So I heard back from the woman I sang the Handel for and she wrote back and said "no thank you". She didn't even offer me a cover.
Why has this upset me so much? The last two auditions I went to I didn't get anything and I just shrugged it off. Maybe because these were real live staged productions of big Italian operas and this was just a chance to sing a role in a Handel opera from a book in someone's living room. So I'm not even good enough to do that?
I just feel so much despair.
I was so happy with how I've been sounding (although I got into perilous waters at last week's choir practice singing a spiritual where the second sopranos end by pounding words on Fs and G flats at the top of the staff) but it's like a big so what. At the risk of making an inappropriate analogy, I feel the way certain ethnic groups feel about immigrants. No matter how well they do, a new wave of immigrants comes in and pushes them back to the bottom. Actually that's a very apt analogy, because no matter how much progress I make, there will be a new wave of people coming here who have a "package" (they sound perfect, look good, and have music degrees). So I end up on the bottom again.
I just don't know how many disappointments I can sustain. But apparently it's not enough to make me stop singing (and no, choral singing doesn't do it - I have to have a venue for solo singing, even in someone's living room where I'm just singing for peers, or in church). I know that the Mentor found me in the back of that church for a reason and I can't give up now. I feel like there's a huge bird beating its wings inside me and it has to fly. And no, it's not a little sparrow or a little robin but a huge tropical bird with bright colored feathers that wants to take people's breath away when it soars.
I think the last straw was when I produced Carmen, which was something innovative and different, and hardly anyone came. And that this annoyed the woman helping me produce it, to boot.
Yesterday I looked at the site for a nursing home/social service facility that brings in "performances". Well, guess what? All the names of scheduled performers were groups I'd heard of, the sort that get reviewed in the TIMES.
So I'm at a complete loss. And I don't even have anything on my calendar. Not one thing. Well, once the Advent schedule comes out I can chase the choir director around trying to get a spot to sing something (I am going to order the piano vocal score for Verdi's Ave Maria with Strings to see if I can excerpt something; otherwise I found a Bach hymn called "Advent" that is arranged as a solo.) And maybe the woman who produced the September 11 concert will have a Christmas concert in various outreach venues. At least she's savvy enough to know that if she wants to get a group of people to do this (last time it was 5 or 6 women) she has to offer us each solo verses in the carols we're doing.
And I will think of something else...
BabyD, I can see why you are frustrated. It is such hard work to create one's own performance opportunities, but that seems to be the lot of the avocational singer. I too feel like no one cares whether I sing or not. People seem pleased enough when I sing, but it's not like there is any demand for my solos at church; no one would complain if I stopped singing them.
ReplyDeleteI know you haven't had luck finding other avocational singers who are at your level of both ability and commitment. I'm wondering if you could find other avocational instrumentalists. You might be able to assemble a chamber group or something, and even if each person only brought eight friends or family to a performance, that would then be dozens of people.
My boss is an avocational pianist. She is VERY serious about it and has taken lessons for fifty years. Once she retires and stops being my boss, I'm planning to ask her whether she would like to put on a joint recital with me. She does this on her own already, so I'm hoping that the combination of her friends and my friends would make a decent sized audience.
I'm still working on finding avocational violinists and cellists, but admittedly, I haven't looked very hard!
This is a good suggestion. I know one avocational violinist who created her own chamber music group. They only play in her living room, not for audiences, I don't think, but she might know someone.
ReplyDeleteThe problem isn't as simple as there being no avocational singers at my level of commitment, though.
The first problem is that all the supposedly "amateur" groups are overrun by professionals (or people on what someone called "the professional cusp") using them as places to test drive roles that they aren't currently getting paid for. Basically there are three kinds of people singing at those groups: "emerging professionals" with music degrees, in the 20s and early 30s, who hope to have a career; managed low-level semi-professionals who want more experience in certain roles, and a few people who are older (meaning 50s) who have sung for decades, probably rarely for money, but who started out as "emergings" and have decades of experience singing these roles at these no pay groups.
So no one is interested in someone like me. I have met a few peers, mostly at the Meetups given by the woman who produced the September 11 concerts and who helped me with Carmen. These are women who started studying in their 40s or 50s and can sing selections in the classical style with a nice line and are very serious about doing solo singing in front of audiences, however small. Then of course there are choral singers, but I am not interested in doing this.
At church, actually, the congregation loves my solos and would be sad if I discontinued them; it is simply that the impetus always has to come from me (that is true of most people singing stand-alone solos, and there are no solos embedded in choral pieces for my voice type, so it seems)
As for the problem of getting an audience, people do want to come and be supportive, but I have no "family" and my SO doesn't go out at night, so she will only come to something in the daytime if someone will escort her. Friends sometimes come, but then I have a whole larger circle of acquaintances who love classical music, but are surrounded not only by the Met and Avery Fisher Hall, but by all those small opera groups that don't charge admission, or charge very little, free chamber music performed by Juilliard students, and all those free senior recitals given at the three big conservatories.
Probably for me the last straw (in terms of audience non-attendance) was when people who never came to hear me do anything came to the senior recital of the new soprano in the choir (the one whose slipper the choir director is figuratively drinking champagne out of, so to speak) and generated a huge buzz about it.
So I now just feel at a total loss. I know (and I am not bragging) that I am a big talent. My voice was not meant to be hidden in the sound of other people in a choir although I find doing that type of singing useful to me for a variety of reasons. Yes, I need polishing in every sense of the word. I didn't have the "total immersion" that music school students get, so if it's a choice between working on my voice and learning some repertoire or polishing my languages or learning how to sightread or working on my walk and my look, I really can only do the first. I have maybe an hour and a half a day to devote to this.
So what I'm saying is that I won't give up.
Hm....I wonder if you are engaging in the cognitive fallacy of minimizing, just a little bit. I have read here how sad it makes you that no one would knock on your door and ask you to sing for a wedding/funeral/concert, etc. However, it seems like your church solos are very much in demand, even if your choir director doesn't ask you to sing them. In other words, people enjoy your singing and feel like you have something to communicate. That's huge.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like what really stings is not that "people" aren't interested in you; it's that they are more interested in other people. There's nothing you can do about that. I get that it makes you sad and it would make me sad. It does make me sad, in fact.
But it doesn't minimize the fact that people love hearing you sing. I don't think it matters in the end if they are self-created opportunities.
"Cognitive fallacy of minimizing" goes waaaay over my head. But I get the point. Yes, people enjoy my singing, but there are sooooo many people who are better. Not just a few. And the people who are better literally suck up every opportunity there is, no matter how humble, no matter how small. I am not a sports fan, but I wish the performing arts operated more like sports: if you want to think of yourself as a professional you should not be allowed to sing in amateur venues. So if there's a singthrough of an opera from books, that should be for people who will not get other opportunities, for example.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the end it doesn't matter. It's like grading on a curve. If 90% of the people would, nationwide, be in the 99th percentile, someone like me, who, nationwide, might be in the 88th percentile ends up on the bottom. And it never gets better because every year more 99th percentilers flood in here.
So there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to make myself more marketable. There just aren't enough hours in the day.