Gary Moulsdale
GARY MOULSDALE (Lecturer, Voice) has completed a B.A. in Literature and Philosophy and in B. Music at the University of Toronto, and a M.A. in musicology at Cornell University. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Cornell, completing a dissertation on Rossini's non-comic operas for Naples, and the role of the orchestra in representing female authority on stage. In recital, Gary has performed Schubert's Winterreise, Schumann's Dichterliebe, twentieth-century song cycles by Benjamin Britten, Dominick Argento and Leos Janacek, as well as the first modern performances of select thirteenth-century Occitan descorts from Le mansucrit du roi in collaboration with leading medievalist Judith Peraino. On stage, Gary has performed the title roles in the de Falla chamber opera El retablo del maese pedro, the Schubert singspiel Fernando, and leading roles in The Cradle Will Rock, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Pauline Viardot's Cendrillon, and the premiere of Sasha Matson's jazz-influenced baseball opera, Cooperstown. Gary has also created leading roles in two new student operas at Cornell, Jared Emerson-Johnson's The Mountain, and Jen Bellor's Bathsheba. Other recent projects include a concert of nineteenth-century German lieder and melodramas in collaboration with fortepianist Francesca Brittan in the private residences of the college president of Queens' College, Cambridge.
As music director and vocal coach, Gary has worked on new productions with Broadway composers Duncan Sheik (The Nero Project, by Steven Sater and Beth Milles), Kathryn Bostic (Little Women, by David Feldshuh) and Lewis Flinn (The Bourgeois Gentleman, by Molière), and served as the singing coach for the revival of Tim Robbins's Carnage at The Actors' Gang in Los Angeles. As music director, other Cornell productions have included Uncommon Women & Others (Wendy Wasserstein), As You Like It (new music by John Winn), and Inherit the Wind (Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee). Gary also served as the production manager of the 2003 Cornell-Eastman School of Music collaboration, the Lully comédie-ballet, Le carnaval mascarade, in its first complete performance since 1725. Upcoming projects at Cornell include The History Boys and The Body Project.
In addition to vocal training at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music and Cornell University, Gary has studied voice privately with Patrick Calleo and Jane Randolph, and improvisation and stage movement in the Hindustani-influenced rasa-box method of Richard Schechner's "East Coast Artists" program. Gary studied and performed in the Vocal Chamber Program at the Aspen Music Festival, where concert performances included the Britten "Nocturne" for tenor and chamber orchestra, and has also studied in both the Opera East and Summer Opera Lab programs in Canada.
Gary is a regular guest speaker at the Caramoor International Music Festival, where his presentations have included talks on the original cast of Bellini's "La sonnambula," prostitution in the biography of Marie Duplessis (the model for Verdi's "La traviata"), and questions of race in Rossini's "Otello". Other research interests include the theatre of Robert Wilson, the music and vocal style of Tom Waits, Schechner's work on theatre and anthropology, and the viewpoints method of American director Anne Bogart.
E-mail: gbm2@cornell.edu