A Busy 54 Days

So will they be good, or will they be disappointing?

A lot of that is in my hands.  I have my Carmen concert.  With or without a cast, even, Heaven help us, without a tenor (I am pretty sure now I will have a narrator and I have an accompanist) this show will go on!

I had a good runthrough of "Chanson Boheme" at the producer's apartment.  Finally I was able to air the subject of dark versus bright vowels and I explained about my teacher wanting me to sing dark vowels so that I can make a big space for the higher notes.  She said she understood that, but that I didn't need to do it in middle voice, which I suppose is true.  She is very invested in my pronouncing the French in a nasal way, like spoken French, which she says  makes Carmen seem more "witchy".  What I love so much about these sessions is that I get to delve into some of the nonmusical aspects of creating a performance and creating a character, which engages my imagination, which is something that happens all too rarely (if I tell you about the hundreds of posts I've seen over the past month about whether to use one or two spaces after a period, coming from people who work in the industry in which I earn my living, you will understand how arid and meaningless that world is and why I despair so much of the hours I spend in it).

I am also reading through the novella looking for sections that match the sung selections we will be presenting.  The producer thought it might be good if I read one of them in conjunction with singing "Chanson Boheme" at her musicale. So that will give me a chance to do something new, and to work on my speaking voice, which I have never used properly.

We also got the choir schedule going through Good Friday.  We will be singing "pieces by Mendelssohn".  So does that mean Elijah?  I remember when the choir sang an excerpt from Elijah last spring, I sang "O Rest in the Lord".  People (including the choir director) really seemed to like it, but afterwards he said something interesting.  We were talking about how wonderful the oratorio was and he said, "Well, maybe you can make that one of your next projects".  He didn't say "We are going to be doing something from Elijah on Good Friday and I hope you can sing something."  So what was that supposed to mean?  When I got the schedule this morning I wrote back to him saying that if we were doing something from Elijah I would very much like to sing something, either one of the two arias, or even just a recitative or maybe participate in a small ensemble.  I also said that I had been "disappointed" the last two years that there hadn't been anything for me. The Brahms Requiem does not have anything for a mezzo, but the year before we did the St. Matthew Passion which had a number of nice things for mezzos including a duet which was sung less than stunningly by two women from the church that shares our building. I think I was particularly upset because that year (the St. Matthew year) I had asked if there were any solo opportunities on Good Friday and he said no. I don't want to say that he "lied" to me, because it is hard to imagine someone as devout and truly good as this choir director "lying", but something was not on the up and up.  Anyhow, my friend "Abby" (not her real name) who comes from what she has called "hillbilly" stock has an expression she uses "don't borrow trouble". so I need to just chill out and see what is what.

I find it so hard to tread that line between being "pushy" and going after what I want.  I was thinking that I shouldn't "bother" the choir director tonight after rehearsal (he may not have gotten my email or may have decided to ignore it) but on the other hand if I don't say something the opportunity may be lost.  And I don't have a plan B.  I really have nothing else to do with myself during that period other than, perhaps, find excuses to go to rehearsals for Carmen instead of choir rehearsals if I'm only a chorus member.  Then I can just pretend I'm one of these "ringers" who shows up without rehearsing much and at least have a choral part under my belt for future use.

On the other hand I may be pleasantly surprised.

Tonight we are doing the piece by Britten (which I intend to do more work on later) and the other hymn with the solo that isn't.  How ironic that the text to it is "Ask and it shall be given you."  If only.

ETA: So tonight I asked the choir director about singing "O Rest in the Lord" or something else from Elijah on Good Friday (he had not gotten my email yet).  He said he would have to see if it fit in with the Passion story (if not, there is another short aria "Woe Unto Them").  He said he didn't know if there would be an appropriate spot for either of these but that maybe I could sing "O Rest in the Lord" on Maundy Thursday.  I also think we had a fruitful brief discussion about the fact that if there are going to be solos they should be more evenly divided up among voice parts.  So now I just have to turn things over, learn my music, and work on Carmen.

What's Up Next (Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down)

As both my Carmen concert and Holy Week are now approaching, there is a lot to take stock of.

For Thumbs Up, Carmen is really progressing.  Other than the B at the end of the "Seguidilla" (which is "passable" if not lovely or easy) and making sure I keep my strength up and my jaw relaxed during "Chanson Boheme" (and if we get a Micaela she can sing the bridges between the verses, which will make that a nonissue), there is nothing that is difficult to sing, and I can have a ball.  Also for Thumbs Up, the woman producing the concert is really excited about it, as is evidenced by the fact that she is already heavily into the planning stage.  The tenor is difficult to pin down.  He says he is on for the concert as far as he knows, but did not yet get back to me about whether he is available on April 6 to sing one of the duets with me at another "musicale" (she told me not to refer to it as a "concert" LOL) in her living room or whether he can go to me to any of the Meetups to rehearse.  Another Thumbs Up is that my partner did not give me any flak about returning to these Meetups.  I don't know if I mentioned it, but she had a little mini-tantrum over my telling her how much the woman producing this "meant to me".  I was referring only to her as a mentor, after a lifetime without such, not comparing my feelings about her to my feelings about my partner.  YIKES!

