Lucy Fitz Gibbon: New Music, Nature, and Schubert

Lucy Fitz Gibbon wears many hats: she's a soprano whose repertoire spans from the Renaissance to the present day, she teaches at Cornell and Bard, and she has been known to dig around in libraries for a manuscript or two 🤓

Naturally then, the reach of this conversation is far and wide, from Lucy's musical upbringing playing violin and watching operas, to her grounding Feldeinsamkeit walks at Marlboro Music Festival. She also gushes over Schubert's long-form songs for 10+ minutes...and that's AFTER the edit, mind you. But I am all about it, because what comes through in this episode is Lucy's eloquent passion and commitment to amplifying the multiplicity of voices, past and present, that are "integral to classical music's future," and I could not agree more. Have a listen; this conversation is an inspiration and a meditation all wrapped in one.

Music:
"Viola" by Franz Schubert, D. 786
performed by Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano, and Evren Ozel, piano, at the Marlboro Music Festival in 2018
For the whole recording, go to: https://www.marlboromusic.org/recordings/viola-d-786/franz-schubert/id-7100/

Transcript

Suzanne Lis  1:02  
Welcome to This Embodied Voice. My name is Suzanne Lis, and my guest today is Lucy Fitzgibbon. Lucy is a soprano who, if you look at her bio and her schedule, has a clear intention to amplify and lift up a multiplicity of voices in classical music. Sometimes it's a forgotten work by a long-dead composer, or sometimes it's a world premiere of a new work. Sometimes it's also the literal voices of her students at Cornell and Bard, which she says are unique and vital. 

Suzanne Lis  1:31  
So, welcome to the podcast Lucy! 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  1:32  
Thank you so much for having me. 

Suzanne Lis  1:35  
Thank you for making the time. So I thought we would start with just a simple question of: how are you feeling? And how is your body feeling today?

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  1:44  
Oh, that's actually an interesting question for today, because I've been a little bit under the weather for the last few days. Just running like a low grade fever. So I'm trying to figure out what that is all about. So today, I am feeling a little bit tired, a little bit under the weather, but trying to exercise that with plenty of sleep and all that other good stuff.

Suzanne Lis  2:17  
Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you even more then for keeping our appointment. So maybe you want to talk about your general like life and career trajectory up until this point.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  2:29  
 Sure. 

