This blog post was inspired by hearing from two sources recently about the relationship of having money to being able to pursue a career in classical music.
In one instance, a blogger was responding to an online comment from a woman who (I believe) was whining that she could have had an opera career if she had had money, with the purpose of debunking this myth.
In another, a friend of mine mentioned needing money to pursue such a career, as was evidenced by the number of conservatory graduates who can't make a go of a career in music.
I think money helps, certainly in the beginning, and particularly for instrumentalists. A family with money is more likely to buy the child a musical instrument and pay for lessons. With singers I believe this is less important, although it does seem to help if there are musicians in the family (I believe David Brooks wrote that it took three generations to make a career.)
What I do think, and this is my whine, is that you need the right person to come along at the right moment and do or say the right thing, or, more important, for the wrong person not to come along at that moment and do or say the wrong thing. Or for the right person saying the right thing to drown out the wrong person saying the wrong thing. And this doesn't just need to happen once. It needs to happen at various points along the way.
I was a troubled teenager. Almost at the same moment, a music teacher friend of my mother's told me that I had an exceptional voice (it was loud and high - by which I mean secure on Fs, Gs, and As), and I began smoking. The immediate trigger was, actually, my mother, who herself was obese, telling me "have a cigarette, it will curb your appetite". I was 13 and had a BMI of 25. Hardly obese. Then there were the thin girls who smoked. And who hung out in coffee houses in Greenwich Village talking about the meaning of life. Talk and smoke. Suppose that music teacher had been my mother instead?
Suppose someone had said to me "You have a gift and you need to protect it. Leave your weight alone." Suppose I had auditioned for the performing arts high school and developed a different social circle, instead of the beatniks who smoked and talked, and later drank, smoked pot, and took amphetamines.
There's also the issue of screening out distractions. And this has to begin when you're very young. Some people have more discipline than others when it comes to doing this. But then some people also have more distractions than others. And the very age at which you need to be building your talent (I am talking about all the work that has to get done before you get into the music program, not after you leave, which is what the above referenced blog post was discussing) is that age at which most people are most distractable. And of course mentors help here as well. That oh-so-important high school teacher who can tell a young girl to treat her voice gently and stay away not only from smoking and drugs but from trying to scream like Aretha (when she doesn't have the training yet) or Giulietta Simionato (when - well, ditto). Or who can tell her she really needs to re-think the boyfriend who is shooting up or the BFFs (see how with-it I am!) who keep telling her she's fat.
Of course money (or at least education and savvy) can sometimes help with screening out distractions. My coach's daughter, a recent Juilliard graduate who is now studying in Europe (although she did neither of these things on family money - she got grants) was spared getting drawn into all the destructive things teenage girls do by being homeschooled until she left for college. Her family doesn't have a lot of money but they had the savvy to be able to homeschool her. And she is very close with her mother, who has encouraged her dreams rather than laughing at her, as mine did.
Suppose I had been in a kind of time warp and had met the Mentor when I was 14, or even 34, instead of 54? No matter how much he tormented me at the end, he made me believe in myself, and more importantly, he made me realize that God wanted me to sing and that that was what I had to do no matter how many sacrifices I had to make.
There have been so many times I thought I should give up. Or just be a nice choir singer. But just an hour in my bathroom singing arpeggios (yes, that C has been easier this month) and pouring over the score of Werther finding that if I can sing the progression up to the A just the way I sing the progression up to the G flat maybe I can nail it and know that I've nailed it and not panic ever again - maybe, tells me "no, you're not 'done' yet."
If I could just be Benjamin Button! Then in no time at all I could be 45 and who knows what I could accomplish then?
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