As for Thumbs Down, I have written quite a lot about my frustration with the fact that the only solos interspersed into choir pieces seem to be for high sopranos or men.  In fact, I was telling someone that I think the reason such a "fuss" is made over that young soprano is that she has sung (quite a lot of) solos that are interspersed into choir pieces, so she gets to be a star in situ whereas any solos I sing are a separate item that I rehearse before the regular choir practice when people are not necessarily listening and which I sing mostly during communion.  True, many people come up and say nice things (which I am sure they mean) but it doesn't have quite the same feel to it.  I finally got up my nerve and posted a question about this in a closed Facebook group for church musicians, mainly asking whether or not the issue is that composers don't write interspersed solos for midrange and lower women's voices or whether it is something else.  Quite ironically, when I went to choir practice last night, we were given music for Ash Wednesday, one of which was a piece with a little solo in a middle range labeled "soprano solo or unison" and we were told that all the sopranos were going to be singing that together.  So what am I supposed to make of this?  I know the Lutheran tradition is that the communal voice (meaning hymn singing) is more important than the choir, and that the choir is more important than soloists, which I have no objection to.  My only objection is that exceptions continue to be made where very high voices are concerned.  And of course there's the fact that the high soprano(s) can do something that other choir members can't do and that this is obvious to everyone.  Any untrained singer who can carry a tune could (theoretically) sing all the notes in "O Rest in the Lord" so the fact that I can sing that, albeit in a way that sounds "lovely" (I have been told) doesn't quite have the same "wow" factor.

Anyhow, I suppose on the side of Thumbs Up is that we have also been given, for Ash Wednesday, a very complex piece by Benjamin Britten in eight parts.  That means I can learn my part cold (I don't sightread, so I did a mediocre job last night with it, but several days' "plunking" and singing it against the recording will imprint it in my auditory memory forever) and be the anchor for a very small group of people.  Ash Wednesday has its positive and negative aspects, as a service to sing in.  On the plus side, you have to be there early on a work night so there are fewer people.  On the minus side, the other church that shares our building brings in paid singers but this is usually one high soprano and one alto, and I am holding down second soprano.

So now I am waiting for the Lent singing schedule.  I will see what has been selected for Good Friday and see if there's a mezzo solo connected with any of the pieces that I can "lobby" to sing, otherwise maybe I can sing "Qui Sedes" on Maundy Thursday.

And I won't be available on April 6 because of the living room "musicale".  Whether anyone will miss me is - well, it shouldn't really matter.  I am starting to accumulate a lot of other fish for a nice big fry-up.
 

Writing Assignment: The Most Important Thing that Happened to Me This Year

To my regular readers: I posted this in response to a "prompt" from the woman who taught the writing class I took this summer.  Much of the "history" here is familiar to you.  It isn't to her, so I needed to include it here.  And I suppose there are always new insights.  So of course I would love you all to read this.

The most important thing that happened to me this past year was finding a mentor.

When I look at people who have achieved excellence (and perhaps renown) in their chosen field, what they all have in common, is that they had a mentor.  It might be a parent (David Brooks once said that it took three generations to make a career), teacher, coach, or even a spouse or lover in a the same or a related field. I never had a mentor for my singing.  My mother wanted me to be a writer, in high school I was steered toward academics, not music (interestingly, students from disadvantaged backgrounds with good voices were more likely to be encouraged to sing than I was), and after I graduated from high school, let’s just euphemistically say I “fell off the map” for a looong time.

I began studying voice seriously (I had had a few informal lessons before that) in my late 20s, and was singing quite well, but at that time I was immersed in Lesbian-separatist political activities where I was discouraged from “giving my energy to a patriarchal art form,” particularly one where I would have lots of interaction with straight men.  So at 30 I stopped singing and enrolled in college to get a degree in – what else? – Women’s studies.

I say that after that I never thought about singing again until well into the millennium, but that is not really true.  If people were gathering around a piano at a party to sing, I would join in (and blow people away) and at least once a week I had a dream (I’m referring to the nocturnal kind) about singing.  And when we played “getting to know you” games at the office, I loved being able to answer the question “What is something nobody knows about you that would surprise them?” with “I used to be an opera singer” which I can say was true, even if I never got paid a penny for it.