Suzanne Lis  2:29  
So people who aren't familiar with your work can get a sense of who you are as an artist, as a person. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  2:35  
Sure. I was raised in Davis, California, which is a relatively small town in the Central Valley in Northern California. And I grew up there in a family that was not musical professionally, but was interested in music, I actually did start playing the violin at the age of five and played quite seriously up through high school and continued playing a little bit in college and, and do have, I mean, I have been bringing my violin to to coachings at Bard recently because the students are working on the Kafka fragments. And so it's been helpful to be able to demonstrate a few things there. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  3:23  
But starting in middle school, I got guilt tripped into joining a children's chorus, and actually discovered that I really loved it. And I had been very interested in watching opera starting from a pretty early age, my dad basically realized that if he brought me along, when he bought his standing tickets at the Opera in San Francisco, the ushers would take pity on him with his small little child and, and give him open seats. And so I had been going to the opera quite a lot, but had no real aspirations of of singing, like that, or singing in general. But I discovered that I was really looking forward to these rehearsals in a way that I certainly enjoyed my weekly orchestral rehearsals and, and enjoyed playing chamber music with my family. But there was a sort of freedom and a sense of myself that I got from singing that felt very different from my experience as a violinist. We're speaking of the body - it always felt like I was sort of coming up against my own limitations. And I think some of that also had to do with my, the, the teacher that I had and, and other extenuating circumstances, but I developed really some bad anxiety related to solo performance on the violin. And then just feeling like it was never really adequate enough. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  5:03  
And in singing, it felt like it was this way that I could explore music and musicality. That felt very much like it was unfettered. And so I started taking private lessons with the woman who directed my children's choir, I just really found a home there musically, with with voice. But I also really didn't think I was going to go into music professionally, I had aspirations of being a doctor. And so when I applied to college, I applied mostly to liberal arts programs and wound up attending Yale University. And again, I was engaged in music there, but really came in thinking I was going to major in the sciences, but through a sort of funny collection of events, wound up really falling in love with the kind of rigor that I felt was possible or even necessary in vocal music. And this combination of literature and history and social and political thought that all came together in this art form. And so as time went on, and really thanks to the encouragement, and generosity of my teachers there, I decided, like, I won this prize when I graduated, which allowed me to have this sort of financial ability to pay for grad school. And that was just a miracle. And then that meant that despite maybe the reservations of my parents, I could strike out on that path. After college, I attended the Glenn Gould's School of the Royal Conservatory Artist's Diploma program in Toronto and worked there with some really fantastic teachers in a very small and supportive environment, which was great for me as somebody who had had a lot of performing experience in my undergraduate but didn't have the kind of exposure to repertoire classes or diction classes the way that other conservatory students might have.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  7:36  
And then from there, I felt like I wanted to return back to the United States, because I am not a Canadian citizen, and I did a master's degree at Bard. And then after I finished that, I wound up moving to Ithaca, where my then-fiancé, now husband, was completing his doctorate and was very lucky to be invited to join the adjunct voice faculty there. And so I started teaching there in 2015. And remained in that position until 2019, when I was appointed to be the director of that program. And then, in the spring of 2019, I had also been invited to begin teaching at Bard. So I now teach in the graduate vocal arts program at Bard, I will be joining the faculty of our new undergraduate program in the college conservatory there. And then I am also maintaining my studio and running the voice program at Cornell. 

Suzanne Lis  8:49  
Wow. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  8:49  
And then I guess on top of all of that, I do also perform quite a bit. 

Suzanne Lis  8:54  
So maybe going back to the violin thing, so I also played violin growing up. Did you feel like when you started singing, or singing more seriously, like studying privately that there were certain things that like translated over very well, some things that did not translate over very well?

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  9:14  
You know, something that it took me probably at least until I was in my artists Diploma in Toronto to really unpack this. But I realized that because my study of violin had started, almost, you know, from before, I could remember any other reality that my sense of the birth of sound, the onset of sound, came from a feeling of resistance with the bow on the string. And I realized at that point that I was translating that idea of resistance to an idea of resistance, really, in my vocal folds. And so that's actually really informed my teaching because nobody had really bothered until that point to suggest that that could be part of my mental process. And so it took me time to understand how to translate that into support, rather than into a feeling of constriction here. And I am, it is now something that the, you know, the first thing that I speak about with incoming students with new students to my studio is what their other musical background is, and basically trying to figure out how they're thinking about how sound begins. Because I think for a lot of young singers, it's very difficult to imagine creating a sound that doesn't involve some feeling of constriction in in the throat. And for me, that really was tied to just not even being able to imagine another way of making sound because that was just so inherent to my understanding of what sound production meant. That was a really important moment for me.

