Office Hours

Giselle (00:03):
Hi guys, my name's Giselle Kowalski and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Office Hours, and today we're talking to Dr. Marc Reynolds. I'm here with one of my interns. Can you please introduce yourself?

Tony Lopez (00:17):
Howdy y'all, I'm Tony Lopez and I was fortunate enough to get to speak to Dr. Marc Reynolds.

Giselle (00:23):
Yeah, so how did that conversation go? What'd you take away from it?

Tony Lopez (00:26):
All kinds of fun. Little advice. It was a very insightful conversation, and I'm honestly really glad. It was really cool to hear from a professor's perspective. Yeah.

Giselle (00:35):
Yeah. And he had such an interesting journey too. We hope you guys enjoy the conversation between Tony and Dr. Marc Reynolds.

Tony Lopez (00:45):
Could you please introduce yourself and what you do here at Texas State?

Marc Reynolds (00:49):
My name is Dr. Marc Reynolds, and I'm the director of Opera Theater here at Texas State University, which means I produce the operas, I stage direct the operas. As a program, I figure out how we're gonna develop it and offer new courses, anything that has to do with opera, that's my job at the end of the day.

Tony Lopez (01:06):
First question I have is I wanna find out if there's a quote you live by. Um, since you're on the spot here, I'll go ahead and share mine, "What makes anything precious, especially life, is that it ends." For me, that's a motivator to take full advantage of everything I want to do, do the things I would like to do, do the things I would love to do, tell the people that I love, that I love them, et cetera. So I was wondering if you have some sort of mantra that you let guide you throughout your life.

Marc Reynolds (01:29):
This is, Einstein says, "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." Coming from Einstein, that's inspiring to me. Figuring out how to inspire passionate curiosity in a world where our education often is "fill in the right bubble" is really in my mind the job of higher education. Of how do we help students relearn how to recapture that passionate curiosity they have when they're a little kid.

Tony Lopez (01:53):
Wonderful. I'm very excited for this interview, not just as a student speaking to a teacher, but as an aspiring storyteller myself. Talking to someone who I think many of your students at least would consider to be like a master of what you do, or at least someone who's constantly working and perfecting your craft. So I wanted to really get to the root of your story and how you have decided that this is what you want to do for your life. How does someone decide that they want to teach opera? What's your story there?

Marc Reynolds (02:22):
I think for everyone, it's a slightly different road of getting here. It's a really small niche that is not something that American culture drives people towards. I actually started, when I was a kid, my dad was a physician, he's a surgeon and so I traveled around hospitals with him, watched surgical videos, when I'm growing up, I'm gonna be like my dad and be a surgeon. So I did my undergraduate stuff with that in mind. I got to my junior year of undergraduate and everything was great. Grades were fine, life was fine, but I just wasn't happy with where I was. I wasn't happy with who I was becoming. It just didn't feel like the right fit. I'd had people along the way say, you have a gift at singing, you should consider that. I said, there's no way I can make a living off that.

(03:01):
That's way too scary. I'd much rather do this. Long series of events happened really pretty quickly that said, "no, you need to go that direction." So I did. It was January, classes had already started, and I switched my major in the first week of class a hundred percent and switched what I was doing. So then I did my undergraduate as a singer and by the time of that I was like, I'm close but I'm not quite there yet. Still is not quite the right fit. I don't get the satisfaction outta performing like I should if I want to be a performer. And I had a mentor say, "Hey, you should try stage directing it." So I gave it a try. They let me direct a few opera scenes and I realized, ah, this is it. This is where I belong. This is what I love. This is everything that I want to be able to do. Then went to do grad school stuff and so I did my master's and doctorate work in opera directing.

Tony Lopez (03:45):
How long have you been teaching here at Texas State?

Marc Reynolds (03:47):
This is year number five.

Tony Lopez (03:48):
What is one thing that motivates you to keep teaching opera?

Marc Reynolds (03:51):
It's an easy answer. The students, the students that are sponges and are passionately curious. I think you'd find almost any teacher, especially here in the music building, if there's those students, they'll bend back over backwards. They'll do anything for those students because as a teacher that's so gratifying to see growth. That's why we do what we do, is to see that growth.

Tony Lopez (04:10):
That's awesome. Did you always know that you wanted to educate once you started sort of going down vocal performance slash opera as a career path? Or was it the idea to get out and just make a career out of it?

Marc Reynolds (04:22):
Yeah, so initially my goal was to become an opera singer and that changed with time. That option came up a few times of being able to really go down that road and see potential success. For me, the short version is A, I really love teaching. That's actually what I love most. The opera, the directing, that's great, but it's actually not what I care about most. And then secondarily is I do have a family and so I remember we had just had our first child and I was at a summer gig and my wife had called me up like, oh, he just rolled over for the first time. I don't think I cry easily, but I did. I lost it. I was like, I'm missing the big moments of my children's childhood, and if I do this career, that's what it's going to be. And so that had me really thinking about what do I care about most? And it ended up becoming a really easy decision.

Tony Lopez (05:08):
Where did you go to college and what did you major in? You already kind of briefly touched on this, but elaborate a little bit more on like your educational path.

Marc Reynolds (05:15):
Sure. I did my undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University in vocal performance. And then I went to UT for my master's program. And then it's really easy for a doctoral program cause there's only one in the nation and that's UT.

Tony Lopez (05:26):
What was the college experience like for you?

