The Best So Far

Yesterday's concert went really well.  All the technical progress I made held and I wasn't even affected by nerves once I got past the sustained high A in the Bolena recitative.

A number of people from the choir, whom I was not expecting, came, which touched me very much.  Several of them had never come to anything I sang in.

My teacher was pleased, and a neighbor of his, who had heard me sing in the Verdi Requiem and told him I didn't sound all that good, told him I sounded much better.   And considering that she had been Marilyn Horne's nanny and traveled all over Europe on the opera circuit, that is saying something.

One big disappointment is that there is no video.  The one woman who usually does things like that apparently left her phone at home.  My teacher recorded it, and will burn a CD, so that means that I can make mp3 files from it, somehow (either my sound engineer friend can do it, or he can explain to me how to do it, or he can tell me where to take it to have it done).

So now I have to work not to fall into postpartum depression.  I think I had such a big letdown after Carmen because the woman who produced it was angry that not a lot of people came, and then when I got back to choir all the buzz was about  Little Miss's recital.  She is doing something again (with the company that rejected me for not being a "future investment") but at least since five people came from the choir (no one from the choir came to Carmen although two women from church whom I knew from the writing class did) there may be some buzz.

The pianist (the same one who played for Carmen) was pleased with how things went and when I spoke with him about doing the Carmen piece again (I said I thought it had "legs") he told me to contact him because he might be able to find out a way to produce this in schools (he works as an accompanist and coach at the conservatory where Little Miss is a student and I know they produced Hansel and Gretel in schools).  So I will do that.  Also, apparently my Don Jose spoke to my teacher (they are friends and colleagues) and said he had gotten my email about the Mozart Requiem and that he would get back to me.  (The performances are in February so they may have more auditions.)

And the choir is singing a choral piece from Elijah again so I will see if I can sing "O Rest in the Lord" on the same day, or perhaps the Schlosser piece "He that Keepeth Israel".

And here's a photo of me and my teacher, which his wife took.

First Rehearsal Went Well! Can This Be the "New Normal"?

After not being able to sing for a week, and practicing very carefully, I sang through the entire concert program yesterday, and with one or two exceptions, I was thrilled with how things sounded.

For starters, the Bolena duet, which is in a high tessitura, sounded fabulous and felt so easy!  The sustained high A in the opening recit felt like I could hold it forever.  It just sailed up into some head space that I never had before and shimmered.  This is the sound I have longed for for so many years and could never find.  It can't all be because of my cleaning out my sinuses with the Neti pot, can it?  I  have also been taking Mucinex twice a day now.  Maybe that helps also.  Maybe I should just take it forever.  It seems like a pretty benign medication.  Of course I am sure a lot  of it is technique, and learning new muscle habits.  Laura's aria didn't sound quite as good, probably because I use a heavier sound and it is something I sang for the first time in 1980, then sang a lot in my early days of study this time around.

The only thing that did not sound good was the Dalila and Daddy duet.  I am still having some trouble with my lower passagio (not the lowest notes, but the notes around E and F at the bottom of the staff) and at one point my voice actually cracked on an F.  But I would rather have to deal with that than with high notes not happening.  I also need to work on the run at the end of the duet.  It starts on middle C and goes up to a high A flat and back down.  The problem is, I think, that that duet uses a heavy sound in a low tessitura and suddenly I have to get my voice to move.  I had no trouble with the ornamented phrases in the Bolena.

So now the question is: will this new technical proficiency, particularly with my top notes and the big head space that I have found (and I have a tiny little head, not your normal singer shape with wide cheekbones) become the "new normal"?  Will I be able to replicate what I did yesterday?

Here are three signs that things are going well.  The pianist, who hasn't heard me since Carmen, told me how good I sounded.  My teacher said he was pleased.  My teacher invited a lot of his friends.

I only hope that someone will make a video, even just a cell phone video.  My teacher said he will make a "recording" but that means a CD, which is not something I can use for post and boast (presuming that there is something to boast about!!!)  And at the very least I hope someone takes a still photo.  The lack of these things is one of the many things about being my age that are a bummer.  I don't have techie friends.

