I'm seeing this from the other side, too. Of /course/ singers need to know how to do their own research. But, if there is a friendly group of folks on the interwebs who can tell me in 30 seconds what it might take me 30 minutes or more to find myself, what's the harm in asking?
I was recently sent a list of excerpts to learn for a chorus audition. Bits from 6 different operas and 2 choral pieces. I was given the list 9 days before the audition. I was working more than full-time at the time, and just couldn't get to the library quickly enough to get the music and learn it, so I asked for help here. I still spent about 2 hours just finding the right spots in the music.
It was especially time consuming, because some of them were referred to by the words they started with, and some of them were given colloquial titles, like "the wedding ceremony," which, when you're dealing with a language you don't know, takes a bit of work to figure out, i.e. find the synopsis, read it, figure out where in the opera the wedding takes place, then find the libretto, find the spot in the libretto, then go through the score until you find that same place. All this (plus learning and practicing the parts), and in the audition, I was never even asked to sing any of the $%$# excerpts!
You're right, I can't imagine the days before the internet. I can't imagine what I would have done if I couldn't have found synopses and libretti online. At one point, when I couldn't find a place to download one of the pieces I didn't have, I almost sent my husband to the library for it. Luckily, someone here was kind enough to point me to a place online that had it for sale as a download.
The amount of busy work that goes into singing astounds me sometimes. Is it really time well spent to go through and translate the whole opera myself? Really? Do I perform it better than if I found a translation online, made sure it matched up, and memorized that instead? Do I sing better because I went to the library myself instead of sending my boyfriend?
And finally, if you are so angry about people not doing their own work, why do you help them? I guess, to me, it sounds a bit like the old codger saying, "In my day, we had to walk through 5 feet of snow uphill to get to the music library. Then we had to use the card catalog, and we all had paper cuts on our fingers from using it. AND WE LIKED IT!"
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