This n That

I am about to dress for Pilates class, so there's no point  in working and I have some thoughts from yesterday that I want to put on "paper".

Yesterday the choir director and several other professional musicians from the church led a discussion about the presence of God in music.  A number of people from the choir attended, as did I, even though our choir wasn't singing.

One of the topics that got discussed was being an avocational musician versus a professional one.  One man (another choral conductor) said that the advantage of being an avocational musician was that you didn't have to do anything musically that you didn't want to do.  I can certainly see the advantage of that.  I have never been particularly bothered by the fact that I don't make money singing; in fact, when I was singing the first time, my idols were women who were big stars on the avocational singing circuit and got to sing plum roles in small productions two or three times a year and then go about their lives with jobs, family, etc.  There are still people doing that, but of course the bar is much higher now and they all not only sound as good as the professionals but also have conservatory degrees.

For me the problems of being an avocational musician are twofold.  First, I always have to justify why I'm spending time and money on this.  Part of this, of course, is that when I began singing again I already had a life and needed to squeeze singing into it.  As many people know, my need to recapture the feeling from that Valentine's Day was so strong that I was willing to orchestrate a breakup with my partner so that I could have a new life, but in 2007 she had a hip replacement and I realized that I needed to care for her, and one thing led to another. I still don't think of us as a "couple", but she is my significant other and in that vein we check in with each other about what we've planned for the day/week/month, etc. and she feels, rightly or wrongly, that she has a vested interest in how I spend my time and money.

The second issue with being an avocational singer is that other people (aka other singers) don't take me seriously.  When they find out, for example, that my church gig is unpaid, I can hear a bit of contempt in their voices.  (That would not be true if I had been cast in someone else's production of an opera and were singing for free.)

There was a Q and A session and so I asked the choir director and his wife, a cellist, both of whom are quite young and have up and coming careers, if it had been hard for them as young people to take care of themselves the way one needed to to have a career as a musician.  I know in my heart of hearts that one big reason I gave up singing at 30 (in addition to not making money, wanting to go to college at night - it never occurred to me to major in music - and being in a Lesbian separatist milieu that did not encourage pursuing a "patriarchal" art form) was that I found it onerous to take care of myself.  I had quit smoking but resented it (and after I stopped singing I went back to smoking for another two years), was continually starving myself to keep my weight under 130 pounds (I was five foot six), and wanted to party until all hours.  When I went back to singing in my 50s I had long since finished with all those things and was in top physical shape.

In other news, I asked the choral conductor I mentioned if I needed a conductor as well as a pianist for the Requiem  and he said no, if I trusted the pianist we could look to her for cues (this is what we did for Samson et Dalila).

And on a final note: when I got home I worked on the "Lacrymosa" measure by measure again and found that I was able to sing the first two of the difficult pages with the recording.  And I woke up humming my part, despite it's not being conventionally melodic!