Suzanne Lis  11:05  
You were talking about how one of the things that you experience when you switch from playing violin to singing voice, was the feeling of, you know, there must be like a resistance or a sense of like, something happening in the body, when I think in reality, when singing is going well, when everything is coordinated nicely, then it's actually remarkable, almost like, very minimal sensation, or an absence of sensation. And I was wondering how you approach that in your students, and especially maybe through this time of like teaching online.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  11:39  
So I've actually, I feel like I've also continued to learn more things about teaching, through the pandemic, and through this experience of not being present with students. A lot of what informs my work is, and and I should have mentioned earlier, a lot of what has been transformational for me as a singer, has been my work with Alexander Technique. And so I do a lot of work with the students that is based on that, based on exercises from Alexander, thoughts and vocabulary/language from the Alexander Technique. And I always already before the pandemic had engaged with my students quite a bit physically in the studio. So whether was, you know, doing floor work, or pushing themselves around in rolling chairs, or leaning into walls or pianos, or engaging physically in other ways. I have now as a teacher, over Zoom, been able to think about "Okay, so what can I see in the either the background of this practice room or for my students who are taking lessons at home? You know, what do I see leaning against the wall? Or what do you have in the space with you that we can engage with physically." 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  13:02  
The other thing that sort of surprised me and that I've been thinking a lot about recently, is the sort of radical empathy that it takes to be a teacher. I think from a scientific standpoint, we might say that this is evidence of mirror neurons in action that, you know, somebody who is highly trained in any field when they're watching somebody else, go through the motions, feel, or experience, activity in their neurons, which mirrors that actions that that other person is taking. And so what I have realized, in being, you know, disembodied from the student in another physical space is that I feel very strongly in my own body, what they are doing. And so then my job is to try to find language that speaks to that individual student, that allows me to describe what they are feeling, such that we might then adjust things physically for them, that allows them to move through or move past or better conceptualize physical actions that they're engaging with. And so I've actually been kind of amazed. I mean, of course, when I'm sitting at the piano, and the student is in the crook of the piano, I can't see their knees. And of course, when I was in the room with them before I could still tell that their knees were locked. But still, every time it amazes me, I'm like, Oh, yes, I can hear that your knees are locked. Or I can hear that the lower part of your spine is curved too far inward and your diaphragm is not able to descend fully. Or I can hear the tension between your shoulder blades. Or the fact that you know, I can feel the fact that your soft palate is not behaving the way it should be.

Suzanne Lis  15:04  
And I was gonna ask you also about your experiences teaching trans voices. Because I think, like, yes, radical empathy is for sure, I think, a core tenet of teaching, and I think, but I also think you have to acknowledge your limits of your own physical experience, and how has it been like teaching trans voices, because I could also imagine that, you know, getting in your body may not be the wonderful juicy feeling that you want it to be when you have feelings of like dysmorphia. Sorry. dysphoria. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  15:40  
Absolutely. And I think that has been, so when I - the first student that I worked with, who was trans, when we began our work together, they were using  they/them pronouns, now, she's using she/her pronouns. And so we've, we have really been on a journey together. But something - I had and have friends who are trans masculine, but I had not worked with and, and who are singers. So I had spoken with them a little bit about that process. But I had not worked with any trans feminine singers. And in starting to do research, first of all, I was very open with this student that I did not have experience, and that I was ready to learn with her. And to be an ally, and someone who could try to look for resources and connect her with other people who know more than me, but not somebody who was coming from this as a place, you know, from some sort of place of superior knowledge. And I quickly started to realize that there's very little literature actually about teaching trans feminine voices, and that a lot of the literature that is out there, whether it's specifically from a voice teacher's perspective, or from the perspective of somebody working in voice therapy is about feminizing, the voice. And I was also working with someone who was going through an incredibly difficult process of transformation. And so as you said, something that I can, that I really struggled with, with this particular student in the beginning was that I had to completely rethink everything that I do in in the studio, but nothing that I did with her, I think, really matched what I was doing with other students. And so it was very difficult. And I feel very grateful that she had the patience to explore with me. I realized that we use a lot of language that is very pejorative, and gendered in talking about the voice. And so through my work with her, began to adopt more gender nonspecific language to speak about vocal function. And to think about timbre in the beginning, she didn't even really want to vocalize in front of me. And so we did work on breath. But similarly, you know, trying to find an embodied voice when, as you were saying, your own relationship with your body. I mean, I've taught students who have issues with body image, students who are struggling with eating disorders or students who for for various reasons, have difficulty connecting with their physical experience. But of course, for this particular student, this feeling was was very strong. And her relationship to her body was also changing a lot because at that point, she had just started hormone therapy a little bit before that. And while of course, hormone therapy affects trans feminine women differently than it does trans masculine individuals. It does still affect the vocal folds and they're not going to get shorter, but the texture and the quality of the folds change and of course your relationship to your body changes. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  19:57  
One thing that was very meaningful to her was to start to introduce more technology into the lesson. So she spent some time at Ian Howell's voice pedagogy programs in the summer. And we began using this software - VoceVista - a software that allowed us to have, you know, visual analysis of what was going on. As she or I were making sounds, and actually, we were able to use this even over Zoom with screenshare. Yeah, so with this particular student, it was a mix of, in the beginning, a lot of talking, me describing function, and finding things for her to explore on her own privately without me there. And then from there, it became just a huge amount of play time work in making sounds together. So not really working on repertoire. Or if we were working on repertoire, really focusing that work on the choral work that she was doing, and making her feel comfortable and healthy and safe in a choral ensemble. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  21:16  
And it was the end of our first semester working together, we had a real, I think breakthrough moment where it felt like she really trusted me for the first time. And I think from that moment forward, though, the work came in. It was like she was progressing by leaps and bounds. And of course, with every student, you know, there is that moment where where you unlock that thing. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  21:48  
But something that, that always remained difficult for us was not really finding repertoire that spoke to her. And, and her often feeling like, you know, I mean, every single person has experienced making, while I would, I would imagine, anyway, you know, try singing something and just feeling so woefully inadequate. I'm sure you and I have experienced that. But you know, for her, it really felt even more...