Fast forward to 2003, the year of my “discovery” sitting in the back pew of my local Unitarian church, singing from a hymnal.  My partner and I started going to that church because we liked the idea of going to church but didn’t believe in most of the supernatural events that are the bedrock of most religions.  Certainly I didn’t go there to sing.  But one day, a very charismatic figure who looked like a cross between Rudolph Valentino and old drawings of Mephistopheles, whispered in my ear seductively “You’re a professional singer, aren’t you?” and things were off and running.  He led me a merry chase, which I wrote about at length here, but the end result was that I have been singing for ten years now.  He and I had a very ugly falling out (and then made peace five years to the day after that fateful Samson et Dalila duet, when I was singing the "Habanera" at a Valentine's Day concert at the Unitarian church), and I left the Unitarian church both because of that and because they decided to stop using classical music in the services, but I got right back on my feet and now have some solid (or they would be solid if I didn’t live in the most talent-packed ZIP code in the country) accomplishments under my belt.

Looking back, I realize that I would not have been so susceptible to a lot of his silliness (voice lessons, at which I learned a lot, were laced with racy comments – to me flattering, I suppose; I was 54 – and silly New Age blather) if I hadn’t been so starved for a mentor.

And I did not find another one until this year.  I have a good voice teacher, a musically knowledgeable choir director, and several coaches, but no one who was really interested in me.  I mean, really, when you come to think of it, who wants to mentor someone over 60?  Everything is about young, young, young, young talent.

But this year someone materialized.  I had sung with her before, but this year it has been different.  She says I have the perfect voice for Spanish songs.  Which to her includes Carmen.  She is going to help me produce a concert of excerpts from Carmen with someone reading from the novella by Prosper Merimee.  She gave me a big thumbs up for the Youtube video I made, singing the Habanera in the Strand Bookstore (available on request, just send me an email).  She suggested a book of Spanish songs for me to buy, as well as a book about Spanish culture.  And if the weather had been better, she had planned to come to the Lutheran church where I’m singing now to hear me sing a Spanish song about the birth of Jesus at a service conducted entirely in Spanish!

I have had so many disappointments since my 2003 “discovery”.  There are about 10 “community opera groups” (aka they don’t pay people) here and none of them wanted me.  They are filled with professional sounding singers (some even have managers) with conservatory degrees and impressive CVs.  Even a choir that doesn’t pay is now filled with the “stars of tomorrow” from the big conservatories.  I was starting to give up hope.

Now I can believe again.  That someone sees a special spark in me, no matter that I’m over 60, have no music degree, and nothing on my resume except church solos and a few homemade concerts (produced by me or someone else).

And if nothing else, I can still hope that someone turns my blog into a movie.  If it happened to “Julie”, cooking from Julia Child’s book, in obscurity, it can happen to anyone.

In Praise of Praise

This blog post is prompted by several things.  The fact that, working alone at home, and now, compounded by the dangerous snow and ice conditions outside, I get so little feedback.  The fact that I recently read an article citing a study that showed that happy workers are workers who get regular feedback (which presupposes that at least half of it, or more, will be positive; the rest being instructive).  The fact that when I look at little micro-situations that have made me feel blue and put out, they mostly involve other people getting praise when I got none.

Now praise is very different from a grade or an award.  Praise can be given to each according to her personal accomplishments.

I am not one of those people who think "everyone is a winner".  If a role is being cast, it will only go to one or two people.  Likewise a prize.  Perhaps there will be first, second, third, and honorable mention, but no more.  Think of Olympic medals: gold, silver, and bronze.

But praise is different.  Praise can go to the person who improved the most since the last round of auditions.  Or to the person who sang that particular aria better than she had ever sung it.  Or - and this is the import of this piece - to someone who exceeded expectations of what was possible given the person's age and starting point.

My partner, who occasionally says something really supportive and profound, said she couldn't understand what made me so sad about having this 21 year old conservatory student in the choir.  She said, how can you compare yourself to her?  You're 63!  You can't "do your life over" (which of course made me want to cry).  But it was then that I realize that what I was so envious of was not that this young woman got a solo on Good Friday (which is again approaching; I must fortify myself with lots of planning for my Carmen concert, which will be two weeks after Easter, or - who knows? I may be pleasantly surprised).  It was the fuss that people made over her, all the way from the choir applauding her in rehearsal to the choir director asking people to give her a hand for a solo that she sang that was interpolated into a choir piece.  People have come up to me when I've sung something and said it was "lovely", which is no small thing, as I know.  People don't have to say anything.  But no one has actually said to me "you know it is quite amazing what you have accomplished over these past ten years, considering your age and all the obstacles that entails."  My partner said that to me.  She who almost never compliments me on anything except my cooking and my looks.  She said I should be proud of everything I have accomplished and how hard I have worked.  I laughed and said that I wished I had her in my pocket!  That then I might feel more confident and less despairing.

