Music
professor inspires students
By
Kristen Wooley
Daily Forty Niner
For
her entire life, Marian Bodnar has had music
surrounding her. She played the piano as
a young child, the violin, had been in several
school musicals and sung in choirs, but
her most treasured instrument, she said,
is her voice.
"The
feelings that the voice, as an instrument,
can evoke are incredible," Bodnar said.
"I love the art form of music."
Nine
of the 25 years or so that Bodnar has been
teaching music has been spent teaching class
voice lessons and private lessons at Cal
State Long Beach.
"She
knows a lot about the voice," Elysse
James, a current class voice student of
Bodnar's, said. "I've been singing
since I was 4 and I've heard a lot of the
things that she teaches us before, but she
explains the why behind what she teaches."
"I
feel like I am very non-judgmental,"
she said. "I try to be encouraging
rather than critical. I want people to have
fun while they are performing because it
is a really hard thing to do, to sing in
front of people."
There
are tactics that James referred to, quirky
ways of teaching and reaching students which
made Bodnar stand out to James.
"She
has these silly vocal exercises that feel
weird when you are doing them, but in the
end everyone in the class is laughing and
so it's cool," James said.
Some
perks Bodnar has enjoyed in her many years
in the music field happened when she was
teaching at the Stella Adler Theaters and
Academy of Acting. She taught private singing
lessons to Antonio Bandares, Melanie Griffith
and Penelope Cruz, to name a few famous
faces she instructed.
"I
joke with my students," Bodnar said.
"I say that when I teach singers how
to breathe, I place my hand on their ribcage
in demonstration, and I tell them it was
a lot of work touching Antonio's ribcage."
Besides
music, teaching and theater, Bodnar, among
her many talents, also teaches aerobics.
She said that with the workload she has
and the enormous energy output it takes
to teach one on one with students, she likes
to exercise to keep everything working better.
A
very rewarding aspect of teaching for Bodnar,
she said, has been the students who have
come back and said that her teaching has
helped them in their careers. She had a
student who made a singing career in Nashville
call her and thank her, saying that he has
used so much of what she had taught him.
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