Juliet, Cio-CIo San, and the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name

I haven't written anything here for a long time, because I haven't been singing. Tuesday week I lost my voice to laryngitis, which, I was told by my ENT, whom I saw a few days later, was caused by a virus.  My vocal cords were in perfect shape apparently.  So I spent a week coughing and spitting and blowing my nose.  I sang for the first time this past Wednesday (just a few exercises; I didn't go to choir practice) and had a lesson yesterday.  The concert is now only two weeks away. My voice is mostly back (except that I am still coughing and blowing my nose, somewhat) but I need to get my stamina back.  Wish me luck please!!

As for the title of this post, as I have not been singing, I have been revisiting my other persona, the writer.  Monday I went to look at the performance space, and one of my colleagues from the choir (who lives in the building where the performance space is) agreed to swap plays to read.  I gave her Duet, the light and frothy fictionalized version of my experiences with the Mentor, including his $64,000 question, asked with a smirk, after I translated Dalila's aria "My heart opens at your voice like a flower" "So what kind of a flower do you think she's talking about?"  It will be interesting to see what she makes of it.  Maybe she will have an idea for someplace that wants to produce it.  Rather ironically, her play was produced in a church where a friend of the Mentor is the music director.  Wouldn't it be rich if it were produced there??

Her play was about a Lesbian minister.  I don't want to say more than that because there are things that are confidential.  In any event, if nothing else, it brought back lots of memories.  Back in my activist days, this was exactly the sort of bandwagon I would have loved to jump on with a group of women.  I was not raised to be religious, and would not have chosen this as my battleground, but anything high profile where there might be reporters was right up my alley.  And in fact we had already been there before.  This play was set in the 90s but in the 70s there had already been an ordination of a Lesbian minister (I don't remember with what outcome) and a song was dedicated to the whole thing called "You can't be in the closet with God".  It has so fallen off the map that it took me a while to find it online, but I did, and I will give a copy of it to my friend.

Now here's where things get weird.  Am I the only person who thinks half the fun of being gay was being an outsider?  I don't mean an outsider who will get run out of town on a rail or have my house burned down, but the kind of outsider who is, well, not welcome at family or other "respectable" gatherings.  If I had yearned to be part of that world (something I am ambivalent about) I would have married a rich man who would have bought me a brownstone to live in and let me pursue a career in the arts for no money in exchange for supervising the housekeeper and entertaining his business associates.  The whole gestalt of being with a woman was that I chose love and romance over respectability and practicality. (I could easily see myself marrying a man I was not in love with for practical reasons, but a woman never!)  We didn't want to be invited to the family Thanksgiving.  It was much more fun to make our own community get togethers.  Like being part of a sect or a cult (which had its downside, I later discovered) or a family of outlaws.

I grew up with Romeo and Juliet, Madama Butterfly and La Traviata.  Even though I was never a lyric soprano, there was a period when I played my recording of Butterfly over and over again because almost every word she sings could have been sung by a Lesbian in love.  All of it.  Being rejected by her family, being told her marriage is not "real".  Of course it simplifies things that she kills herself because then she doesn't have to wonder what to do later.

But the point I'm making is that the more "society" didn't want us, the closer we became, either as individual couples or as a community.  Being outsiders didn't make it harder to bond as couples, it made it easier because we could set our own terms.  (Actually many straight feminists envied us our freedom and open ended approach to relationships and were looking to us for leadership on how to create alternatives to marriage.  How ironic!) Now there's nothing. You have women pairing off, getting a marriage license, making nuclear families. The whole thing leaves me totally cold.

But as I said in an earlier post, maybe it's just as well.  Thirty-five years ago I gave up singing for my community and it norms.  Now I can just sing.

Age Equals Stage - Not

When I opened up the OpEd page of my TIMES, I found this article, originally titled "What's So Great about Being Young?"

