Chasing the Spark: Ms. Shamazov

Name: Liliya Shamazov

Subject: Bass, Oratorio, and Treble Choirs 

What made you choose to teach chorus? 

I love singing. I love working with a group of vocalists. It all happened when I was in my high school chorus. I just grew to love the idea of singing and creating music with a group of people. And for some weird reason, I was fascinated by the idea of writing on the board. It’s really weird, but I was fascinated by it. So I just thought about it. I like writing on the board, I like kids, I like singing, so conducting and teaching a student chorus was kind of great. 

What brought you to love chorus and music in the first place? 

Because I came from a musical family, my mom was a piano player, I went to music school, and I studied piano. It was the Soviet Union, so the study was very strict, and, interestingly, part of the music school curriculum was being in a chorus. So I was probably five or six, and I went into the chorus as a mandatory thing, in addition to the piano study, and after the first day, they told me not to come back. So they’re like, “Well, we’ll give you a B, but don’t come.” I was one of the children who, I guess, did not match the right pitches and whatnot, but they did not teach that. They just were kind of sitting in a group, and the kids who weren’t matching weren’t allowed to continue. So I didn’t do much singing as a kid. And then, as I started getting older, around when I was 16 in high school, my voice changed. During puberty, the girl’s voice changes, which, especially in those days, most people did not ever talk about. Everyone knows, okay, the boys have vocal changes. They have active displacement, it's very vocal, everyone hears it. But no one really talks about the female adolescent voice. But I remember the day. I still remember where I was. It was in front of my locker in high school, and I started singing something. And I remember, it was a different voice. And that’s when I just felt it coming. And I just started singing more and just got into it more. 

How do you select kids for the choruses? 

I take as many students as I can when they audition. If they have enough range to handle a certain part, and if they have a more or less easy time matching notes. So, typically, if they can match a pitch and have enough of a range, I’ll accept them. But some of the time, adolescents do not, because their voices are always changing. So sometimes I will say, “Let’s give you another half a year, you come back to me in a few months, let me hear you then.” Because as adolescents grow, their voices keep changing, and usually singing gets easier. And if the student is very inexperienced, and I know they’ll be fine after a bunch of exercises that we do, I’ll still put them in. I won’t put them into the Oratorio Choir, because we spend less time working on that sort of thing. But after a year with me, most students can handle anything. 

How did you get to your position at Stuyvesant? 

My first job was at this very small school in Manhattan. The principal must have loved music, because I was the fifth music teacher at a school with significantly fewer students than Stuy. And I was there for a year and a half, but then I was laid off, surprise, surprise. I don’t even know how she could budget five music teachers! Typically, the last teacher goes out first, which was me. So I was looking, and I saw that there was a position available here. I interviewed and I auditioned. I had to play piano and conduct for the old chorus teacher, Ms. Hall. But I was very lucky to come here. 

What is your favorite part about teaching here? 

I mean, so many things. But it’s the kids. I love the kids. The kids are awesome. 

What is the most rewarding part of your job? 

It’s always going to be seeing my students making music together. Making communal music together and really finding the joy in that. When they figure it out and get something together, it sounds so good. Each song is a project that you build from the bottom up, and all its components come together, sometimes in rehearsals, sometimes at the concert, and when it comes together, and I’m looking at all my students, and I see that spark that just arises, that is the best part ever.

If you could go back in time and give advice to your high school self, what would you say?

Take physics. I think it would have really helped me in life. When I was studying voice very deeply this summer, with vocology, I learned that singing is just physics. There’s so much physics involved in sound creation, and the sound we make, and how we balance it in the universe—it’s fascinating. And if I had understood physics better earlier, I think it would have helped me. The other thing would be, don’t compete. Life is not a competition. Sometimes, we go through life and we’re like, okay, by this age we’re supposed to have this figured out, or be this, or measure things in certain intervals. But everyone is on their own time path. It always works out. You don’t have to be so competitive in life, trying to get to this particular place at this particular time. 

What do you consider when picking a repertoire for a chorus concert? 

The sound of the chorus, the interest level of the students, and the novelty. I have to look at the overall concert. I’m like, “Okay, this chorus is doing something from this era or something of this style.” So I want to balance it amongst the different choirs for the audience’s sake, because we are doing a show. So you want to present a variety of music and styles to the audience. And my program is a four-year program, so I also have to look [and] see, “Okay, last year we did a lot of classical stuff. This year, let’s jump to the 20th century.” So it’s a variety of music for the students over four years and for the listeners’ sake, and so not one song we did has the same energy or feeling. 

What goes into your job that people might not understand?

I think a lot of times, when people look from the audience, they see someone at the front just waving their hands and the kids just opening their mouths. They don’t understand the detail and the work that goes into every single piece we do. They don’t understand how much each individual member of the chorus contributes and how hard they had to work to get to this particular level. 

And the way we do it is different every time. We could have rehearsed every single thing, but the 

concerts still might be completely different from one night to the next. It’s live music. There’s multiple decisions that are constantly being made by the conductor and the performers during the performance. There’s an amount of memory that goes into the music, just practicing and fixing errors, but finding the balance is different. 

How would you describe conducting an exciting piece?

There’s this magic, and I don’t quite know how to describe it. I hear overtones. The air starts to feel different and there’s this wash of energy that comes from the audience. It’s different when we’re there by ourselves, but when you have that interplay of the audience, there’s this constant exchange of energy that happens between the audience and the performers. When the audience gets into and understands a piece, it’s the coolest thing ever. And that’s why, usually after the first concert, the kids fall in love with making music. It’s a universal thing. It happened to me. It happens to most people that continue for the rest of their lives. That’s why live music is different from recorded music. It’s a different universe. When we’re working with acoustic sound, we’re working with energy. It’s like when you’re having a conversation with someone face-to-face versus on the phone. When you’re having a face-to-face conversation with someone, it becomes this back-and-forth between two people. Each person has their own contribution. And we start to play with that in the concert. It’s emotions. It’s feelings. It’s thoughts. It’s body language. It’s communication. It’s everything.