Suzanne Lis  22:20  
Like a judgment on her abilities, or...?

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  22:23  
Yeah, and, and feeling like she would never live up to what she wanted. And so I tried, again, you know, this is only from my perspective as a cisgender woman, but something that I have tried to emphasize to every student, but especially to the student, is that their individual voices are not only unique, but are necessary. And so the uniqueness and the ability of her voice to encompass multitudes was something that was not just inherent to who she was, but was something that brought important beauty and meaning into the world. And so one way that we tried to also address this feeling of her not having repertoire that really reflected her was to have someone write repertoire for her. So there's a student in the doctoral program, at Cornell, in, in composition, who is non binary, and this person worked with my student and with a poet, friend of my student, to write a piece that allowed her to explore more of her voice. And, you know, in this way, it was really meant for somebody with her instrument, somebody whose voice can span a really large range, somebody whose voice really can speak to, you know, the experiences that were outlined in that poem. But yeah, it's been, you know, it is challenging, and with that, similarly, with other gender nonconforming students that I've worked with, you know, I think our task really is as teachers is, of course, to, I feel, I do feel so strongly that the individual experiences of the student and their own ideas about beauty and about communication, and about truth, provide something that is unnecessary in the world. And so helping those students to see the inherent beauty that is already present in their, in our in their voices, because every voices imperfect, and in progress and Yeah, and there's still something really vital about that expression.

