Groping for a Resolution

This title, I see now, is actually a double entendre.

New Year's is almost upon us, and there is the pressure to make a New Year's resolution.  But what?  I have just about finished with the Artist's Way commitment. I mean, I believe that that program changed me forever. It is right up there with AA and the Well Spouse. Actually, a lot of what I learned from the Artist's Way is similar to what I learned from The Mentor: to make my life a feast for the senses even if my daily circumstances are not. I feel that I had made a lot of headway, particularly at Christmas. I knew I wasn't going to get any presents (and hence not give any, except to the needy) so I would have to find something else to do. I bought a small tree and decorated it, and got one for my partner. I put the expensive plaid sheets on her bed and made bean soup with red tomatoes and green basil. And I sang in a Christmas Eve service. Even though I wasn't a soloist (there weren't any), still, being a part of something that beautiful made Christmas Christmas.

I am trying to learn what my triggers are for getting depressed.  The first is spending too many hours indoors working.  So I made the choice to work no more than 30 hours a week, even if it means taking money out of savings.  In four more years I will be able to collect my full retirement amount from Social Security and if I add that to my earnings I will have almost as much as I had when I worked full time in a management position.

But today I realized another trigger, which is hearing what I call simplistic, dismissive,  "anything is possible if you want it enough" talk.  Someone posted something on Facebook saying "if you don't love what you do find another career" huh???  So I saw this just as I was telling myself to be grateful that I had a paycheck, a cheap and decent place to live, a small safety net, and that there were many people in this country now who had lost all of the foregoing, not to mention the many many people who never had it to begin with.

But every time I hear something like that I backslide spiritually.  I think: what's wrong with me? Why am I still trapped with dull work?  How did I end up here?  Am I a failure because I sit for hours cleaning up punctuation when what I dream of doing is strutting my stuff "out there" some way, some how.

I did all I could.  I got a year of career counseling.  I don't blame the counselors, or myself.  Repackaging a 60 year old with a time limit before her severance pay runs out, and eldercare responsibilities, in a bad economy, is not like redecorating your living room. It is something for which there is a slim likelihood. I was lucky there was work of any kind to be had, so I grabbed it - what they call "the low hanging fruit".

So now I am depressed again.

The Artist's Way tells me that it doesn't matter what I do for a living if that is not something that it is easy for me to change.  I can express the artist in myself in other ways.

So how does that translate into a New Year's resolution?  I think I'm a bit burned out with morning pages and artist's dates, although I think I take the latter from time to time instinctively now.

I am really really enjoying my new iphone.  I have made it a goal to photograph myself in every sexy outfit that I have.  So here are some shots in the drop dead red leotard that I wear to my Pilates class when everyone else is wearing black.

And my final bit of surprisingly happy news is that people love my "Angel" Youtube video.  One of my Facebook friends shared it with a lot of her friends.  It sounds lovely, although I sound like a lyric soprano, not a dramatic mezzo.  Well, I guess it doesn't matter what I call myself.  For me the world ends at A natural for the most part so anything that doesn't go higher than that I can sing.  I would post the video here, but I really can't trust random readers to understand how to put a positive spin on feedback.  I always am happy to receive constructive criticism but as I wrote here this seems to be a learned skill that is less intuitive than I thought. If you know me in real life (or online) and want me to send you the link, just give a shout.

Everyone Loves an Angel

Yesterday I sang Wagner's "Angel" song in church during communion.  That is a "milestone" piece for me because it was the second solo I sang after being "discovered".  Although I date my transformation from the date of "Mon Coeur" (February 15, 2004), as I wrote about here, I was actually "discovered" the summer before, singing from a hymnal in the back of the church. The first solo I was given was "Dido's Lament" for "Day of the Dead" (the Unitarians' answer to "All Souls Day") and the second was "The Angel", which I was assigned to sing on Christmas Eve. I never liked German lieder and still don't much care for the "An Die Musik" sort but this is different. Of course when I sang it on Christmas Eve 2003 I had no idea how to sing it and I am sure I bellowed my way through it.

