Singing Makes It All Better

I haven't been having an easy time lately. I am worried about my finances (I don't want to cannibalize my 401ks) and exhausted by eldercare.

But when I sing, particularly when I sing well, or have a plan for someplace to sing next, all feels right with the world. I know this is probably foolish since I'm almost 60 and no matter how well I sing will never have a "career", but there you have it.

First, regarding the tenor. He wants to do Carmen (easy sing, lots of sex)and we're looking at the Fall of 2011. I will touch base with him again this Fall.

Next, I had a lesson yesterday. I can feel that my teacher is really excited about how I sound singing Amneris (despite lingering difficulties with those bloody B flats - more on that later) and he's also excited about singing the duet with me. Interestingly, he's still the only person who doesn't use the "D" word when describing my voice - he still calls me a "big lyric" - but he said I have real power in the upper register. The higher I sing the bigger my voice gets (which may explain why I hit a brick wall at A natural and have to push past it)but he's a little reluctant to call me a dramatic since I don't have a big middle. He did say that the conformation of my voice is more "old fashioned" (Simionato-like) than Zajick-like in that I don't shift to a lighter position for high notes. I have tried and tried and tried that and all it does is create tension so my teacher has helped me stay with the low larynx position. Actuall I think I figured out how to handle the B flats - if I raise my ribcage (and my arms) that pushes my larynx down and makes it easier to sing up the scale. In any event, the Judgment Scene is going really, really, well. I have always had a big, easy powerhouse A which is the note featured in that scene. And I've also learned to keep the drama in the scene by observing the dynamic markings not by feeling something myself. (I can hear The Mentor Who Shall Not Be Discussed telling me "You're not supposed to feel anything, you're supposed to make the audience feel something.")

Speaking of Himself, rather ironically, it turns out that the pianist who will be playing for us isn't set up with a piano in his studio yet, because he just moved here, so we may be using the basement of the Unitarian Church to rehearse with him. If so, it will be interesting to see what Himself thinks of this duet, if he's around to kibbitz. (If I haven't mentioned it before, we did make peace and he was very supportive and professional with me about my performance of "O My Lyre Immortelle" back in January.)

Dawn, Maybe?

I wanted to make a post last night, but was at an all time low ebb (usually I save these sorts of posts for "the other place").

I am still dangerously underemployed (I'm supposed to get some regular work starting next month but don't know how many hours t hat will be) but am determined to stick with freelance. I get health insurance from my previous employer and simply can't face having to go into an office for 8 hours a day on someone else's schedule. It's really really nice to be able to sleep a little later and make daytime appointments. I can work at my computer at night, which is a good time to be in my apartment and cozy.

Even in this precarious state, I am the financial "anchor" for my (mostly ex) partner who is practically destitute living on a fixed income. I am finally getting her some much needed social services but nonetheless....

The current bone of contention is $200 she owes on the cell phone. It was easy for her to overuse it when she was in the hospital and neither of us could ever figure out how many minutes we had left (I spoke to a live person over the phone and I think I now have this figured out).

I am also feeling very depressed because my 60th birthday is next week. Aside from feeling that my "last gasp of healthy middle age" is slipping away due to financial insecurity and eldercare responsibitilies (I mean I chose not to have kids, for Pete's sake! I'm not a nurturer except in small doses - I was a great, mentorly boss, for example), I am depressed that there really is nothing/no one to do anything special for me. I don't have a "Circle of Friends" IRL although I have a lot of acquaintances. Between working 50 hours a week at a job for the past decade, eldercare, and trying to sing, I haven't had much time for socializing. My ex partner is supposed to take me for a restaurant so we'll see. If she gets into a snit with me over the phone bill for all I know she might not. Ironically, she bought us a ballet subscription (a birthday present for me) which she really couldn't afford. This was before she knew about the cell phone bill.

The one thing that is going well (a strident B flat here and there notwithstanding) is my singing. And it isn't just that I'm singing well, it's that I'm on people's radar screen, something I never thought would happen.

The glorious rising young tenor pictured Here asked me what opera I was going to cast him in next!!! So maybe I can get to the next thing on my "Bucket List" in the Spring of 2011!! I know that's when I'm doing a concert with my teacher. If they weren't both tenors, I would try to include them both in something, but I'd rather do a pocket version of Carmen or Aida as another concert.

Now I just have to find a place. The Lutheran church where I sing had a concert series to restore their historic Tiffany windows but I think that's over and the message I had gotten was that if I wanted to do something else I would have to pay for space rental. So maybe this guy can find something. But he thought of me.

