Shows
Thrilled to AnnounceTo dead things and the mutable pastWe dissect the idea of a fixed, unchanging past and futures colored by the deaths we experience through Handel arias, Lynch's death, Yuval Sharon's 'A New Philosophy of Opera', Nosferatu 2024, the anniversary of Perri's father's death, 'Die Wise' by Stephen Jenkinson, and the opera singer who sang at the inauguration.2025-02-221h 45Thrilled to Announceopera is undead, the 'it' girl will save usHAPPY 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!2025-01-061h 17Thrilled to AnnounceCRINGE: Part 1Is opera cringe? Are you cringe? Let's find out together :) Charlotte & Perri discuss the cringe inherent in performance through the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jia Tolentino, and their own little brains! They share stories, compare notes, and commune with cringe. The only way out is through - let's have a seance with uncomfortable emotions.2024-05-062h 15Thrilled to AnnounceTerrified to Announce: A Halloween SPECTACULARHAPPY 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 w...2023-10-3145 minThrilled to AnnounceReview Theories Pt. 2: an interview with critic and cool person Sylvia KormanSylvia's Don Giovanni review!!
We are SO excited to share our convo with THEE Sylvia Korman!! They are an opera critic for Parterre Box, owner of @peoplemadatopera on twitter, and a phd student genius!!
We followed Sylvia to the met’s production of don Giovanni like two little puppy dogs to get an inside look at the critic’s PROCESS: what are they thinking about when they sit down to watch a production they plan on reviewing? Do they take notes? Should a reviewer lean into The Dunk, or resist it with all their might? Are...2023-09-251h 12Thrilled to AnnounceMeditations and Musings on Meaning at the Met CompetitionWelcome 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...2023-06-031h 15Thrilled to AnnounceFlexible identities, ‘bad’ reviews, and behind the scenes at a Plopera™️We giggle at the bad reviews we’ve gotten over the years and read some of the haunting reviews you all sent us on insta. Then we start to flesh out a theory about fluctuating and flexible identity, both in rehearsal and in life. It’s so deliciously easy to form our self-understanding around a stiff and rigid self-concept… what changes when we soften our idea of ourselves?
THEN, in a new segment called TTA Hits the Streets, We TRAVEL to a real LIVE rehearsal of ‘the smallest sound in the smallest space’, a piece by Bryce McClendon...2023-03-031h 28Thrilled to AnnounceSlurping Oysters and Swinging Big: a convo w/ Haus of ShmizzayHi 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 powe...2023-02-171h 24Thrilled to AnnounceThe Bridge between What Is and What Can BeWE’RE BACK BABIES!!!! Strap in, hunker down, pack a snack, because this one is a doozy. This magnum opus of an episode is the beginning of a gigantic exploration process for us. What started as a simple question (‘what would our dream rehearsal process look like?’) turned into a beautiful, twisty-turny, unanswerable labyrinth of interwoven thread.
What would it feel like to have the genuine opportunity to fully realize our dreams in the opera world, in our vocal technique, and beyond? Why do we feel incapable of carving out non-normative paths in our lives? How has this l...2022-08-302h 00
Thrilled to AnnounceA Conversation with Members of the BOA: In it for the long haulNEW 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...2022-03-071h 43Thrilled to AnnounceChit Chat: Mercury Retrograde and Audition Season DialecticsCHITCHAT 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 h...2021-11-241h 08Thrilled to AnnounceK-POP Universe & YAP Universe Collide *PATREON TEASER*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 :) t...2021-10-3125 minThrilled to AnnounceNancy Drew and The Case Of Chautauqua OperaLike 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 mi...2021-10-1054 minThrilled to AnnounceAn Artist's Proverbial Winterreise *PATREON TEASER*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...2021-08-2949 minThrilled to AnnounceDecolonizing Broken VoicesOh 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 an...2021-06-221h 42Thrilled to AnnounceChit Chat: From Sunscreen to Social Safety NetsOMG 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 2021-05-231h 00Thrilled to AnnounceChit Chat: Black Opera Alliance ~*~*SPOTLIGHT*~*~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 t...2021-05-011h 09Thrilled to AnnounceChit Chat: Life’s a Highway and We’re Gonna Ride ItGuys… 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. Th...2021-03-2737 minThrilled to Announce<3 Friendship <3Hi 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 with...2021-02-111h 06Thrilled to AnnounceThe YAP Episode Pt. 1 (Feat. Blake Jennings)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...2020-12-101h 22Thrilled to AnnounceDreaming of Opera AnarchyHelloooo reporting live from Paxton’s universe~*~*
She’s a SINGER she’s an ANARCHO-SYNDICALIST she’s a BRUNETTE. As our very first guest, shes coming to remind us that we deserve community, a livelihood as artists, and art that is empowering to both the artists and community!! It’s just what you deserve, baby!
We’re getting into:
* Paxton’s experience protesting consistently for the past six months
* Fostering solidarity among opera singers
* What an opera world centered around mutual aid could look like
* Our dreams of restructuring o...2020-10-241h 11Thrilled to Announce~Chill~ Q&A Interlude EpHello??? 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 ! I...2020-09-1556 minThrilled to AnnounceAuthenticity + ~Opera~ticityEp 4 is out! We’re getting into identity, shapeshifting, and evolving as little avatars in this world (and the opera world!)
How can we remind ourselves that we’re not stagnant, but constantly growing, adapting, and full of infinite possibility? Do we sound like we’re on shrooms? We’re making connections between Heidegger, @sighswoon, and Minecraft! (?!) Come listen to us think about how to not be so in our little egos and instead leave room for the possibilities of new definitions & Sims Expansion Packs of self!
Some questions we answer to provide organization so we don’t spiral into esoteric i...2020-08-191h 27Thrilled to AnnounceCancel Culture + LA Opera Talk + The Spreadsheet is Out!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: YUP2020-07-281h 16Thrilled to AnnounceOpera Singers of the World, Unite!We dove into the dark & haunted world of ~Opera Singer Facebook~ and surfaced w some more marxist analysis! First, we check back in with some opera companies and see if they’ve said or done anything remotely anti-racist! Palm Beach Opera, still can’t tell if ur ok?? (Tune in next week for our full-episode pt. 2 of our BLM response breakdown)
2020-07-1453 minThrilled to AnnounceIntro + Opera Companies’ Responses to BLM Pt. 1Today we start our series on our Magnum Opus of Excel spreadsheets: Opera Company Responses (or lack thereof) to the protests and rebellions for Black Liberation. R u ok Palm Beach Opera? Haven’t heard a PEEP. First up, we introduce you to Perri’s Marxist take on Young Artist Programs and a standard Charlotte Spongebob Metaphor relating to nipple visibility in the audition room.
00:12:17 Being cucked by Pay To Sings
00:30:15 Breakdown of spreadsheet of opera companies’ responses
01:13:33 Perri, Charlotte, and a crow outside Charlotte’s window discuss the title of the Podcast!!2020-07-031h 17