Actually, I did once get a compliment of that sort, from an unexpected quarter, from a voice teacher, one who is at least as well respected as some of the ones I have had "issues" with over the Internet.  She said I was an "inspiration", sounding like I do at my age not to mention that no one in a million years would guess how old I am.

I just long for some praise, some strokes.  Not instead of constructive criticism.  There have been articles lately about how too much "self esteem" is not good for kids; that if they're told everything is "wonderful" they will never improve or develop any self discipline, which is probably true.  It's important to be told (often) that the wonderful things are wonderful, and also to be told which things need improving and how to improve them.

Lastly, there is a quote that's been circulating, that I would have shared on my Facebook page, but it ends in an obscenity which is so not my style; also it is really not the correct word for my situation.  It reads, more or less:

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, surrounded by [jerks].

If I substituted "superachievers" for "jerks", I would have it, in a nutshell.

I wish all the superachievers could just clear off, so I could really see myself.

The Internal Call and the External Call

I have not been feeling great lately, mostly because of the weather.  Being A. more housebound than usual and B. noticeably more frightened by the idea of walking on snow and ice than younger people are (or than I was 20 years ago - yes, the last rapid succession of snowstorms was in 1993) has not been good for my mental health.

So this afternoon I took a break from work to listen to a tv interview with the (drop dead gorgeous) pastor at the church where I sing.

A lot of the thrust of the discussion had to do with the role of women in the church, the lack of female role models at the time she was ordained, how she dealt with her "call" in the absence of these, and what that call consisted of.  I am not going to post a link to the interview here, mostly because it is almost a half hour long, but one thing she mentioned about her "call" was that in the Lutheran tradition it is considered important for there to be both an internal and an external "call".  That means that not only was it important that she felt called to the ministry, but that other people should perceive her as being suitable for it.

So therein lies the heart of some of my deep sadness about missed opportunities as a singer.  The lack of an external call.  Oh, there were external calls, mostly when I was much younger, but they were few and far between and never loud enough to compete with my generation's exhortation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", to smoke to stay thin, and to "be" an intellectual, engaged with the issues of the day, not with something as self-absorbed as the pursuit of excellence in classical music.  (Don't get me wrong.  As I've said many times, my mother and her circle adored classical music, but it was meant as something to listen to after a day's work in a classroom or at the typewriter, not as a personal pursuit.)

And the external call mostly petered out by the time I turned 21.  Even though I began studying singing seriously the first time at 26, that was too late for me to matter.  And my whole heart wasn't in it. True, I was no longer smoking, but I was still starving myself to fit into a size 30 jeans and spending long evenings at Lesbian discos.

I am now coming up on the tenth anniversary of my "discovery" by the Mentor.  I think why that was such a cataclysmal event in my life was that it was the first external call to singing that I'd had in a very, very, long time and it was neither elicited nor sought.  I had begun going to that Unitarian church to go to church, not to sing.  If we want to be picky, it is now beyond the date of my "discovery", which probably happened in the summer of 2003, but it was the sumptuous "Mon Coeur" that changed everything.  Which may explain why I am so (inexplicably) sympathetic to Miss Kansas. Maybe singing "Nessun Dorma" badly lit a fire under her that singing "Caro Mio Ben" in a studio with a vocal pedagogue never would. Maybe she will start again and do that now that the fire has been lit.  Would I have continued to be obsessed with singing for a decade if I had been asked to sing "Amazing Grace" instead of being coaxed and seduced with an image of my own lusciousness in a seethrough lace top singing one of the sexiest arias ever written?  Possibly not.

It is the external call that I still crave.  That is why I am happy with the woman who is helping me produce Carmen and sing Spanish songs.  More than half the people who show up at her meetups have never even had a formal voice lesson, so in that milieu I feel special.

I am also facing a choir dilemma.  Last Sunday we sang a piece in 8 parts and, for the first time ever, there were four other second sopranos, including one "ringer" (not a trained singer, but an instrumentalist who can sing pleasantly in tune and can sightread).  Why on earth was she needed in my section.  When I told her I was surprised she wasn't singing alto (where more people are needed) I am not sure she understood but she mentioned two women by name in the first soprano section, saying that their voices are "so strong".  Hello??? I can sing loud enough to drown both of them out any day of the week.  Now I will say with all humility that my voice is in no way as lovely certainly as the 21 year old conservatory student's.  But strong???  I know this sounds idiotic, but I was really hurt.

I just am not all that excited about singing there any more.  If I am not noticed, even as someone with a big, obviously trained, voice who can hold a part with confidence, why am I even doing this?  On the other hand, I don't want to skip rehearsal because of the weather.  That just makes me look old and dilettantish.  I will be there whatever the weather, unless I get a "call" from somewhere else to do something else, which I hope is more often than used to be.  I think the woman who produced the last Sunday concert will be producing another - in March.  I hope I can sing there with my Don Jose.

And now I need to get onto finding a reader.