Suzanne Lis  25:56  
Can you talk about your research on the Schubert Viola and Vergissmeinnicht songs, I saw that you a while back went to the Morgan Library to look at it. And it seems like you've had like a long love affair with the songs. And for people who don't know, it's these are two, I guess long form, you'd call them, Schubert songs, which are a little more unusual for his repertoire.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  26:23  
Yeah. So you know, in voice, we're used to singing a lot of short form pieces, whether or not it is an aria within a cantata, or an oratorio or an opera, or a song, an individual song that stands alone or song, even within a song cycle. Everything that we do is made up of these relatively small building blocks. And so when I found this song, which is about 12 minutes long, and is in a kind of rondo form with this returning refrain, it really struck me because it reminded me of rondo-form pieces that I had played on the violin. And it just got me kind of thinking about why it is that we only work with this sort of miniature form. And then at a later point, I realized that Viola had a companion piece, Vergissmeinnicht. And so then I was sort of doubly struck. And it became a goal for me to finally have some opportunity to program those two pieces together. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  27:46  
But when you look back to historical accounts of the work, it's been written off basically, since Schubert's day as this sort of anomaly. There's this great quote about listening to it is "like being inveigled into attending a horticultural show." Because the piece itself has all of these flower characters. In looking at the two pieces in aggregate, I just began to note and doing research on the two of them, in preparation for performance, I began to notice a number of sort of interesting parallels, and started to have more and more questions about the piece. Part of this also stemmed from the fact that Viola exists in two published versions. And they have some really disagreeing markings. And that, I think, in order to really make the piece come alive, you have to - based on the two published versions, you have to make some assumptions and some qualified guesses as to what Schubert was initially thinking. But when I started working on Vergissmeinnicht I came across a digitized version of the manuscript in the Morgan Library. The Morgan library actually also has - it's not the manuscript but the only sort of extant material in Schubert's hand is a fair copy with corrections in his hand of Viola. And so the real gratifying thing with that was to realize that all of these corrections that were in Schubert's hand, totally backed up all of the musical choices that I had been making that in some cases had been questioned by authorities greater than I, because they weren't in the score. And I felt very strongly that these were choices that needed to happen in order to make the piece work. And then I saw that Schubert himself had had agreed with those things or had initially intended for those things to be in the score. And so that was really thrilling for its own reason, just to feel that you know, whether the composer is alive and somebody you can call up and talk to them on the phone, or whether the composer has been dead for a long time, that you really can enter into this empathic relationship with a composer and their relationship with notation that allows you to make educated choices that reflect their initial intention.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  30:21  
And something that Susan Botti, the composer and soprano Susan Botti, they just said in a talk that she gave our students at Bard was that when we look at a musical score, we have this notion that it's a physical object to which we must - that we must serve. But if we think about it, of course, that musical object is itself only a reproduction of the sounds that initially existed in the composer's mind. And so the music came before the score. And the score exists so that we can turn it back into music. And, and that I really feel strongly that no matter when the piece was composed, we should enter into our relationship with the score with that in mind, that the score itself is is about a simulacrum of what the music should be. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  31:28  
So at any rate, with these two pieces, the text is written, the text was written by Franz von Schober, who was a close colleague, maybe somebody with whom Schubert had a romantic relationship, depending on how you interpret his letter, certainly somebody with whom he had a very close relationship. And in these two songs, we have the story of two different flowers, a violet, and a forget-me-not. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  31:59  
And the violet, the story of Viola. It almost is like the story of the brides waiting for the arrival of Christ, where we have these women preparing themselves and it sort of anointing themselves for, as the poem states, for the bride groom. and Viola, gets up too early and is too excited about spring's arrival and is ultimately killed. But spring, seeing her sort of purity of heart and spirit holds her up in a way above all of the other flowers. Whereas in Vergissmeinnicht, we see this forget-me-not, spring comes across her lying on a bank and kisses her, and then disappears. And so she has this sexual awakening, which was not something that she had initially asked for, actually. So you could also maybe view it as a kind of rape. But she has this sexual awakening, and then she finds herself unable to interface with the rest of her flower sisters, she's had, she's been brought to some other plane of existence or to some other state of awareness. And she is, basically has to ostracize herself from her community, as she continues seeking out spring, seeking out this thing that brought her this realization or this change in state, and at the end of the poem finally finds herself alone, looking at her reflection in the water, sort of Narcissus-like action that brings her some sense of peace. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  33:53  
I was really struck that by the fact that I think that Schober and Schubert are both being depicted as characters in these two stories. I think that they're deeply personal. I think that Schubert is supposed to be the violet in Viola, and I think that Schober maybe is the Vergissmeinnicht. And they were written at a really critical point in Schubert's life. So in late 1822, early 1823, he started first experiencing syphilitic symptoms, and it was in late -  in May of 1823, that he is then hospitalized for the first time because of syphilis. And the current literature describes this as being earlier on in Schubert's experience with syphilis, but from my understanding of the disease, he actually would have had to have been infected quite a bit before in order to be experiencing symptoms that were that severe. And so I think it's at this point that Schubert is really sort of having his first brush with mortality, and thinking about death in a much more personal way. And it's also just before he makes this switch to creating song cycles. So he writes Die schöne Müllerin in May of 1823 while he's in the hospital, but I think it's this really interesting turning point in his output. And it comes at it, for him a personal turning point, a personal point of crisis. So I really feel strongly that these pieces deserve more attention, not only because they're just gorgeous pieces of music, that because I think they were deeply felt and really allow us an insight into his character.

