When you consider musicians who engage in multiple musical endeavors–as most musicians do–you can see that music is a sort of river. A living thing, interconnected with itself and all who participate in it. Musicians are taught, and in turn teach. They sing, they play, they compose, they learn, they teach, they grow and communicate and create community.

We could quote the old alchemical aphorism:

The things that are above are like the things that are below
The things that are below are like the things that are above
For the perfection of the One Thing

Or we could quote photographer and Celilo Falls collaborator Joe Cantrell’s now famous line about how we are “all one”:

You are the land. You are the river. You are the salmon. They are us. It’s all one.

And we’re saying the same thing. The music, the musician, the teacher, the performer, the audience–it is all one.

Which brings us singer-pianist-composer-teacher Lisa Neher, recently named Oregon Composer of the Year by the Oregon Music Teachers Association. The award emerges from years of teaching, composing, and performing music in Oregon, and comes with a commission and a premiere–Neher’s new song cycle Love in a Time of Climate Change, setting poetry by Craig Santos Perez, will be performed by soprano Lindsey Rae Johnson and pianist Dianne Davies at this year’s OMTA conference in Florence (home of the notorious Oregon Dunes). The conference runs June 26-28, and the premiere happens at 1:30 on the 28th.

You might be thinking, “music education conference, zzzzz” but the present author has attended a few of these and can attest to how much fun they can be. Open mic nights, awards banquets, breakout sessions and masterclasses (Neher’s giving a presentation called “Cultivating Happiness as a Music Teacher”)–that all adds up to a good time on the coast.

Talking about it together

Johnson and Davies are two of Neher’s most regular collaborators. Johnson is one of the co-founders of another of Neher’s projects, New Wave Opera; you can read about her work with NWO right here, and watch Neher and Johnson singing Neher’s “I’m used to the way I move” right here:

Oh and hey, that’s Davies herself playing piano in the video above, which is from Davies and Neher’s “Cycles of Life” concert with Cascadia Composers last year. You can read all about this particular collaboration in our interview with them just before the premiere, and you can watch the whole thing on Cascadia’s YouTube channel.

This is also not Neher’s first rodeo with Santos Perez; her song cycle No One Saves the Earth from Us But Us is based upon poetry by him and Felicia Zamora. Listen to that one right here:

As if all that weren’t enough, you can also hear Neher’s work in Portland, this week, when she and her vocal studio perform at The Old Church on Wednesday, June 18. If you’re within moseying distance, you can catch that for free, live and in person, at noon o’clock. But if you’re not in town, or can’t get away from your job at the bank or whatever, you can watch it online right here.

Busy, busy, busy! We wanted to hear more about all of this from Neher herself, so on a sizzling June day we got on Zoom and asked her all about it.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Oregon ArtsWatch: Let’s start by talking about your first learning experiences. Who were some of the teachers who influenced you as a musician and, ultimately, as a teacher yourself? 

Lisa Neher: I was really lucky. I had this fantastic teacher who lived in our neighborhood. I took piano lessons as a small child and her name was Mary Bolstad. She lived within our neighborhood, and so you felt so adult, getting to walk down to your piano lesson and have this sort of independence amidst childhood. And Mary was so creative, and she really brought so much fun and the joy of the sounds you were creating and the joy of the shapes of the music. And also you got to talk about art and life with her. 

To have that adult–a space between a more formal teacher, where there would be grades or a test at the end, and a family member who you had a different kind of closeness with–was this third space. I think that is something that really influences how I teach: this is a special space for people of any age to, yes, work on our craft, but also to be human beings. I really cherish that this is a place where we get to be full human beings. When we encounter art–when we think about why we’re making it, what we want to do with it, and once we become engaged with text and story as singers–I think it’s very natural that life is going to come up. I feel really privileged to be a part of that as a teacher, and I see a lot of that going back to how much respect Mary gave us as elementary-aged pianists in her studio, to talk about what we cared about in the music and what we cared about in life. 

So that was a really huge influence. After studying with Mary for a while, when I was getting a little more serious about piano in high school, she suggested that I move to another teacher who had more experience. And so I studied with a teacher who lived a little further away from us, about half hour drive, Lori Shannon. She showed me the model of a teacher who, in addition to certain method books, really knew a lot of repertoire and would pull individual pieces out. “Oh, I think you would like this.” Really matching the piece to where you are. I remember at one point, she suggested that I work on “Für Elise.” And I really didn’t feel drawn to that piece. So I pulled up my courage and I said, “could we do something else? I just don’t feel drawn to that.” And she’s like, “sure.” And she opened up some Chopin books and we found a Nocturne. And so I think that was a really lovely example of that collaborative finding of repertoire and matching rep to the student. 