And he's using the photo of us as his Facebook profile pic!!

Opera, Dickens, and the French Revolution

Since I'll be doing a (small) role in Dialogues of the Carmelites, I have been immersing myself in the French Revolution.

First, I bought a recording of the opera. I wasn't all that familiar with it, only having seen it once, at the Met, years ago in English.

I am going to be playing Mother Jeanne but since I had originally auditioned for Mother Marie, I want to sort of learn her part too (I don't really sightread, but I have a superb ear and can learn music pretty quickly if I listen to it over and over).

Well, after listening to the opera about 6 or 7 times I must say it really gave me the creeps! At the end you can hear the guillotine and at the very end it actually cuts someone off mid-sentence. Then there's just silence. Eerie.

To get myself in the mood I read a novel that I found in my laundry room (where there's a book freecycle) called A Place of Greater Safety. It's loooong, and huge sections were boring, but you really get the flavor of the period, including all the executions.

Then today I spoke to my mother (I'm glad we had a nice talk - we hadn't been getting along all that well, she's 93 and housebound but as domineering as ever) and she said the movie of A Tale of Two Cities was on tv so I turned it on and watched the end and cried buckets. I remember my mother taking me to see it when I was a teenager.

In fact before I fell in love with opera I fell in love with Dickens. It started with my seeing the musical Oliver! and then with my mother reading Oliver Twist to me when I was 12 and had the flu (with a very high fever). After that I read all of Dickens. I just loved the denseness of the plots, the mysteries, the secrets....so unlike my sterilized High Modernist life in a New York City apartment where what you saw was what you got, and where embarrassingly frank talk about everything from sex to politics showed that you were "enlightened".

Actually, Lady Dedlock in Bleak House would make a great operatic heroine. She sort of reminds me of Violetta but without the TB. Deeply depressed and disaffected because what? She had sex outside of marriage 20 years before the story began and had a child? That she was damaged goods. Sort of as if Violetta had married the Baron and lived sadly ever after.

Now I'm listening to Andrea Chenier just to continue the theme. It's got an execution at the end but it's not as gory as Carmelites.

Keeping it Real

When I began singing again in 2004, no matter how happy I was with how I sang a particular piece, I didn't feel entitled to think of myself as a "real" singer. Sure, compared to amateur choir folk I was such the diva (at the Unitarian church, except for one operatically trained lyric coloratura who didn't sing with the choir, mezzo me was the only one with "high notes" - read Gs and As), but as soon as I entered the operatic blogosphere I sadly realized that I was really No One.

The fact that I had sung a role like Laura at a no-pay outfit with rickety sets, ancient costumes, and a piano, back in 1980 really meant sod-all (sorry for swearing) to the people posting on The Forum and initially when I posted things there unless I asked a question I was politely ignored. I mean these were people with managers who had sung at the sort of regional opera houses that get reviewed in Opera News not to mention that some of them had even auditioned for the Met. Having grown up in the 1960s when opera stars were very "touch me not" from their big hair to their disdain of getting into a political argument, I was rather astounded to realize that here were people blogging about their weight, their failed love affairs (some in graphic detail), and their political opinions (mostly as left of center as my mother and her lefty friends), who, nonetheless, might actually have their picture in Opera News or their name on a billboard at Lincoln Center.

Many of them wrote about trips to New York, which made me a little sad. I mean I live here, but I never get within ten miles of anything more than a homemade concert or (recently) a company with an orchestra offering me a small role in exchange for selling tickets (actually I'm glad now they only offered me a small role, otherwise I'd never have been able to sell enough tickets to break even). So here are people trekking to the Holy Grail which for me is just a place to do grocery shopping. I often have fantasies about running into one of them at the Juilliard Bookstore or a small local shop, actually.

But now things are starting to get real.

The woman having the salon heard my MP3 file (it's on my profle as a "sound clip")which even I don't love as much as I did when I made it, and still wants me to sing for her. And I know pianists who know real singers who want pianists.

And I no longer worry that the people on The Forum just think I'm a big joke, because I'm almost 60, because of the name I use there (which I love love love, and it's much nicer than my real one), and because I 'fessed up that I had sung with the notorious Madame LaPuma (who actually had some very good singers on her roster, in case people are wondering).

I'm not a joke any more. I'm real.

There are a few people on the Forum now who have actually heard me sing, who know how hard I work, how I've transcended the barriers of age and obscurity. Not that I'm expecting any big contracts. Just to be real.