Suzanne Lis  35:56  
So I was gonna ask you, like, what it was like to have COVID last year?

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  36:03  
Yeah. So the last week of February, in the first week of March, I was actually on tour with musicians from Marlboro. And it is a miracle that none of us got sick. And then everything shut down. And, and we took one last trip to the grocery store, to get, you know, what we thought would be a bunch of things to keep us safe. So we could hunker down at home, and then everything would blow over in a month.

Suzanne Lis  36:42  
Oh sweet summer child.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  36:44  
Yes. And at that point, this was still March. So the directions from the federal and state governments were that we shouldn't wear masks, and save those for medical workers. So we didn't wear masks, but we did all the things we were supposed to do: gloved up and, you know, sanitized everything or whatever, took showers when we came home. But about, I don't know, six days later, my husband started feeling kind of weird. And then I started feeling kind of weird. And I had initially seemed to have a very, very mild bout of it. So like, very mildly elevated temperature, some aches and pains and some fatigue. But basically, I was like, wow, okay, well, you know, we got lucky. But around day five, I started to experience this shortness of breath. And so then for almost two months, I had, you know, kind of intermittent cough, my cough was never really that bad. But I did have this just feeling of like, you would take a breath and never feel satisfied. And this fatigue, that, like, I would go outside and sit on a little bucket and pull weeds in my garden for like 30-45 minutes, and then be knocked out for the next week.

Suzanne Lis  38:17  
When you went back to singing, did you feel like you have to ease into it?

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  38:23  
So when I first the first thing I had to do was in May, I had to make a couple of recordings for Songfest. And I felt like I could still like, you know, my ability to sing long phrases was still there, but my heart had trouble with it. You know, it's like, I guess maybe because my blood was not being oxidized, oxygenated as well as it should have been. It felt like, you know, I would take one do one take. And then it would just I would have to rest for 20 minutes. And my heart would start beating like crazy as I got towards the end of a phrase. So it felt like in terms of my ability to spin out that phrase, that was still there. But my heart couldn't keep up with it very well.

Suzanne Lis  39:18  
All right, can you talk about - so looking at your bio, looking at your schedule, it seems like you do a lot of new music. You have a lot of collaborators, composers. And I was wondering how you go about the process of having someone write a piece for you.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  39:35  
Oh, that's a great question. I feel like it kind of depends on the composer in this situation. So sometimes there's a lot of back and forth with a composer. And sometimes it's just like, here's the thing that arrives. And I think that whatever the approach, whether it's just receiving it in 
its fully birthed form or, or being more a part of the process of creation, I think there are benefits. And I suppose downsides to to either one. You know, sometimes when you are more a part of the process of of creation, you come in with preconceived notions. And so having the opportunity to just receive the piece as it is, sometimes, maybe you're approaching it with with fresh eyes or - Yeah, and then you're challenged to, you know, maybe it's asking things of you that you thought were impossible for your voice. And so then you get to have this experience of not having limited yourself by what you thought you wanted to do, or what you thought your voice was capable of. And so I do appreciate that aspect. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  40:55  
And then sometimes you do get a piece and it's fully formed, and you're like, "wow, I think that is not - that particular way that you set that phrase, where it's a whole bunch of text on high Ds, maybe we can find another way to make that happen, that will make me feel more comfortable. And, and I have found that people are very open to talking about that. I mean, you know, generally, I would only say something like that if I felt like, you know, the text was not going to be possible to be understood. And I was concerned about wanting the audience to be able to understand the text without needing to look at a written program note. And so you know, then I might say, "this is what I think will happen. If you're concerned about that as well, might I make this suggestion that might allow it to be a little bit easier, more easily understood?"