It was also the first solo I sang at the Lutheran church, Christmas Eve morning of 2006.  It has come a long way since then.  I wasn't 100% happy with the top G in the actual performance church service, probably because I was afraid I wouldn't have the energy to make it up there, so I gave it that little extra "push" that it didn't need.

But I got more compliments on this from people in the choir and the congregation than I have on any singing in recent memory.  Was that because I really sang that much better than usual?  Or because they liked that piece?  Or because an Angel was a perfect response to the tragedies of the weekend?

What is so ironic is that, like the Susanna with the heart of a Lady Macbeth and the Goro with the heart of a Manrico, I find myself spending most of my time singing "angelic" church music when I have the soul of Dalila.

I who so love flaunting my cleavage spend most of my singing time either in a choir robe or a long black skirt and top with a high neck!

This weekend my SO referred to me as "angelic".  Most  likely because I got her a cat, which I will pay for.  I pay for the cat because he is there for me to enjoy as well as for her to enjoy, much as I pay for her cable tv so I can watch it.  I mean if I am going to engage in charitable giving, I would rather give to someone I know and love than to strangers, even if it is not tax deductible.  And yet I feel all of this has happened by default.

So many of us end up with things other people are impressed by that we never wanted or aspired to.  Many divas, for example, are not really divas at all, they just have extraordinary voices and by dint of that and hard work, ended up singing at the Met, but I don't think they all enjoy all that media hype.  So I never aspired to virtue, but people see me as virtuous because I pay for things for my SO and sing in a church for free.

I remember one of the early times I sang "Mon Coeur" (this was after that fateful February) someone came up to me afterwards and said I was so seductive and then quickly said I was such a good actress. My feelings were hurt because I had hoped they would say something like "perfect typecasting".  Don't people know that it's when I look angelic in a choir robe that I am acting?

In other news, the videographer said that she didn't know about putting the "Angel" on Youtube because she was far away, and as I was singing during communion, there were a lot of visual and auditory distractions (she said you could hear "body of Christ", etc. as a sort of counterpoint).  Anyhow, she said she would send it to me and if I like it I will email it to friends and that she will try to come to a rehearsal of my next solo ("Andaluz" by Joachin Nin, for Epiphany) and tape me from close up.

Last but not least, I have been trying and trying to take a sexy picture of myself with my new smart phone.  This is the best I have been able to come up with so far.

I don't know why, but when I upload it, it ends up sideways, which I actually like.  It looks like I am lying down!

Angel or devil?

Impressions of the Gala

Well, I watched the Richard Tucker gala on tv, and, as I had guessed, found it both depressing and inspirational.

 Jamie Barton blew me away with her rendition of "O Mon Fernande". Her voice was dark and rich, and just as I said to myself, "no, with all that weight on the bottom and all that richness she's not going to interpolate some stratospheric note into the ending but will just sing a good solid A", she did interpolate some crazy high note (I couldn't grab my pitch pipe fast enough to tell if it was a B or a C). How do these singers do it? How do they get their voices to be so big, so rich, and with such ranges? I simply can't get a handle on that. No matter what I do, I just don't really have anything above an A except to sing in the middle of a run and drop like a hot potato. And her singing is surprisingly passionate, compared to her rather - so it seemed - placid "yes definitely from the heartland" personality.

And Olga Borodina rocked "Mon Coeur". Although she should have left that interpolated B flat alone. It doesn't belong in the piece unless you can sing it softly and sweetly. She also seems to have lost a lot of weight. Apparently she is chewing up the scenery as Amneris this season.

Sorry to say I found Ailyn Perez rather underwhelming. She has a beautiful voice full stop. She has neither the passion of Anna Netrebko or the brilliance of Beverly Sills, in, say, a role like Manon. But she did say something that left me with, well, something. I may be misquoting her, but it was something like "If you work harder than everybody, anything is possible."

