By Danielle Jacoby and Aviv Rubinstien | Photos by Jane K. Fox

When we were barely more than acquaintances, we agreed to become a big part of each other’s lives by immersing ourselves in each other’s music. One of us, Danielle, is an opera singer. She spent the last four years studying vocal performance at USC and appearing on stage in the United States and Europe. At 21 she became the opera critic at LA2DAY.com. The other, Aviv, has been writing and performing rock music since he was a teenager. He has recorded three full-length records and one EP. His current band, Pray for Polanski, toured the Northeast and Midwest during summer 2008.

Because we admittedly knew nothing outside of our own musical genres, Aviv agreed to learn about opera, while Danielle took on rock and roll. Mutual admiration ensued—as did discoveries both musical and personal.

aviv rubinstien

Where are my shoes? I have one pair of dress shoes, and I can’t find them. As I frantically search my apartment, I can’t help but think that opera is dumb. I wouldn’t be looking for these shoes if it weren’t for opera.

I find the left one; now I need the right.

If it weren’t for opera I wouldn’t be wearing a mismatch of dress clothes—black jacket and dark-blue pants, wrinkled from months in my drawer. I’m hoping the dim lights of the theater will cover them up.

My background is rock and roll. I grew up on folk and punk. Now I’ve stupidly agreed to immerse myself in a type of music that I don’t understand, and don’t really care to, if Danielle, an opera singer, will immerse herself in my world.

I got my first guitar at fourteen, wrote my first song at seventeen and subsequently formed a band. I’ve shared the stage with great bands that no one has ever heard of, bands whose songs could change the world but who’ll never get the chance. I’m glad for it. I wouldn’t have it any other way, because I’m a rock and roll snob.

As I said, opera is not my thing.

I give up looking for my missing dress shoe and put on a pair of black boat shoes decorated with little gray skulls. Like I wasn’t going to stand out anyway. I meet up with Danielle, who tonight is taking me to a modernist German opera, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz. It’s sort of a neo-Faustian tale about a man who sells his soul to win a shooting contest. I read the program notes and ask how long the opera will last. I’m being a baby. Danielle is more than accommodating. She seems excited just to feel the blanket darkness of the theater.

The opera starts. It’s a strange piece of work. The stage is covered in mint-green-and-white camouflage. People jump on picnic tables and growl and sneer. I do not like it. The actors seem to be simply going through the motions. To me, the best music is passionate, immediate and powerful—like a cannonball blast to the chest. It teleports you and emotionally attacks you. Opera is very controlled, contained. It doesn’t have the contagious excitement of a backbeat or swing.

The only thing that gets me through Der Freischütz is the bass. The devil in this epic has a low, booming voice. Every note he hits I try to match. I hum to myself in my seat to stay awake.

At the first intermission Danielle says that we can go. I feel guilty for being a bad sport, so I insist we stay.

“No. No.” She shakes her head. “This is not a good opera.”

Thank God.

I put opera out of my mind like a trip to the dentist. I know I’ll have to go back, but I’m in no hurry to make another appointment.

A couple of weeks later, the next appointment arrives. I get a call from Danielle about Boston Baroque’s production of Handel’s Xerxes. Performed only with instruments available in 1738, when the opera was written, it should at least be an interesting history lesson. On a chilly October night, Danielle once again leads me as though I were a petulant child, this time to the mezzanine of Jordan Hall, on Huntington Street in Boston. The floor is on an angle, and our entire section leans slightly to the left.

Danielle explains that most of the time the males in Xerxes are played by females because Handel composed his two main characters as sopranos—a very high register for a guy to sing.

“The men that used to sing this were castratos,” Danielle says, referring to the literal lack of balls among certain singers of the period. “But this guy’s voice is naturally like that. It’s pretty rare. He’s really amazing.”

Lucky him.

I once again read the synopsis in the program, and I’m surprised to discover that Handel composed the entire opera in less than four months.

I’ve spent four months on a single song.

It makes me think of immediacy. Something must have been burning in Frederick Handel to motivate him to produce a two-hour opera in four months. He must have really meant it. But meant what?

The opera is interestingly staged. Instead of in an orchestra pit, the accompanying musicians sit in a grid on the stage, which allows the actors to interact with them. When fleeing the wrath of his brother Xerxes, the character Arsamene grabs a spare instrument and sits with the orchestra, concealing himself. The final sword fight between the two takes place with two batons stolen from the conductor. I imagine the characters dancing upon the sheet music, creating the notes that they themselves sing.