Suzanne Lis  41:52  
Alright, last question, not even really a question. I just - I was struck by - it even seems like in your work, but especially in like your personal life that you are like, very, very connected to the outdoor world. So whether it's growing things in your garden - you mentioned weeding before - or you have this weird propensity for finding four plus leaf clovers. Like, amazing. And then you forage. You have these hilarious squash in your bathroom. And I was wondering how I guess like, how do you feel like it contributes to like, how does like being close to nature contribute maybe to your overall well being? How does it inform your work, your sense of beauty? 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  42:46  
My dad especially cultivated in us a love for the outdoors, I spent a lot of time as a kid camping and hiking and just being outside, whether it was in my backyard, or where my grandparents lived in a very rural area, about an hour and 15 minutes away from where I grew up in California, in which they were just surrounded by open land where we wandered freely. I think that was something that was just a just a very, very important part of my childhood and my relationship to the world growing up: understanding my place in this physical space and on this planet, and feeling connected to the earth. I grew up - literally behind my fence was many, many acres of tomato fields. The town I grew up in, is that Hunt's Tomato, well, it was home to one of the big Hunt's tomato processing plants. And so I grew up playing in those fields and in the irrigation ditches. I don't know about the pesticides, but anyway, and then also my family we also grew a lot of our own food and and so that just always was a big part of my life. And it's something that remains important to me and actually one of the true silver linings of this COVID period was having the time at home in the summer to have a vegetable garden and so as you mentioned, I still have been reaping or enjoying the bounty of the that garden and still have four very, very large squash in my bathroom, in addition to frozen tomato sauce and other smaller squash and stuff like that, beans. And it's something that, you know, literally I think feels grounding. 

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  45:15  
I became interested in mushroom foraging a little bit, starting maybe back in 2015, but then - or sorry, 2013 - but then being at Marlboro starting in the summer, starting in 2016, where I had all of this time outside of rehearsal in a very rural area. And I just became interested in being able to identify the, the mushrooms that I was finding as I was exploring the woods. And that became a place a space for me that felt very much like home, and where I felt like I can be myself and and also, you know, I would like go out in the woods and have on my Zoom device, my last rehearsal recording and, and be listening to my recording or memorizing poetry as I'm moving. So feeling like the musical space and the nature world are not so disconnected from each other. And then of course, you know, we sing so much about birds and flowers and springtime and the woods and you know, Feldeinsamkeit and all of those things. And so that is something that I - that I feel strongly myself, is something that is very important to me.

Suzanne Lis  46:47  
Yeah, yeah. All right, my dear. I think we're good. Like, I think I have everything I need. And I want to give you some time to like switch gears before your lesson. Um, but yeah, thank you so, so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon  47:06  
Thanks for having me. I'm so excited about this project. And I hope that I said some things that are usable.

Suzanne Lis  47:14  
You said many things that were very usable! 

Suzanne Lis  47:18  
You can follow Lucy's career at lucyfitzgibbon.com or on Instagram at @lucy_fitz_gibbon. Thank you to Lucy for her eloquence and her inspirational spirit. And thank you for listening to this fifth episode of This Embodied Voice. In case you're new here, this is a podcast where we talk about the voice, the body, but also pretty much anything else we want. And if you enjoyed the episode, then please rate, review, subscribe, and tell a friend. You can also reach me, Suzanne, on Instagram @thisembodiedvoice. I'm going to close out the episode with the end of Viola, sung beautifully by Lucy. And if you want to hear the whole version, then take a look in the Episode Notes. Until next time, take care of your body, take care of your voice, and be well.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai