for music students."

"American students tend to be very isolated," she says. "We don't have near neighbors that we can go see all the time, and we tend to think, by and large that English is the only language that you need to learn to survive in the world. The experience of living in another culture and learning to speak their language and communicate to them on their terms widens your horizons."

It's easy to want to widen your horizons when the scene is as beautiful as Peeler and Hamilton describe Novafeltria.

"Anywhere you looked in the town there was a beautiful mountain vista, there was a river running by," Peeler says. "Almost every mountain peak you looked at had a fortress on top of it, probably dating back to the 13th, 14th century."

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