It is talking about writing contests with an age cutoff but of course so much of it speaks to me as a late blooming singer.

It addresses that age and stage are not equivalent, that "emerging" shouldn't automatically mean "young", and that early-blooming talent often requires coming from privilege. Or, as I've written about before, having the right mentor find you at the right time.

OK, so it's true that with certain sports, ballet, and playing certain musical instruments, the older you are when you start the harder it is, and at some point it is more or less too late (to be competitive).  With singing less so.  I mean I can see age as part of the picture in that it took me 10 years of lessons to learn what a younger person might learn in 4, because as my teacher has told me, cartilage and small muscles are stiffer and less flexible in older people.  And most older people cannot afford (and/or do not have time for) the "total immersion" that conservatory students get.

But all I can say is that I will be 65 in three months and I am singing better than I ever did.  And not just for short periods.  I can sing for much longer without getting tired.

I can understand people wanting to cast young people to play young roles.  I mean I've been watching Wolf Hall, and when I first laid eyes on the child playing Jane Seymour, I had to laugh.  No.  I certainly wouldn't do in a costume in a small opera house.  But it still smarts to this day that I was rejected by an opera company looking for "emerging" talent to play La Zia Principessa in Suor Angelica because I was not a "future investment".  I was about 59, and it's almost 6 years later and I sound better now than I did then.

I guess this subject was on my mind because this summer Little Miss is doing her YAP stint with that very company.  She is playing Rosina.  Yes, that's as it should be.  But why couldn't I be an emerging talent who specialized in roles where I would look appropriate?

Or oratorio?  Why should the Oratorio Society of New York's solo competition have an age requirement? Why does that need to be part of the picture.  If it turns out that the older contestants don't sound as good as the younger contestants on a given evening, whatever the reason, then they won't win.  But why shut us out???

Whatever the obstacles, I am not giving up now.  I feel strongly that this is my "call".  I wasn't sure before, but I am now.  I had an insight recently that made me feel somewhat better about how I spent my time "then" and how I am spending it "now".  I recently sent some photos of me as a baton twirler to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. That was the kind of diva I was then. That was my call. To be "out and "proud" and "pretty", which was for that time and place, unique.  I realized that instead of being angry that the movement has passed me by and is now taken over by middle class women who want to marry (not my thing), I can say OK, they don't need me now.  What I want to do is sing.  That's my identity now.  And if I want to be the public face of a movement, it can be for older women who discover our passion late in life.

The Age-Related "No" - and Ambivalence

I have been feeling so happy since Good Friday, but now it is time to move on!  I have been continuing to work on my concert repertoire and my vocal technique continues to improve by leaps and bounds, amazing even me.

As for the title of this post, two opportunities have presented themselves, one which I am pretty sure I will finally pass on, with a great deal of regret, the second of which I will pass on because I have no choice.

What upsets me, particularly in the first instance, is that what became a deal-breaker is more or less age related; namely, that the evening audition that I had wanted to go to is in a neighborhood where I do not feel safe either going to, coming from, or being in at night after dark.  This is an up and coming neighborhood in North Manhattan, where all the people who, 30 years ago, would have found tenement apartments on the Upper West Side, are now living.  It was even once laughingly referred to as the Diva ghetto.  On the other hand, much of it is unsavory, it is a fairly high crime area at night, and I do not know my way around.  If I had to live there, I would cope, and would know which streets are safe, which are not, how to navigate my way from point A to point B, and so forth.  But going alone to an audition is another story.  I say this is age related for two reasons. First, my "image" of that neighborhood is probably by now about 20 years out of date (although not entirely; I know people who have moved to the burbs and commute to work rather than live there), and second, I feel especially unsafe as a woman in my 60s with orthopedic challenges who cannot run.