As I look back, I really admire Mary for suggesting that I move on to study with someone else. We have all these horror stories that you hear in our industry about possessive teachers and about ego, and I just think how fabulous, for me at my young age, to have someone model that idea of “it’s okay to go study with someone else” or “it’s okay to outgrow someone” or to be ready for another perspective. I really admire that. 

Pre-college I was studying piano mostly, but through musical theater in high school I started to sing a lot more, and that led me when I was at Lewis and Clark College to study voice. And over my time there, I studied with three different voice teachers because people were in and out of overseas programs and things. I started with Anna Haagenson and Carl Halvorson, and then my last two years with Susan McBerry. They were all fabulous. Sue became one of my mentors as a voice teacher. She just knows the rep, and she knows that rep can teach people so much about technique and artistry by helping match that singer to a piece that’s going to bring something out of them, and that a huge part of what we do is guiding people through a progression of repertoire that serves those goals. 

And she loved the art form. Lewis and Clark is our liberal arts school, there’s a lot of quirky students who are multidisciplinary, it’s a great place to be involved in lots of things. But because of that, it’s not like everyone comes into that door with a conservatory knowledge of art song. Rather the reverse, certainly for me. And it doesn’t matter, she just pours out all this cool knowledge and interest in poetry and composers and repertoire and lights everyone on fire. I got lit on fire for vocal rep because of Susan McBerry. 

There are moments where a certain song, or maybe there’s a musical that all the high schoolers want to learn, and that’s so exciting to share. And after we learn that song, “what else can we do that maybe you haven’t heard of that I can introduce you to?” I feel like that’s a big part of my role as a teacher, to help broaden that. I see that as something that I was inspired by Sue’s teaching. 

OAW: What was it like founding your own studio? How did that get started? 

Neher: I’ve been doing it for 12, 13 years now. It started in the Midwest because I was there for a while, doing my graduate work at University of Kansas and then University of Iowa. People started asking me if I could teach them some lessons. At first it was one or two students, just adding that onto my schedule as a graduate student. I was also teaching first year theory and oral skills during my master’s at University of Kansas, so I was doing classroom teaching within the academic setting, but then started to have students who asked me to teach them voice lessons. 

And then at University of Iowa, my teaching assistant position was as a studio teacher for non-majors. That was lovely because you got 18 students in a weekly repertoire or seminar class where they would sing for each other. When you’re working with that many students, you start to see the patterns, you start to get some of your techniques that seem to work for many people. And then, “oh, that didn’t work for that person,” so you troubleshoot and find other ways to describe things or other ways to get at it. There were six of us TAs at University of Iowa. We had this office and we would swap ideas and we would swap rep and “what are you doing for this kind of thing?” And, “somebody asked me this and I didn’t quite know how to answer, what do you think?” So that was really great, to have colleagues in teaching who were doing it and who were doing it with a fairly similar population: undergraduate non-majors, first- and second-year music, and music therapy. So, you know, a lot of 18 to 20 year olds. You start to see the patterns of what the voice is doing at that age and at that stage of development, and I think that’s very helpful. 

The private studio then happened because a former teacher who had gone through the graduate program was teaching a large private studio in Cedar Rapids a little farther north, and she and her husband moved suddenly. She was teaching out of one of the high schools. They had this really cool thing where you could go into the high school and they’d set you up in a practice room and the students would come out–if they had homeroom or choir or an empty period, they could come out for 30 minutes and take a lesson once a week. It was amazing  because you could teach during the day. Students who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to maybe go to another location to take lessons, they could do them right there. She was leaving, and through the connection with University of Iowa it happened that I was recommended as somebody who might want to take over her studio. And so I inherited a studio at one of the high schools. That was my first time working with a big chunk of pre-college students. 

Show choir is really, really big in Iowa and in the Midwest. And so a lot of those students were in lessons partly to get ready for show choir auditions and to try to get into the very top-tier show choirs. So there was a lot of musical theater, a lot of crossover stuff–which honestly was not a focus of the graduate work I was doing as a singer, and not something that our higher ed universities have been that quick to adopt. So it was a crash course in trying to figure out, with the help of a couple of my other colleagues who were doing it, like, “what are you doing for this style?” And, “how do I sing that style?” 

