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Time Signatures: Measures of Tomorrow’s Musicians - Alex McKissick

Patrick Fort
/
Aspen Public Radio

Alex McKissick is a singer from Connecticut. He’s twenty-three years old and is currently getting his masters at Juliard in New York, where he got his undergrad.

  Alex has lived his whole live in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.  You could say that Alex has lived in a geographic box, but his voice helped him explode out of it - all the way to Aspen.

 

He got his musical start when his mom recommended that he get into the arts.

 

“You know I’d come back and tell my parents the full recap of every TV show I’d watch, and my mom would say ‘Alex why you go tell someone a story that they’d want to hear.”

 

So he did. He started doing shows in high school while continuing to be active on his rowing team. Soon, shows in high school got him to the Aspen Music Festival and School where he was part of a recent performance of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. He was cast as Benvolio, and acted as an understudy for the role of Romeo. In his spare time, he tries to relax and get away from music.

 

“I forget who said this, but the one bad part about being in the arts is that you never get to see any of the other arts.”

 

He jokes that he has worked his way through the entirety of the Netflix streaming catalogue, and is currently watching a few series on HBO.

 

“You end up watching tv a lot because there are a lot of times when you’re just kind of sitting there, and you’re like ‘I can’t practice because I have to save my voice for tomorrow, but I can’t go out and do anything fun, and I really don’t want to do anything productive because I just sang and looked at my scores all day, so the movies and tv - we become connoisseurs.”  

 

Opera is a tough part of classical music. It requires that the singer be able to translate multiple languages and sing with the emotion and intent of the original writing. Alex has training in Latin and is trying to become fluent in Italian. He says the disconnect between understanding the words and then being able to apply emotion to them is a difficult one to bridge. He said sometimes he would have to be on the spot with what certain words mean.

 

“‘What does this word mean?’ ‘Uh it’s something...It’s a bird. It’s a small bird. Ok, yeah. Right. Small bird.’ You have to be on that level. You have to be ready to go.”

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