Saturday I went to hear my voice teacher, his wife, and three colleagues sing a free concert in a prestigious venue. They have a new mezzo. Yes, she sounds better than me (her voice has a big "shimmery halo" around it which mine does not), and yes she's younger (40ish), and she's agile, although I thought some of her acting was over the top. At my last lesson I asked my teacher how long he thought it would take me to sound good enough to sing with that group in that venue and he hemmed and hawed. The fact that he picked someone who sings better than I do is something I can't argue with. What I got angry about was that one of the last women he used as a mezzo was someone who did not sing better than I do but she was someone he had "known for years" and had performed with numerous times.
So there's the age barrier and then there's the social barrier. I was thinking about the similarities between starting to sing (or really do anything) when you're older, and coming out when you're older. When I was counseling at the LGBT center, one of the problems older women had who were coming out at the age of 40 or older was that they had a whole life infastructure in place (sometimes involving a husband and children, but at the very least involving friends who had known their "former" self) and now they had to figure out how to re-tool it to make room for their new identity as a Lesbian. I feel very much that way about my passion for singing. I wasn't in a college music program, for starters. That's huge. So even when I began singing the first time in my mid-20s, I had a totally different social circle from people who were in college music programs. Most of my friends (and my mother) thought my interest in singing (particularly classical music) was at the very least quaint and irrelevant and at the very worst "not what politically minded 'dykes' did". And when I began singing again in my 50s it was even harder. My friends were polite (albeit bemused) by it and my partner was angry at me. It has taken 10 years to get people on board, that this is what I am doing and will be doing until I can't do it any more, so that is a blessing, but it's still not the same as being immersed in an environment where you know musicians and they know you and that's where your friends come from and that's even where your spouse or your partner comes from. I don't only have to build a vocal technique, I also have to build a network and most of the existing ones don't want me.
As a last word about singing (before addressing the second topic), we are singing a choral selection from Mendelssohn's St, Paul next Sunday at 9 am. The soprano part sits very high, which is fine (it is similar to pieces I have sung with the choir recently) but it also has a high A in it that just sort of hangs (you go up to it and don't come back down). I did a bang-up job with the two high As I sang in choral pieces recently but they were a little different because each was in the middle of a phrase, marked forte, and in the case of the "Hallelujah Chorus" there was brass playing. So I am going to work on the piece and have as my goal to sing the note correctly (which means full voice) at rehearsal while sitting down (no mean feat) and if the choir director doesn't like it, and there are no first sopranos there, that note just won't happen and no one in the "audience" will know the difference. If we still had high sopranos in the choir I would be happy to sing the alto part, which is lovely (although the highest note is a C - the ever-present annoying gap between the two women's parts) but with the current cast of characters I can't really jump ship on this particular Sunday.
Now for the second part of this post, which I have named, Insidious Platitudes.
Today a woman whom I am very fond of (and who is quite "sensible" in the best sense of that word) posted what I would call a bit of "twenty-first century guilt-trip fodder" on Facebook.
This type of guilt-trip fodder has now become as common as diet guilt-trip fodder used to be; you know anyone can be thin if you just [eat this, don't eat that, don't deprive yourself, do deprive yourself, just set aside 15 minutes to exercise, wake up at 6 to run, blah, blah, blah]. Now the guilt-trip mantra is if you don't immediately leave a boring job, spouse, neighborhood, or, to quote Neruda "change your life when you are not satisfied" you are a loser. Whom is this addressing? A single mom with two low-paying jobs? An average person whose boring office job keeps them from being homeless, gives them health insurance, and, possibly, some money to retire on? A family caregiver who has to arrange their work schedule around a loved one? Or you're a loser if you don't change your routine. For some people a routine is all they have. Sure, you can tweak the edges a little bit, but sometimes that's the best people can do.
What ever happened to (another platitude) "love what you have"?
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