Denyce Graves launches new Generational Voices Program, to host master class

LAYLA VINSON
Staff Writer

Having recently retired following a 45-year career, Denyce Graves, mezzo-soprano and founder and artistic director of The Denyce Graves Foundation, continues to lend her voice to pedagogy at Chautauqua Institution through her newest program, Generational Voices. Established by The Denyce Graves Foundation, a banquet for the postgraduate program took place Sunday in McKnight Hall, kicking off a two-week program in which artists and faculty will come together as a rare cohesive unit. 

“I’d always been teaching voice and working with the next generation of singers,” Graves explained. “That was also a part of my life and a career that was happening parallel to singing … When I’m working with these young people, I think, what kind of world am I turning them out into?”

Graves previously served as an artist, speaker and artistic advisor for Chautauqua Opera Company. Now, the presence of Generational Voices at the Institution was made possible through collaboration between The Denyce Graves Foundation and Chief Program Officer and Senior Vice President Deborah Sunya Moore and Vice President of Performing and Visual Arts Laura Savia. For Graves, it’s an exciting opportunity to return with a uniquely personal program.

“After these two weeks, the work that we’re going to be doing with this program is going to be personalized. So everybody will sort of be siloed off with their intergenerational artistic council and will have their own programs designed for them,” Graves said. “They won’t be together anymore. So this is a very, very unique experience and opportunity.”

Reflecting Generational Voices’ core values of individualization and personalization, Graves will host a masterclass at 4 p.m. today in Fletcher Music Hall. With only about 20 minutes to offer impactful insights to artists, Graves said she hopes to leave each artist with helpful guidance that transcends the session in an impactful way. She said she has long held a passion for providing hands-on support and guidance to young artists.

“I just try to focus in on what they do well. Let’s lean into what they do well and try to offer advice and recommendations and suggestions where they can have an easy win,” Graves said. “That’s important, I think, and then you can gain their trust. And you know, maybe sometimes, you see them again.”

Determined to avoid dismantling the foundation of a young artist, Graves said that trust is integral to the master class process, a setting in which singers are “tremendously vulnerable and exposed” as their work is “pulled apart” in front of an audience. 

The program exists alongside two other initiatives run through the foundation — Hidden Voices, which focuses on K–12 education and artists that possess innate talent but lack opportunity, and Shared Voices, which connects Historically Black Colleges and Universities with conservatories and schools of music.

Graves said she hopes to fill the gap of vulnerability and uncertainty in opera following graduate and postgraduate settings in a rapidly changing industry. Generational Voices aims to provide support to emerging opera artists by better addressing the immense amount of money and time that are necessary for vocal refinement from the earliest stages of childhood through collegiate education and beyond.

“I want people to appreciate the arts and to appreciate that there’s no fast-tracking this thing,” Graves explained. “The amount of study, of sacrifice, of discipline, of complete ups and downs, of just sticking with it — how tenacious you have to be to be good at something. You can’t just leapfrog it; you’ve got to put in the time.”