I took some summer coursework online at the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music that does a lot of crossover training for people. Most of the people who go there have a background as classical singers and classical voice teachers first. It is in our language to describe, like, “you’re doing this in classical, do this different thing to belt.” And that’s really helpful if you’re immersed in that. I thought, “well, this is what the students are doing and this is what the students want to sing. And so let’s figure out how to teach that.” 

By the time I left Iowa in 2018, I was teaching at two different high schools, and then at three different colleges as adjunct, and working with a lot of voice students, people who were interested in everything from pop to musical theater to classical. 

And it’s very interesting. I think our classical training, and our classical training of people who are going to be voice teachers, is starting to be more supportive of teaching cross-genre. There still are little hints from that older thought, that within the academy we only teach classical or you need to learn how to sing classical first and then you can sing these other things. I do think there are some fundamentals of good singing across many Western styles of singing, but I really don’t feel like everyone has to learn to sing an opera sound before they learn to belt. We do have the ability to sing many styles, but also we all have defaults. 

I was a triathlete before I had long COVID–now I can’t do aerobic things–but I came from running first and then cycling, and my worst is swimming. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t, I could still do all those things, but it meant my swim time was always going to be worse because I had more training and therefore more neuromuscular defaults that helped me with running. That is a metaphor I really started to think about with singing: we can do many things, but it is a sort of art sport. If you spend a lot of your time singing one style, that’s going to be your default. And then when you go into a new style, you’re going to need to adapt. Some things will be similar, some things will be different, but if a student is coming to me and they mostly want to sing musical theater belt, I don’t know that it serves them to have operatic defaults. That’s not really what they’re saying they want. 

And so, you know, I don’t teach every single style on the planet, but I do teach musical theater, pop and classical. I developed a philosophy that I want to meet the student with what they want to study. It’s my job to help them. 

So then, in 2018 we moved, and I referred all my students out to other folks in Iowa and came to Portland and it took probably about three years to build this new studio here, because there’s wonderful voice teachers here and there’s not just this gaping need right away. But the lovely thing is we have such a great supportive community. We have a really wonderful NATS chapter, the National Association of Teachers of Singing. I think our Cascade chapter is one of the biggest chapters, and one of the most active. I really found a really wonderful community there. And people were so happy to know where I was located and what kinds of groups I taught. And then if they were full and wanted to refer out, they were so generous. And now I am very full. 

OAW: What’s your current studio like? Who are you teaching? 

Neher: I would say my studio is primarily high school and up. I do sometimes work with younger folks, I’m not against that, but it seems to be mostly the high schoolers who are coming. A lot of them are coming because they’ve worked with someone in the past and gotten their voice kind of going and now they’re ready for something a little more, maybe a little more advanced work, from somebody who has that doctorate in performance and pedagogy and advanced training like I do in crossover styles. 

And then I have a wonderful cohort of adult learners. Quite a few of those folks are really dedicated choral singers. I have a lot of singers who sing with In Medio, a very good auditioned choir in town. Folks who sing with Cappella Romana and Resonance are in my studio. And then other folks who have different goals, either soloist goals, or they’re trying to get into a choir, or they’re just working on it for the love of singing. 

And I will say after kind of starting with really homogenous populations, like a bunch of undergrads or a bunch of high schoolers at the same school, I have found a particular excitement in teaching multi-generationally. I love our recitals because we have folks ages 13 to 70. And it was so cool to see them get excited for each other. Sometimes you get a very young student who’s really bold and they go up there and they don’t always have the same self consciousness that comes with adulthood. And that’s so great for some of our adult students to see the boldness and the audaciousness of a younger person. But also I think it’s really lovely because there are things that come with maturity, like the dedication to work on hard things for a long time or to work on something that’s really challenging and frustrating in technique over months or even years. 

We had a recital rehearsal over the weekend, and then I was having some lessons this week, and one of my students was saying this one student that they’ve known in the studio for several years is sounding so great in their upper range. And the fact that they’ve known each other for a while and they can appreciate that progress sometimes only comes from really consistent work. That’s really special, and it’s not always happening in the same way with a more homogenous group. 

And we don’t have a lot of places for intergenerational hanging out and doing things together. A lot of folks in Portland aren’t members of a religious community, which is fine, I’m not. But that used to be a place where we would have intergenerational hanging out. And without that, I don’t know that we’ve all found a different way to hang out. 

