Training | david-gottfried-acts

Performance

THEAT 230: Intermediate Acting (Spring 2014)

Intermediate Acting is a studio course exploring absurdist scenes and monologues, Shakespeare scenes and monologues, classical Greek theater and idiomatic techniques, modern "realism" acting and character development, using interviews from Studs Terkel's Working. Students work as a team to provide peer review. The course culminates in a showcase of the students' work, for which the students had to select three monologues to perform.

MUSPF 152: Voice Lessons (Fall 2011-Spring 2015)

At St. Olaf David took voice lessons from Dr. Robert Smith. In addition to building a healthy vocal technique, he studied interpretation and performance practice across a broad range of genres, including art song, opera, and musical theater. Highlights include: Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel, Gustav Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and Deeper and Deeper Still/Waft Her Angels, Through the Skies from Handel's Jeptha.

MUSPF 134: Piano Lessons (Fall 2011-Spring 2015)

Throughout his time at St. Olaf David took piano lessons from Dr. Kathryn Ananda-Owens, building his skills at the piano, including sight reading, score reading, score reduction, vocal accompaniment, and efficient repertoire development. Progress was tracked by a graded jury at the end of each semester, as well as a final proficiency test required for graduation.

DANCE 106: Ballroom I (Spring 2012)

Ballroom classes are taught from a social/aesthetic perspective. In this course, students learn fundamental steps, rhythms, and styling in the foxtrot, slow watlz, Viennese waltz, east coast swing, and cha cha. Skills and progress were assessed by a dance final, in which students were partnered at random and had to display their skills in the dances listed above.

2010 - present

ArtisticTraining

St. Olaf College

Stage Direction

THEAT 232: Beginning Stage Direction (Fall 2013)

Beginning Stage Direction introduces students to the different techniques and methods of different stage directors, both past and present. As the course progressed, studying the methodologies of recent directors such as Katie Mitchell, Peter Brook, and Mary Zimmerman became important. Eventually the course required the directing students to direct one another in short scenes of different styles; some were devised pieces, others were assigned scenes from plays both classical and contemporary. The final project of the course was to direct and present a scene with actors from outside of the class.

THEAT 338: Intermediate Stage Direction (Spring 2014)

Intermediate Stage Direction builds on the fundamentals introduced in the introductory course through practical application. While disccusion of directing theories and techniques continues, the course emphasizes creating theatre. This focus is manifested by continued directing projects with our in-class peers and culminates with each student directing and producing a one-act play which performs in the Quade One-Act Festival that takes place annually in the Haugen Theater.

A snapshot of David's one-act play. (Pictured: left, Gregory Adam; right, Jesse Landa)

Photograph by Andrew Wilder

History & Literature

THEAT 180: Text and Performance (Fall 2013)

Text and Performance is one of the introductory courses to theater at St. Olaf College, exposing the class to dozens of plays which are discussed and analyzed during the course. Students are encouraged to think critically about each work, including historical and social context, playwrighting influences, and innovations to form and style.

THEAT 379: Topics: Musical Theater (Spring 2015)

This topics course provides an in-depth investigation of American Musical Theater. The course covers the history of musical theater, starting with it's roots in vaudeville, minstrelry and English operetta. An emphasis was placed on the contributions Rodgers & Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim. The Final project of the course was to outline a musical with a fully fleshed out scene entering into a song, for which David wrote and composed an Act I Finale called Tampa Bay.

MUSIC 345: Topics: Folk/Pop Influences (Spring 2014)

This topics course investigates the influences that popular music and folk music have had on classical music from the year 1800 and forward. The course focuses on identifying the roots of large force compositions such as Dvorak's 9th Symphony and Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. For the final project, David wrote a research essay called Poetry in Music: Musical Representations of the Kalevala in Sibelius' 6th Symphony, Movement III.