Theology and Music

I should be getting to bed (I have to get up at 7:30 for Pilates class) but I wanted to write something about this topic, as it's one that interests me.

This morning I went to the Lutheran church where I sing in the choir during our regular season, because they were having a summer "pickup choir" and also because there was going to be a special program on Theology and Music.

It wasn't quite what I expected. To me "Theology and Music" means Bach, Handel, and the other great composers of sacred music, but this morning's fare was more contemporary. Mostly original songs written by members and friends of the congregation. Several of these were surprisingly moving in their authenticity. (I am usually not a fan of "popular music" of any kind.)

Although my parents were militantly atheistic, my mother often took me to churches to hear sacred music. She saw nothing odd about being a secular Jewish atheist and listening to the Messiah or the Bach Passions, or going to see the Play of Daniel, or spending time at the Metropolitan Museum looking at sacred art. She came from that generation of well educated first generation Americans (actually her mother was born in Philadelphia) who had been taught to revere "Western Civ". This included knowing Greek mythology and the Bible. A parable about Jesus, or the aria "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth" was no less beautiful than a "myth" about Athena or a statue of Apollo. None of this had anything to do with religion (if you weren't religious).

As an adult I always felt ashamed of my atheistic background (I was for years the only child in school whose answer to the question "what is your religion"? was "none") so as an adult I became a Unitarian. I had actually sung in a Unitarian choir as a teenager and remembered the services (and the music) to be as "old fashioned" as any Protestant service except that the word "Christ" was removed from the hymns and there was no Communion. But there was Handel aplenty and the church was a historic building.

Becoming a Unitarian as an adult, the church I attended was also a historic building but I was quite surprised to find that the mosaic of Jesus over the altar, which showed him washing the feet of the disciples, was often covered up with a curtain. Apparently people in the congregation found it offensive. I found this rather amusing, and no less "yokelish" (one of my mother's favorite words) than John Ashcroft wanting to cover up the naked statue of Justice. It was a work of art, no? People could interpret it as they saw fit. I was equally surprised that people were offended by my singing "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth" at Easter and even more surprised that they were surprised that I wanted to sing it.

I suppose it is odd in a way that as someone who grew up "Godless" I seem to have such an affinity for sacred music. Well, on the one hand, to me, anyhow, it has all the beauty and drama of opera (art songs leave me cold, for the most part, sorry) without the overtaxing range and volume. Also you can sing a selection or two and call it a morning. And you can sing in the morning which for me is a lot easier than singing at night (I simply don't understand how all the great singers can hit a "peak" vocally after 9 pm). And you sing on Sunday, which, when I worked in an office, was more convenient than trying to sing on a weeknight.

Eventually I left that Unitarian church over their decision to drastically curtail any classical sacred music in the services.

I was directed toward the Lutherans, as having the best music, liking bigger voices, and not insisting on choirs singing "straight tone".

And I would be lying if I didn't say that singing there for me has been some kind of spiritual experience, although I cannot always say what kind.

And now, since in three weeks I will be singing the heroic "Judgment Scene" from Aida in a Sunday concert, I really do need to get back to my regime of high protein, low sugar, and 8 hours of sleep at night.

Rip Van Winkle Waking

When I returned to singing at age 54, I was rather astounded at how much better I sounded than I had at 30. Well, for one thing, I was several decades, not five years, away from my last cigarette, and for another, I had stopped crash dieting. At the time I resumed singing I was still five foot six (I'm now five three and a half, and that half is something I've regained from studying Pilates) and was up to 145 pounds and that was just fine. I also had better posture. When I sang in my 20s I had so much conspiring against me - a recent history of alcohol, drug, and nicotine addiction; thinking I had to be "really skinny", particularly because my specialty at that time was trouser roles, ("really skinny" to me meant keeping my weight under 130 pounds, which was still nowhere near fashion model size but made me look boyish while, unfortunately, keeping me weak and easily tired); feeling isolated as the only Lesbian I knew who sang opera; having an unsympathetic partner (this hasn't changed). I also (this one's for the gals) think being post-menopausal helped my voice. It sounded and felt "lighter" and had more clarity, for one thing, and I also felt more or less the same any day of the month.

So in any event, there I was, my properly produced voice soaring over the church's small choir, feeling my oats singing excerpts from Carmen, Samson et Dalila, and La Gioconda not to mention all the sacred arias I sang in church, thinking the world was my oyster. I mean, if I sang circles around the 30 year old self who had been cast as Laura, I was ready to compete, right? Sadly, wrong.