Now, OK, if I thought I really really had a good chance of being chosen for the part (it is a solo part in an oratorio) I would chance it and pay for a car service.  But there are already numerous challenges.  The audition date is now less than two weeks away, the forms are annoying to fill out (you have to send a money order [the fee in and of itself is not a deal breaker, even if I were only doing this for the experience], the forms are complicated, and I don't know if I can use oratorio solos for my "aria list"), and I never heard back from my Don Jose, who works there as a stage director, and should by now have answered either my email or my phone message.  Yes, my teacher told me that this person is busy, but I'm sure if he thought that I would be the perfect person to sing this he would have gotten in touch with me.  So that in and of itself speaks volumes.  I have a voice lesson tomorrow and I will tell my teacher what I have decided.  The upside of all this is that during the brief period when I had thought I was going to audition (and I would have auditioned despite the obstacles if the auditions had been in Chelsea the way they were last time) I reworked "Liber Scriptus" and wow!  what a difference.  All I need to do is not breathe before the word "judicetur" going up to the A flat, and it's a walk in the park.  Yes, all the mezzos I've listened to do breathe there, but for me it's easier not to (the curse of the catch breath).

As for the second "pass", the woman who has readings of operas from books in her living room (the one who was not interested in me for the Handel) seems to be desperate for an Azucena to sing in, again, less than two weeks.  If I had two months notice I would bite, because I would love a chance to sing that role and even think now I could manage the two B flats without cheating on the first one, but the reading is scheduled for a Saturday, which is my regular elder care day, and this particular Saturday is the day after the day I am taking my partner to a new primary care doctor, which means I would not have any rest the day before.  Not to mention that I would not have time to sing the role into my voice applying all the new techniques that I have learned in the past four years (it has already been four years since I sang Act II).  But what irks me is that this is another way in which age is a factor (well, not entirely; if I were in my early 30s and had two young children I probably couldn't jump to sing something - unless it was a paying job - on very little notice).  But many of the people I am competing with don't have children, even the people in their late 30s.  And if they have spouses their spouses are totally on board with their careers (or musical and theatrical obsessions), so I have challenges that they don't have.

Anyhow, this all seems very disappointing.

I need to continue to do things other than just choir singing and church solos, because I need to challenge myself in a variety of settings and contexts, as well as with a variety of repertoire, and overcome my nerves.

In other age-related news, I just submitted an online application for Medicare, for which I will be eligible in three months.

ETA: I wrote to a friend about the Azucena gig, and a lightbulb went off in my head that no doubt all the professionals, emergings, and professional cusp-ers who initially wanted to sing Azucena (there has to have been someone) got a better offer, which is why I strongly believe that if this woman wants to have singthroughs of operas in her living room, she would be better served using people like me, who would be thrilled to sing through a role if we had a decent amount of notice.  She would make as much money regardless.  Contrary to what people think, it's the professionals who leave you in the lurch for a non-paying gig, not the avocationals, for who it may very well be the best gig we can get.  So the professionals should leave these alone.

A Dream Achieved

Yesterday was one of happiest and most fulfilling days I have had in a very long time; probably not since May 2008. And even that day was slightly marred by my knowing I was going to come back to a disaster in the office and that there would be no "afterglow". (And of course if I had had a decent recording of that performance and heard it now I would cringe.)

I was not happy with how I sang in My 2011 Verdi concert, mostly because of the air quality which didn't even allow me to sing my personal best for that time. I was happy with the Verdi Requiem after I sang, but less so when I heard the recording and heard how "small" my voice sounded compared to the other three singers (two of whom are working professionals and the third a woman whose singing could rival any professional's).

Finally by last year's Carmeneverything had come together vocally, for the most part, but I forgot to take my glasses off for some of the scenes, and I was bitterly disappointed at how few people showed up (as was the woman who helped me produce it), and the "buzz" was overshadowed by Little Miss's senior recital.

Actually yesterday was not the first time I had sung solo material with an orchestra, but the previous time all I sang was the alto line in one of the quartets in the Mozart Requiem which had been shortened considerably.