The melodies, too, stick with me strangely. They’re familiar. I can almost predict what is going to happen next. In this verse, instead of playing the major, they’re going to cheat to the relative minor, tricking the audience into feeling sad.

I do that in my music.

I appreciate Xerxes as a musical time machine. The harpsichords and string instruments are in natural tuning, a long-since-abandoned form of tuning that keeps the notes from beating against each other. Think of the swirl that you might hear in a church organ; that’s missing. These notes fit together like Legos. It gives the whole show a strange, airless feeling.

This opera does not bore me, but neither does it excite me. I can’t feel the passion. I know it should be there, but I can’t find it.

I tell Danielle that I need to hear her sing. I need to feel the fire that she has for her art. If she cannot show me, I cannot be shown.

“Oh. Okay, I guess.” She’s bashful. “I don’t know if I can do that. I won’t be any good. I haven’t sung in a really long time.”

I insist, but she puts it off until after our last opera, Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, which comes two weeks later. I’m dressed that night in the same outfit, skull shoes and all. Danielle is as excited as if it were the last day of school. We take our seats. We’re running late, so I don’t have a chance to read the synopsis. In retrospect it’s better that I didn’t.

This opera is awesome.

It’s about three fictional women who have in some way wronged a man named Hoffmann. The women represent three different facets of a “real” woman’s personality. There’s a sex robot, a fifty-foot tall ghost, angels painted gold and a wonderful song about a dwarf named Kleinzach. The production is a steam-punk gold mine.

This opera is awesome! I feel the passion. I feel the power and the vulnerability of Hoffmann as he maligns the women who are ruining his life. It’s sad, sweet and funny, like a 1940s melodrama.

Danielle and I both leave with big grins on our faces.

I still need to hear her sing. She’s modest and shy, and it takes a great deal of convincing to get her into a small soundproof practice room in the basement of BU’s College of Fine Arts.

Finally she turns her back to me and, smacking a note on the piano, begins to sing. Her vibrato is strong. She progresses higher, and louder, and her vibrato pulsates. I start to hurt. I can feel the sound waves attacking me like a thick bass guitar coming out of an old Fender tube amp. I never knew the human body could produce something so powerful. I feel the notes swirling around me, hard notes and soft.

And it hits me. Music is a weapon. I remember Xerxes grabbing the conductor’s baton in pursuit of his brother. Sometimes music is a cannonball to the chest with a fast punk backbeat, and sometimes it is an épée sword, drawing you into an engaging match. The difference between the genres is how each one uses its power. Opera is slow, making you appreciate the subtle changes and layers in the composition. Opera knows it has you for two hours, so it takes you for a ride.

Whether a listener prefers opera or indie is irrelevant. Everyone’s listening for the same reason: windows of truth, camouflaged and presented subtly and made easier to absorb. Rock and roll is strong and straightforward. Opera is more subtle but just as deadly. Both can change the world, if you let them.

danielle jacoby

Sandwiched between guys in tight pants and girls with thick eyeliner, I nursed a Miller Lite and feigned invisibility on a stool in front of center stage. There I sat, hunched over in the grungiest outfit I could find—Urban Outfitters corduroy pants and the Gap’s version of Converse tennis. Nervously wiping the condensation off the outside of my glass, I scanned the room for Aviv—someone I knew; someone I could clutch. But alas, I was alone in a “lounge” called the Alchemist in Jamaica Plain.

I am an opera singer. I perform alone, standing still in the curve of a grand piano before a silent audience. Listening to a human voice resonate off the walls of an opera house gives me chills. A held high note makes me cry. Yet somehow, here I was, trying to hide my puckered brow as I awaited my first real punk-rock concert.

At 11 p.m. Aviv, in tight jeans and a fedora hat, led his band, Pray for Polanski, onto the small platform. On the count of four, Dan the drummer laid down a frenetic rhythm and Andrew (a.k.a. “Chops”) let out a deafening pluck of his amplified bass. My eardrums felt ready to burst. Then Anne, the lead singer, jumped across the stage while squeezing the microphone to her lips. Shaking her head violently, she let out a high, piercing scream. Aviv’s low-vibrato-to-falsetto shriek then joined in, completing the cacophony. It was like Schoenberg on acid.