I work and I work and actually I do keep singing better but it isn't enough. Finding that perfect energy balance eludes me (I realized today that I am always a little too wired or a little too tired), if I talk too much I'm sunk (like a typical New Yorker my default mode of speech is loud with a tight throat). I have chronic sinus drainage, which makes it hard to raise my palate.

Well, tomorrow morning I am singing Wagner's "Angel" song in church. It may be on the church's Youtube channel. I won't post it here, because there is a nasty commenter who ripped some sound clips I put up here to shreds and even though I took them down and referred to her as a bitch in my subsequent post, she still makes comments (not nasty ones, but why is she still here??) The "Angel" has to be sung entirely pianissimo and it has a lot of Fs and F sharps and one G. So I need my beauty sleep. And I will keep it what I laughingly refer to as a "female" morning. No hymns. Until the "Angel" is finished.

Thankful Thursday - and Musings on "Location, location, location"

First "thankful Thursday".

The church where I sing posts a "thankful Thursday" prompt, and people can respond to it.  I am a bit shy of doing that, but I need to remind myself of a few things.

First, I'm alive.  I was reading a post on Facebook from a young woman whose mother died of breast cancer when she (the mother) was 10 years younger than I am now.  I am certainly now of an age when people die and although it might be considered tragic, it is not considered unusual.

Second, however depressed I often feel because of my lack of varied stimuli (I think this is at the crux of it - the fewer hours I spend alone in the house the less depressed I am), I have long since stopped feeling depressed by the holidays.  For years I got flak about why did my mother celebrate, and raise me to celebrate, Christmas, if she was Jewish?  She never really had a satisfactory answer, which made me feel put on the spot when I had to answer for her (and me).  Now that I consider myself a Unitarian (which for me is a mix of Christianity, Judaism, and Paganism - actually they would include Buddhism, but that particular tradition doesn't speak to me) I can celebrate any holiday I feel like, and anyhow, I'm a "high art" snob, so if I can sing church music I can decorate for Christmas.  I don't particularly feel sorry for myself that I have no family and will not get or give any presents.  Music and decorating are enough for me.  If I desperately need a sweater or more opera CDs I can buy these for myself.  So I am enjoying the holiday season quite a bit, actually.

Third, I have conquered four "tech" problems basically on my own, with only the help of company personnel, in other words, sans a "foreign language interpreter"! I took care of getting a new hard drive for my laptop, downloaded a printer driver from the Epson web site, reconnected my external hard drive, and got an iphone to replace my rinky dink cell phone.  The iphone did not come with an instruction manual but I figured out how to do everything except take decent pictures of myself.  Yes, it has a reverse camera, but I hardly look "hawt" if I am trying to take a photograph.  I have one set of facial expressions and body language when I'm posing/vamping and a totally different one when I'm concentrating on looking into a camera viewfinder.

For the second subject of this post...

I was asking myself whether watching the Richard Tucker gala on tv tonight would be inspirational or depressing.

I think what I find the most depressing is that I am literally in the armpit of Lincoln Center where the greatest singers in the world congregate to perform, and their successors go to school.  What role is there for a 62 year old with a pleasant large-ish voice in a limited range who can sing a handful of excerpts from great operas (cherry picked so that she doesn't get too tired), and some church solos?  How am I relevant?  Who cares?

Someone had said a while back that I should start a "community opera group", but there are probably 10-15 of these in Manhattan (and the other boroughs, but I would not want to travel outside Manhattan at night if I was not getting paid) and I have been rejected by all of them, except one that wanted to charge me $450 to sing a role.  (I wasn't insulted, I just don't have that kind of money, and if I am going to spend money, I would rather produce my own thing as a tax deductible charity event.)