A lot had changed in 25 years. When I was in my 20s, I sang in what I now know was called the "Opera Underground" - small opera groups that didn't pay (only one, back then, expected singers to pay them) where most of the performers were older, had established "day jobs", and had minimal musical (although often superb vocal) training. The singers ranged from "as good as what you'd hear at the Met" to, well, let's be frank - "cringeworthy". So as a young, slim, hardworking mezzo with a pleasant voice, I got cast in lots of things. Never as Carmen, which was a sore point (I was told I "didn't have the personality" which was code for "honey, you look like a dyke") but I did get cast as Laura in La Gioconda. Yes, there were conservatory graduates back then, who followed a different career path, but there were lots of performance opportunities for us amateurs.

Now things are different. Everything (except maybe a handful of pay-to-sings) is a training ground for young emerging professionals or a pit stop for managed professional singers who want a role on their resume that they're not likely to get cast in for money at a particular point in their career.

So no matter how I sounded, there was really nothing for me, who obviously was over 40 and really had nothing on my resume other than "choir soloist" for the past several decades.

Despairing of a place to sing, I stumbled on a few nuggets. The first was a "Meetup". Meetups are open to whoever is willing to pay the $15 or $20, so I began with that. In the beginning I was terrified and it showed. Not to mention that all these people knew each other, which meant they rooted for each other when they stood up to sing, while I was mostly ignored, although I did get some applause. Gradually I lost some of my fear and most importantly, I kept going. When I got a Facebook account I had some of my fellow Meetup singers as friends. That kept it real.

Then a woman I had bumped into on the Forum asked people to sing at a hospital concert. So I got on the roster for those.

And I found another meetup.

I soon learned that even if my confidence (mostly about singing above the staff) was still not what it should be, I could hold my own in that at least I always knew my music, never looked flustered, almost never lost my place (unless I was trying out a brand new piece of church music) and never asked for a do-over. I just smiled and soldiered on.

It was still hard not knowing anyone. I don't really have any "singing friends", people who are where I am vocally, and chronologically. Except my bass friend, who started singing opera at 39 after singing Music Theater exclusively.

So now I've found a Sunday afternoon salon. It says we can sing scenes or duets, so I've emailed him re: if he wants to join me. If not, I'll go by myself.

There are still things conspiring against me. I still get tired easily (I have a big voice and for a voice that size I'm still a small person, not to mention I'm going to be 60 next month and spend most of my time as an editor hunched over a computer), my partner is unsympathetic, and I have to worry about her health crises not to mention my mother's. And I have to put in a certain number of hours copyediting or I won't be able to pay my bills. And I don't have a conservatory or regional opera background and the network one builds from that.

But I know God wants me to sing (why else would s/he have sent someone to find me at the back of a church) so I must.

Being a Diva

Pride Week has come and gone, but when I was having some painting done in my apartment I took down my pictures and found this one, of me twirling a baton at the front of the Pride Parade, as a member of the Big Apple Corps Marching Band, in 1995.

Seeing this photo, taken during the extended period between 1980 and 2004 when I wasn't singing, made me realize that whether I was singing or not, I was always a diva.I know the esteemedSusan Eichhorn Young has written many blog pieces about the subject of Divas, including that no one can confer that title on herself, but that it has to be earned.

So why do I think of myself as a diva? I am not a prima donna. By which I mean I am a "team player" (much as I loathe all those tidbits of corporate jargon) and I also know when it is time for me to step out of the spotlight and let someone else step into it. Or when I should not be in the spotlight at all.

Well, when I was a little girl I loved pink frilly dresses. Of course my communist mother hated these and would buy me something functional. I wanted long curls she wanted me to cut my hair and make it "practical". In High School I wanted to be a baton twirler but they wouldn't let me because I had a few extra pounds.

My mother wanted me to identify with Jo March I identified with Moll Flanders.

And then there was opera. I dreamed of being Violetta (on stage of in life? not sure....I remember at that time reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses) while my peers were trekking off to Woodstock to wallow in the mud.

And then of course after I came out I was always the token femme in a dress, as here, when I decided that "girls can have fun too" and "why should the gay guys have all the great outfits in this parade"? (I was actually the first female baton twirler in the darn thing.)

Of course times have changed, and now, I saw from the TIMES, there was a woman born woman honest to Goddess pole dancer!!

Anyhow, my partner knows I am a diva (and often rolls her eyes).

I always have on stage makeup, even to go downstairs to do the laundry, and I don't even own a pair of sweatpants let alone a parka. And don't you dare suggest that I go camping!