Marc Reynolds (05:28):
So the short version is the college experience is obviously a lot of work. It's very stressful, but I found that as I focused on being passionately curious, not on the grade — if I focused on the grade, life was miserable — if I focused on just learning, then the grade happened organically. And I also found that I learned one of my favorite lessons in grad school from one of the teachers there. She's like, the only way to survive and to be productive is to do at least something on every part of your to-do list every day. So even if that's just, if you're supposed to memorize an opera today, I'm just going to crack the binding. If that's all I can do today, then I'm gonna at least do that. That's been kind of a mantra of life when we're trying to juggle so many different things all at once.

Tony Lopez (06:09):
What are you most proud of in your career?

Marc Reynolds (06:12):
Well, I was still doing my doctoral work to direct "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," which is a modern opera based on some writings by a psychologist. It's small. We did it in a church as a minimalist kind of version over the summer part of a festival, a Chamber Music Festival. It was my proudest moment because when I looked up on stage, I had every single character completely authentic. They were so into their character, they're so authentic. It felt so genuine in a way that I'd never seen before. The audience reacted, they were able to fully engage with us in a story. There's nothing that brought them out of the story. There was nothing that was distracting. They just pulled them right into that story. And that was a moment where when you stand up and you have people walking out, wiping their eyes with tears and you're wiping your eyes too. That is kind of why we do what we do. And so that I think would probably be the proudest moment.

Tony Lopez (07:05):
What's a lesson that took you a long time to learn when you were at college?

Marc Reynolds (07:09):
It's becoming a theme of our conversation, but really to stay focused on connection with people not on product. So that it's all about creating a valuable process and then the product will take care of itself, you know, and I wanna see this product, I wanna see this turn out. It took me a while, and I still have to relearn that on a regular basis of, you know, just let that go. Focus on where you are and making meaningful connections and making a meaningful moment.

Tony Lopez (07:37):
If you could give me, I'm a sophomore in college, any piece of advice, what would you tell me?

Marc Reynolds (07:42):
Any student that comes in the door is willing to listen for advice. I say take a grant writing class. Cause if you can write grants and get money that way you can do any show you want to do. You aren't gonna be beholden to someone else offering you a role. You say, no, I'm gonna start my own opera company, and I know how to write grants, and here's the money. This is the role that I wanna perform. I'm gonna perform this, the director I wanna work with, here's the, we're gonna hire them and bring them in. Number two is, I actually know a lot of performers where they get their first break by being part of a company because they can write grants and then they're like, I can also perform. Someone drops out and they're like, "We don't have anyone else, you want to do it?

(08:18):
And they rock it, and then they start building their career that way. It's a way to get your foot in the door. Number two thing is the thing I was saying before, and that is let go of the grade. I remember being an undergraduate and having a professor tell us as voice majors that there were, there are gonna be times where you're gonna need to choose to get a C in another class. I thought, no. I have perfectionist tendencies and so I was like, anything less than an A is not acceptable. But it really did change, my perspective of focusing on the learning and not on getting the grade. If you are walking into the classroom, and you're worried about what grade you're gonna get and how you're gonna do that, then the brain's not in the right spot to be ready to learn. If we give everything 110%, there's nothing left, and we're burnt.

Tony Lopez (09:06):
You're speaking to my soul right now, . I'm, this is really good stuff. Do you have a favorite memory teaching here at Texas State?

Marc Reynolds (09:13):
So one of my favorite memories is actually being post-graduation with a few of the students that were freshmen here when I started. They were the ones that I got to see all the way through the process for the first time. And in what we do, we become really close with our students. I remember as a semester came to an end, I felt like I was losing my own children. That's probably one of my favorite moments because I was so proud of what they had done and what they accomplished.

Tony Lopez (09:40):
We've been talking a lot about personal connectivity and just the ability to be vulnerable. So how would you, what advice would you give to someone not only as like a storyteller, but as a person who's struggling to find the courage to just try?

Marc Reynolds (09:56):
I'm gonna say breathe. It sounds overly trite, but if people actually take a moment just to take a deep breath and calm that nervous system back down. Going back to previous question, I think that'd be something that I wish I would've learned earlier.

Tony Lopez (10:10):
What's a piece of advice you find yourself telling your students time and time again?

Marc Reynolds (10:14):
So, in this super competitive environment where we have people doing stuff and being competitive for roles and a host of other things, there becomes this obsession with how do I do all the right things to be the most competitive to win the role to do, to do this or that? The surprising thing is, and what they often don't want to hear or we don't want to hear, is the real answer is be a responsible, good human being and you'll probably get what you are wanting. Show up, be there on time, do your work, don't be a jerk to other people, actually be pleasant to work with. And they're like, wait a minute, it's not about how pretty my voice is? Yeah, that's down on my list. That is not at the top of the list here. Yeah, you need to have that, right, on some level, but a bunch of people are gonna have that, I will actually cast someone who's got a less impressive voice if they have these characteristics and something else. And I think, in our education system, we forget to teach the human, say "no, let's just focus on being a good human being" and that's what's gonna lead to success.

Tony Lopez (11:14):
That's awesome. Excellent. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I feel enlightened now . Well thank you. And that's not a hyperbole, that I truly mean that. This has been an excellent and very insightful conversation. I'm very grateful that you allowed me to speak with you.

Marc Reynolds (11:30):
Thank you so much. I appreciate it, it's been a good time.

Giselle (11:35):
Thank you so much for listening to Office Hours with Tony and Dr. Marc Reynolds. Um, Tony, you wanna say bye?

Tony Lopez (11:43):
Uh, bye, y'all. Slay hard and love Boko.

Giselle (11:46):
Go Bobcats.

Tony Lopez (11:47):
Go Bobcats, .