By Sophia Romick

Alexandra Guerra is a second-year Bachelor of Music student with a concentration in vocal performance at Penn State University. In the spring of 2023, the soprano performed the role of Mother Gerald in a fully staged production of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites with Penn State Opera Theatre. In April 2024, they will perform the role of Fiordiligi in the Act I finale from Mozart’s Così fan tutte with Penn State Opera Theatre and the Penn State Philharmonic Orchestra on their Opera Gala concert in Eisenhower Auditorium.

Alexandra has been performing since middle school, and winning competitions ever since then. They’re a frequent soloist with Penn State’s Essence of Joy choir and has won several recent vocal competitions, including first place in the Anchorage Concert Chorus Vocal Scholarship Competition, winner of the 2nd-Year Classical Treble division of the Allegheny Mountain Chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing Student Auditions, winner of the Margot Bos Vocal Award and co-winner of the Eleanor Beene Award for Outstanding Talent in the Penn State School of Music.

Who are your biggest inspirations in music?

Easily Fiona Apple with regards to lyricism and I would also say Mitski because they both use very descriptive language, but also one thing that I appreciate about them is that they’re not always very literal. I like music that can stand on its own as poetry. So I like music that makes you think, and makes you use wordplay, as you try and connect concepts together to understand the bigger picture better. So, yeah. I would say Mitski and Fiona Apple with regard to lyricism. Who else do I give a fuck about? I would say Elliott Smith. Musically, because, I think he’s very creative with the types of sounds that he uses, but also, it’s very descriptive instrumentally, and it usually reflects the text very, very well. Like that one piece, the words go a little something like, everything means nothing to me. And under it is the really cyclical piano accompaniment and I think it just works really well as an entire body of work. So yeah I do appreciate that about Elliott Smith’s writing and then he’s also experimental with guitar tunings which is cool.

Clearly, lyricism is extremely important to you. How do you connect with the music that you sing when you don’t know the language? Like Italian or German, for example.

Why would I sing a song that I don’t understand at all?

Okay, so you’re fluent in Italian and French and all the other languages you sing. 

Okay so you know you’re getting smart with me. I’ve taken several diction classes in Italian, English, German, and French. Right now I’m learning the flow of these languages and how to properly pronounce words that come with grammatical structure and stuff like that. I’m currently taking a German language class so that I can more easily understand German Lied, which is the German word for song. But I’m not fluent in these languages obviously, I just have like a better understanding of how they work and how they flow and the kind of colors of the languages, like German is very angular and sharp and French is an unstressed language, it literally, it doesn’t involve stress marks. I mean, like obviously if you look at it, there’s Accenta aegyo and Accenta grov, and yeah. It’s like when we do the IPA for it, we don’t use stress marks. So it’s just like basics regarding each of the languages. And then we’re also given a bunch of resources to properly translate our text and what my professors have us do is translate each piece word for word as opposed to writing down the poetic translations in English. We learn them word for word so that we understand each song that we’re singing and then we also obviously have to understand historical context. We have to understand the bigger body of work if it’s from an opera or something like that, like a song cycle. We learn about composers, why the composer might have written it, what era in history that composer was from, like, was he in his composing era, was he in his flop era, was he in his slay era, so all of that. And so, yeah, we have to actually like write entire reports about each of our songs at the beginning of the semester. That shit pisses me off.

Okay, that’s real. I think that is extremely necessary for accurately performing the music.

Yeah, the meaning of music and the sharing of music go hand in hand. They are inseparable.

With influences like Fiona Apple, Mitski, and Elliott Smith, those are all- Pop is a very limiting term, but they are pop artists. Since a lot of your influences aren’t classical artists, what draws you to classical singing? 

Actually, oh, I have a good answer for you. Cross-training. Do you know what cross-training means?

No.

It means learning several different styles of music at once. So like, learning how to sing in a jazz style, blues style, pop style, music theater style, classical style, all of that is cross training, if you do it at the same time. And so that’s becoming increasingly important and popular. So one thing that I have been doing is I started with classical music in terms of performance. because that’s a really good place to start technique-wise and classical technique will feed into other forms of singing and other genres very well like jazz specifically so I’ve been doing more jazz and pop recently for choir purposes so they’re not completely separate genres they just tend to exist in different spheres but even that gap is being bridged with time because pop and jazz are making their way more prominently into academic spaces.

You’ve got a lot of classical training under your belt. How do you think the techniques you’ve learned have shaped your musical ability now, and specifically in your original work?

So part of my classical training at Penn State is a lot of music theory. So I’m learning a lot about basic chord progressions, but also how to make more interesting chord progressions. I’m learning about atonality and tonality. I’m learning about tonal analysis, which is studying pitches. Not necessarily as melodic lines but as like numerical sentences. So I’m learning a lot about the actual structure of music which can be felt inherently I think because a lot of music theory is just there to explain what humans have been doing for centuries. 

Right. 

At the same time, it’s kind of cool to be able to actually give names to certain phenomenons and certain sounds and use these sounds in my work to reflect my lyrics. 

Yeah I think a good example of that is the cyclical piano part playing underneath everything means nothing to me in that one Elliott Smith song you mentioned. 

Well yes. 

Switching gears, you are primarily a live performance artist. You don’t really deal with recorded music as much. How do you warm up for your performances?

Sometimes I don’t, I’m gonna be so fucking honest. 

Honesty is good. 

A lot of times I just have to make sure that I drink water. Uh, I just like, I’m trying to remember the times that I do warm up. Okay. You know what? Sometimes I literally just like practice my piece in a practice room, which I guess technically I shouldn’t do because right before performance, you shouldn’t be focusing on technique. Because you can’t learn new technique five in five minutes, especially not while you’re nervous about a performance. 

Mm hm. 

So I don’t focus on technique. I just make sure that I’m not going to pass out from dehydration. Yeah, that’s it.

As a live performer, how did COVID-19 affect your career?

I was recently applying for the Golumbic Scholarship at Penn State. As I was putting together my presentation, both the visual and speech elements, I realized that I did not have very much material from the years 2020 through 2022, because I wasn’t able to perform live. All of my auditions had to be recorded. Either recorded or through Zoom, which is fine because I’m kind of used to it as an Alaskan. Like all of my college auditions were via Zoom. It’s not the end of the world, but at the same time, it’s just like not the same as performing live because you don’t get that same rush of adrenaline. You don’t get to interact with your audience in real time, you don’t get to meet your audience either really, and it’s easier to pick apart your performance if it’s being recorded especially if you have the option to do it again. Nine times out of ten, you’re probably gonna try and do it again. This is kind of annoying because usually, these efforts are futile. Usually, the first recording is the best recording and you just kind of like spend multiple hours wasting your own time and becoming increasingly frustrated with the piece and music in general So it just wasn’t great um as a live performer. 

Is there anything that COVID stunted you in your career that you’ve improved on at school?

Yeah. Because I wasn’t able to perform live I struggled a lot with my acting and stage presence while singing. With all the opportunities from last year and this one, I’ve gotten a lot more practice on an actual stage. 

Currently, a lot of your own original music has been done alone. Do you have any plans for collaboration with other artists? 

What I want to do more of is collaboration with other vocalists here at Penn State because I have an abundance of access to vocalists, obviously. My friend Nadia, is applying to do a female empowerment recital featuring their own original work. And so they asked me and Maya [Another vocalist] to perform said work, given that their application is approved. So I think like community outreach would be super fun. Nadia is into electronic, more experimental music. So branching out into different art forms would also be super cool.