We have so many folks performing at The Old Church recital. We are not doing a group song, but most of the time we do a group song in our recitals to wrap it up: we take some song and divide it up into solos and then all sing at the end. And that’s such a cool thing for this whole group of people who are just starting lessons, people who have been singing for years, people of all ages to just come together and make a piece of music together. 

We sang “You Will Be Found” from Dear Evan Hansen last spring at the end of our recital. And I think especially just in the wake of all the things that have been going on in our country and our world, it was really moving for all of those students to share that piece. The family and friends who came were really moved. The students just delivered such heartfelt singing of that piece together and I think those are some of the things I really cherish about the studio that I’ve built here. 

OAW: So you commissioned a new piece for this upcoming recital, from Drew Swatosh. How did that come up, and what will that be like? 

Neher: Drew wrote this piece called Speak to Me, (Talk to Me) for me, and it’s a very special piece. It comes out of a lot of conversations we’ve had as friends. It’s one of the special things about this multi-generational studio, and about being able to work with people in different capacities, because Drew takes voice lessons from me. We’re also colleagues in Raindrop New Music, and we’re also friends. And that is something that I really believe is completely possible, to work with the same people in different capacities. That doesn’t have to be caught up in weird, old-fashioned power dynamics of, “I’m your teacher,” or “I’m a couple years older than you.” We can let all that go. And we can also name it and say, “do you need to give me some feedback on my singing of your song?” It might feel weird at first, because a moment ago I was giving feedback on singing technique, as a teacher, but we’re like, “let’s role switch, let’s code switch.” I really believe in naming those things. 

So, we have had a lot of conversations. I have long COVID and it has changed my life in a lot of ways. It means that I am not currently and may never be again the kind of athlete that I used to be because I can’t sustain aerobic effort. And we know that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be really a polarizing topic for folks. At every level of my communities, from friends and family to work relationships, there have been and continue to be, sadly, schisms that are exacerbated by differences of opinion about how to protect myself, or people having emotions about boundaries I might have about when I’m going to wear a mask and when I’m not, or when I might ask a friend if they can take a test before seeing me. Drew has been very kind to be curious about and supportive of that, and that led to this piece about things that maybe we wish we could say, but we can’t, or things that maybe people don’t want to hear. And I think one of the beautiful things is there’s a lot of compassion and softness in the piece–and then there’s also some more thorny and angry emotions in the piece. I think that’s really human. 

Drew’s done a wonderful job with the poetry of it–while it was informed by our discussions, I think it’s not something that only describes my experience. In talking to folks with chronic illness and talking to folks with a variety of things that are difficult to talk about, or sort of taboo subjects, I think this piece will speak to a lot of those things. Because there’s nothing exactly on the nose that means it’s only about “Lisa having long COVID.” It is more universal than that. And I think that’s a really beautiful thing that Drew has done, to take the specific and make it universal. 

OAW: So let’s talk about the Oregon Music Teachers Association award. What’s the process of that? What did it feel like when you got the news? 

Neher: Oh my gosh, it was so exciting. Lisa Marsh called me. Any artist has a lot of doubt along the way, over the years or even within a specific project–the crummier days when you struggle, and then the days when you get inspired, and the days when you get writer’s block. So it was just so lovely to know that that struggle and the work that’s come out of that over years meant something to people. There are moments when I’m writing and I wonder, “is this what I want to say? And even if it is, will it mean anything to anyone else?” I think we all want to be in communication. I think of art as storytelling and as an art form of connecting with people. 

I encourage any composer in Oregon to put a little reminder on their calendar every spring and go check out the OMTA website. You self-nominate, it’s a very easy process. I have to really applaud them because some applications for things are quite time consuming, but you fill out a short form and I think you upload a couple of sample pieces and a little proposal for what you might want to write if you are awarded and granted the commission. And then their committee goes off and does its magic, which I’m sure must be very hard because we have so many talented and brilliant composers in Oregon. I’ve applied several times since arriving here, and this was my year. So I’m really jazzed. 

The piece they commissioned is a song cycle, Love in a Time of Climate Change, that I wrote for Lindsey Rae Johnson, a soprano, and Dianne Davies, pianist, and they’re both wonderful colleagues that I’ve worked with a lot. It sets poetry by Craig Santos Perez about the climate crisis, many of them having to do with the jarring experiences we have going about our day-to-day lives while this crisis is happening. And that’s the connecting thread through all of them: “how do we think about this? How do we deal with the grief? How do we stay motivated when we also have to go get groceries?” It’s a little disorienting, you know, if you’re at a restaurant and you’re ordering fish and you go, “oh, man, should I order fish or not?” One of the poems is about being at the zoo with his daughter, and the joy of his daughter encountering elephants, and then that making him start to think about the ivory trade and all the horrible things that go into that, and the human cost of that, the horrible poverty that’s driving that. So holding space for these disparate experiences is something Craig is doing really brilliantly in the poems, and that’s what we’re exploring through the music as well. 