This time I got to really let it rip (first with two other singers, then with just the soprano) in the "Rex Tremendae" section of the Dvorak Requiem. So standing there, behind the orchestra, I felt like a real professional dramatic mezzo doing my thing.  And I got (totally unexpected and heartfelt) compliments from the choir director who was conducting.  It brought tears to my eyes.  This is what I have lived for all this past year.

I also sang at noon, the Rossini "Agnus Dei".  I sang it very very well, letting my big dramatic voice out on the climaxes even though they were only Es.

So now I have my May concert to work on and early next week I will write to my Don Jose and ask him what he thinks of my auditioning for the Mozart Requiem.  

If there's a lesson here, it's this.  All those years when I felt frustrated by how little progress I was making, I never dreamed that suddenly it would all be easier (not that everything is easy; all I have to do to humble myself is pick up that Amneris/Radames duet with the high B flats!!).  It is what I wanted  but I really didn't know if it would be possible.  So the lesson is that anything is possible, even for someone who will be 65 in a few months.  It's not over.  It's not a "given" that everything is going to be downhill from now on.  And people need to know this and not "assume".

In any event.  I thank God with all my heart for yesterday.

Good Friday's Eve (AKA Maundy Thursday)

I am calling tonight "Good Friday's Eve" instead of Maundy Thursday because this year I am not singing at the Maundy Thursday service (that has been pretty much given over to the other church that shares our space and only uses paid soloists, no choir), so I see tonight as an "at home and rest" time.

For the most part things are going well.  I have been spot on with my part in the solo quartet sections at all the rehearsals.  The only thing that went badly last night (a loooong rehearsal where IMHO we did too much singing) was I blew the big G sharp in the "Confutatis" section, which is something I sing with the other choir sopranos so theoretically it doesn't make much difference if I sing it or not, but it is a matter of pride and proving to myself what I can do.  I know what to do.  I sing the ascending phrase big and dark (we have a lot of rest beforehand) and  push my larynx down and make space.  And bounce my lower abs.

The "Agnus Dei" sounds great.  I had a good runthrough with it on Wednesday with the pianist.  I am singing that at noon.  I had asked my teacher if I should worry about getting tired and he said no.  If necessary I will "oo" my way through most of the rehearsal before the service tomorrow night, perhaps through the "Dies Irae" which involves a lot of loud singing at the top of the staff, something I am very good at, but I can save it for the actual performance. I will want to sing out in the solo quartet sections and yes, in the phrase in the "Confutatis" so that I know I can do it.

In other news, it turns out that my partner does not want to participate in the Alzheimer's chorus.  She said it's because she doesn't have Alzheimer's (she does have some form of dementia which sometimes she admits to and sometimes not), but I actually think the issue is that she doesn't want to commit to weekly rehearsals.  That may be for the best because in May she is going to start physical therapy again twice a week.

So I have my May concert to work on, and I saw an ad for an audition for the Mozart Requiem.  It is being performed by one of the no pay opera companies that I auditioned for, which seems to mostly use these "professional cusp" singers in their late 30s and early 40s, and which probably would not be interested in me, even for an oratorio, but I certainly plan to audition.  The man who sang Don Jose in my Carmen is a stage director there so after Easter I will email him and ask him what he thinks.  The last day of auditions is on a Monday night which is manageable.  The alto solo part in the Requiem is in a low range and is easily something I can sing.  I sang the alto solo line in one of the quartets on Good Friday about four years ago, which, actually, was the last time I did any solo singing in the Good Friday evening service.  So I will ask, for example, if my aria sheet should contain oratorio selections rather than opera selections.  They are much easier to sing.  If I decide to audition I will ask my teacher what to offer.  "Liber Scriptus" would be good (I need to rework it) and possibly the Rossini "Agnus Dei," although it is long.  The only Mozart oratorio aria I know is "Laudate Dominum" which is written for a soprano but is mostly about having a lovely pianissimo high F, which I do have.  However that is not the type of thing that would show how I would sound in the Requiem. I could also bring the Bach "Qui Sedes".  Anyhow, this is something to plan and look forward to, even though they probably would not be interested in me.