MUSIC 241, 242: History & Literature of Music I & II (Fall 2012-Spring 2013)

Music History I covers the history and development of Western European music from the Middle ages to ca. 1750. Students study the genres and styles of music from monophonic chant to concerted music of the Baroque. The class requires students to identify pieces and different music by different style characteristics that distinguish each work. The class also served as an introductory course in writing about music in an academic setting. In History & Lit II, students encounter the history and development of Western European music from ca. 1750 to the present and study the major forms, styles and representative literature of the Classic and Romantic eras and the 20th and 21st centuries. The skills built in the previous class are put to the test with a 15+ page research paper on a topic of the students' choosing.

MUSIC 281, 282: Solo Vocal Literature I & II (Fall 2013-Spring 2014)

Students survey the solo art song repertoire of Germany, Italy, and Spain. The course highlights the significant features and development of the art song, and provides context, approaches, and resources for studying this literature. Course work includes in-class performances, during which the student must present scholarly research on the piece and then sing and interpret the composition. In the second semseter of this course, students survey the solo art song repertoire of France, England, the United States, and the Nordic countries. Much like the previous course, students learn the features and development of the art song, the context, approaches and resources for studying the art song literature. The in-class performance component is repeated in the second semester.

MUSIC 237: World Music (Fall 2014)

World Music is an introduction to the diversity of musics on Earth. Topics include performance practice, methods for analysis and comparison of various musics, and interdisciplinary approaches to studying the powerful influence of music in human life. In addition to aural testing and short research papers, the class requires an individual project for which David built an mbira from scratch, using the original methods of the Shona tribe in Zimbabwe. He presented for the class the finished mbira as well as a documentary of his process.

Musical Training

MUSIC 112, 114, 212, 214: Theory & Aural Skills I-IV (Fall 2011-Spring 2013)

First-semester music majors begin formal musicianship studies. Students perform basic melodies and rhythms at sight, and notate dictations of basic rhythms, melodies and harmonic progressions. Students also analyze and compose Western tonal music employing the rubrics of rhythm and meter, pitch, intervals, scales, tertian chords, inversions, harmonic progression, and SATB voice leading. The second semester of the program continues these studies, adding the analysis and composition of Western tonal music that employs non-dominant seventh chords, applied chords, sequences, modulations, and small forms. In the third semester, students begin performing advanced rhythms and increasingly chromatic melodies at sight. The studies of analysis and composition broaden to include music that employs modal mixture, Neapolitan chords, augmented-sixth chords, and remote modulations. In the final semester of the program, students analyze and compose Western art music in styles from 1875 to the present, including late-nineteenth-century chromaticism, serialism and set theory, impressionism and neoclassicism, and blues and jazz styles. Performance and dictation studies follow these topics closely, including an introduction to jazz improvisation.

MUSIC 364: Vocal Pedagogy (Fall 2013)

This course introduces a systematic pedagogical approach to the study of voice production for use in the studio or classroom. Students examine basic vocal physiology, the healthy use and care of the voice, voice problems, and appropriate vocal literature. In addition to graded testing of the students' pedagogical knowledge, students are required to teach voice lessons throughout the semester. This teaching component is graded by how well the student applies the knowledge gained in the class.

MUSIC 251: Conducting (Spring 2014)

Students in conducting learn basic conducting gestures (with and without baton) through exercises in meter patterns, preparatory beats and cut-offs, cueing, dynamics, fermata, articulations, phrasing, left hand independence, and face/eye usage. Set class periods function as a lab, in which each student prepares the same piece and conducts the class as a choir, with the instructor and the class giving feedback afterward.

MUSIC 223: Composition I & II (Fall 2014-Spring 2015)

Students are introduced to a number of compositional techniques and apply them in creating original works of music and hearing them performed. Participants listen to important 20th- and 21st-century compositions, and discuss current trends in music, the changing role of the composer in society, and practical composition issues. In the Composition II, students develop more advanced techniques in writing for instruments and voice through individual study in creative composition, focusing on smaller ensembles. For these courses, David submitted his works ...through the valley of the shadow... and selections from his musical Serving!