The audience roared applause. I leaped off of my stool, waved a quick good-bye to my new acquaintance Aviv, and dashed out the door. I knew the concert was not yet over, but already I’d felt awkward enough alone in a room of energetic fans. Outside, I waited in the cold for the T to return me to the comfort of my home. That was the beginning of my adventure into foreign musical territory.

Take two, a few weeks later: Great Scott on a Monday at 10 p.m. In the heart of Allston, the hole-in-the-wall bar teemed with hipsters rocking out to various versions of “alternative.” As I slipped through the front door, the first music to hit my sensitive ears came from a blonde female singer screaming out debilitating high notes. I cringed and took a seat as far away from the banshee-singer as possible.

I had listened to Pray for Polanski’s CD, The Ghost and Bones, on repeat for seven back-to-back days. The effort had not been for nothing. By the end of the week, I found myself waking up midway through a deep sleep or stopping suddenly on my way to class, straining to fill in the gaps of the band’s lyrics. I even put “The Way They Stare,” a song inspired by Aviv’s girlfriend about “not playing with boys,” on the “Upbeat Gym Mix” on my iTunes. For some reason, Aviv’s husky sound intermingled with Anne’s fast vibrato, accompanied by an upbeat “oompah-pah,” was the perfect soundtrack for a three-mile run. In a way, Pray for Polanski’s music had become the background sound of my daily life.

Not that it made much difference now. Alone and friendless at Great Scott, I maneuvered my way through the swaying groupies once the music began, until I stood alone almost touching the stage. I decided that this time I was going to drop my negativity and feel the music. Song after song, I rocked my knees, then swayed my hips, and finally twisted my arms in the air—clapping at the appropriate interludes and screaming “Pray for Polanski” in sync with the rest of the crowd. I was convinced that I was turning into a hipster.

The next week, I hopped into Pray for Polanski’s ’90s tour van, took my place in the very seat some traveling mate “found some marijuana” in over the summer, and headed to the band’s practice space—an old artists’ colony in Allston. We arrived at the warehouse of their manager. Dex was an interesting fellow, friendly, but definitely on something. His studio was filled with colorful murals, unsteady ramparts and dim lighting. It also was freezing. I kept on all of my layers of clothing and watched my breath ebb and flow. A warm concert hall sounded nice right then.

I took up Anne’s offer of earplugs and listened to the muted sounds of the music. She and Aviv squabbled over pitch and tempo. Instead of making me uncomfortable, it only made me yearn to be part of such a collaborative team. I was used to rehearsing alone and critiquing myself. I wanted someone to tell me if I was pitchy or offbeat or to help me discover a different perspective.

Song after song, each member of PFP used his or her body and instrument to express a unique take on the music. As I observed Aviv’s sensitive portrayal on his guitar and Dan’s loud, assertive interpretation on the drums, my understanding of rock music as purely an extroverted form of expression began to blur. Did Aviv and I find similar things in our respective genres of music? Maybe we weren’t so different after all.

On Aviv’s birthday, a few weeks later, I attended a Pray for Polanski concert at a popular Allston venue called Harper’s Ferry. This time I walked confidently past the overweight bouncer and the clumps of pleading underage females to the center of the dance floor. I stood tall amid the groupies unashamedly yelling out, “Aviv is hot!” Once the drums started to roll, and Anne and Aviv began to sing, “I don’t like your dodgy disco—I don’t like the way you kiss those little boys,” I couldn’t help but dance. I glanced around the room at the familiar faces, and then I didn’t think twice about shaking my hair a full 180 degrees around my head while jumping in place with the rest of the crowd. I felt free to feel the music that I had come to know over the past few months.

I caught Aviv’s eye as I sang along with his once-cacophonous and intolerable tunes. The sound was not so dissonant anymore. When it came down to it, Aviv’s songwriting for The Ghost and Bones—the basic beats and unchanging key signatures—was not that far from what Mozart would have written for an opera aria. Sure, the semi-screaming vocal projection of “Dodgy Disco” was far from how Beverly Sills might sing an aria from The Marriage of Figaro, but the premise—communication, passion—of the styles was the same. I was less focused on how I was singing PFP’s music, and more on what it felt like to sing it.

Emotion can come across to an audience in very different ways. It can originate in leaping across a bar stage and yelling through a microphone or in standing still in a theater and singing with natural acoustics. After my years in the opera world, listening to Pray for Polanski’s CD, attending their concerts, watching their rehearsals and spending time with the band members taught me to loosen up and to more fully understand what music can be—a form of personal expression. Performing opera will never be the same.

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