I have been extremely passionate about the impact this piece can have during a time when we are all feeling the effects of the climate crisis, including here in the PNW with our longer and more dangerous wildfire season. 

OAW: What’s the timeline of that like, in terms of being awarded and composing a new piece to be performed at the conference? 

Neher: They always award the next year around this time of year. So you have a whole year to write, and do any workshopping you want, and find your performers and line it up. The requirements are that the piece has to be premiered at the conference, and that you go. You mark your calendar for the conference, and you are given a budget that includes anything you need: hiring the performers, other costs like for me paying Craig for his poems, and then anything that you want to try to budget to help you have the time to write a really awesome piece. So you’re awarded this lump sum that you will get to use to make that happen. And I think because of that, you can see that it tends to work really well to do chamber music pieces so that you have kind of the resources to bring in some excellent performers, set aside the time to write, pay for any permissions, and things like that. And it’s in the summer, so a lot of larger ensembles might be done for the season and all out on summer vacation. So something that’s portable, like a song cycle, seemed like it would really fit. 

I have a calendar of commissions pretty regularly, so most of the bulk of the writing didn’t actually happen until this year. I was lining up performers, and I was talking to Lindsey and Dianne, and I was talking to Craig about the poems–doing all that logistics stuff. And then once that was set, and once I had completed other commissions I was committed to earlier, I flipped the calendar on 2025 and started to really dig into the creative work. 

OAW: How did you come upon this particular poet? 

Neher: Craig and I met about five years ago. I have a very large song cycle that I was commissioned to write during the height of the pandemic: No One Saves the Earth from Us But Us. And two wonderful artists, pianist artists, Elizabeth Avery, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Associate Professor at Florida State University College of Music, and mezzo-soprano Quinn Patrick Ancrum, who’s at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, are a long-term pair of collaborators. They had found my music through my website and particularly had found my piece, American Waters, which has some extended vocal techniques and fragments of poetry. They were longing to do a large-form piece about the climate crisis. They approached me and we started to talk about what that would look like and how we would do it during the middle of a pandemic, when they weren’t able to connect in person. And so we ended up seeking out poets that were dealing with the climate crisis already. And through that, we were led to Craig’s work and also to the work of Felicia Zamora, Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati. They wrote the poetry for that song cycle. And then Craig and I have worked together on two other pieces.

And Craig was so kind. I mean, when I asked him if we could set some of his pieces, he was like, “yes, here’s the book. You can set whatever you want.” He was so trusting. One of the things I think is so special about working with living poets is that just like composers, for better or worse, the publishing and rights process of our work has become a lot more independently managed. There are some negatives to that, because it would be great if there was more support, but the positive is–and I would like composers to know this–a lot of living poets own their own copyright. Even if the poems have been published in a book, poets often still hold their copyrights. Craig has many books, but for the most part he owns most of his poems’ copyright because it was an agreement to publish a certain number and it was a non-exclusive agreement. 

And so many poets are in the position and are very excited about the opportunity of collaborating in another non-exclusive way to get their work out there and to share and amplify their work. And so it’s been one of my joys in working with living poets. And then just a particular honor for Craig to be so trusting with his work. I also feel like until that song cycle I hadn’t really written anything that was super on the nose, “political.” I mean, everything we do is political, but a current event kind of topical piece. And I hung back because there was a lot of that happening, especially in a city like Portland that has such great connections with activism. I think I was waiting and listening and noticing: “what do I feel like I have something to say on,” and “what’s not for me to say? What is somebody else’s story?” 

So when Quinn and Liz came with the idea for that major song cycle, and what they wanted it to be about from the get-go was the climate crisis, and then through our work researching poets and finding Craig and Felicia, who have a lot of history of writing poetry about current events and about social justice, I think that team really helped me find my way into a topic and a way of writing about that topic that felt true to me. I’m really glad that I took that time, and I’m also really grateful to be working in collaboration with poets like Craig and Felicia, because I think the vision gets clearer when we talk about it together.