It would be too self-piteous to blame it all on ageism, but what I do think is that no one is interested in someone obviously over 45 (I don't think I look 62....I'm 62 like Bette Midler or Bernadette Peters, not like an image of someone's grandma) who has minimal experience, no music-oriented formal education, and sounds, even at best, like she still needs a little polish.  (I think if I sounded exactly like I do now and was 27, people would be very interested, although they might instruct me how and where to get more polishing, and I think if I looked and sounded like I do now but had sung 20 roles over 20 years, people would also be interested, but the mix of my skills, age, and background are a nonstarter.)

So OK.  I can always produce something myself, and as someone said "if you build it, they will come".

What I really keep hoping is that someone will be interested in my story if not in my singing.

Before the day is over I promise to write to someone I know who writes for Classical Singer and ask her how to pique someone's interest.

A Happy Holiday?

I am very behind, because my computer crashed and was in the repair shop for two days, so I am behind with work at a time when a lot of other things are going on, but I felt a need to check in.

On the singing front, Sunday I am singing in one of the social outreach Christmas concerts.  I am down to one Nin song and one simple Spanish carol for solos.  Otherwise I am singing some Christmas carols, Chanukah songs, and seasonal pop standards with five other women, sometimes in 2 or 3 part harmony, with each of us having a solo line here and there.

I like the woman running the group but she and my teacher do not see eye to eye about vowels.  I tend to think my teacher is correct, because his take on vowels is similar to The Mentor's, and to a famous Met soprano who was the judge of a big aria competition (I got a grade of 55 out of 100, which certainly let me know where I stood - would probably do better now, but I don't intend to go back).

My teacher says all vowels are to be modified except "ee" and "oo".  Ah is Aw (although I can sing a pure "Ah" if I have to, certainly up to a G).  The killer is "eh" sort of like the e with an acute accent in French.  If you sing it pure it tightens everything.  My teacher, the Mentor, and the choir director all agree it should be more of a schwa sound with an open throat and a dropped jaw: sort of "eh" with a lot of "uh" in it (I hope I am making sense).  Well that is what this woman and I fight over.  I don't mean fight - I am happy to sing the vowel the way she wants, particularly in Spanish songs with a limited range, it just feels unnatural.

Anyhow, it is interesting to get a different perspective.  If I had been a conservatory student I would have been in a lot of these situations and would have had to sort things out and use different techniques for different things.

On the 16th I will be singing Wagner's "Angel" in the church service.  I sound so much better than I did five years ago the last time I performed it in public.  I could tell that the choir director was pleased.  And it will be - I hope - on the church's YouTube channel, which is a new thing for them.

I can also see how much easier certain choral pieces are, for example, Barber's "Sure on this Shining Night" which has a pianissimo high G in it.

I am going to sing "O Holy Night" in the mezzo key at an outreach concert on the 30th.  "The" night will have passed but we will be singing other carols, so it should be ok.  I will brace myself for more feedback about vowels.  I will also try to sing the top G (that's what the high note is in the mezzo version - in the soprano version it's a B flat) lightly, the way I sing the one in the Angel song.

The first Requiem rehearsal went well.  Really the only thing I'm nervous about is that big climax in "Liber Scriptus".  "Lux Aeterna" suits me like a glove.  I muffed a few notes in the ensembles, but will have time to work on them.  The most important thing is for me to be able to sing "against" the soprano and she plans to be at all the rehearsals.  I need to find a bass.  I never heard from my original one.

In other news, my partner and I made a calendar for ourselves out of old pictures from Ogunquit, Maine, our paradise.  Here are several photographs.  The last is where we want our ashes scattered, and I know we will meet there again one day.  In the meantime I hope we can go there for her 80th birthday.

Here is the entrance to our little studio.

Here's the lawn of the main house.

Here's the beach.

This will be our final resting place.


And she will be adopting a cat next weekend.

So our life is good, even without being able to afford presents.

Not Giving Up Today....

I now - for now - seem to be back in the swing of things.  I have three things going on right now: the Christmas concerts, choir (I now have two solos scheduled between now and Epiphany), and the Requiem.

The Christmas concerts have turned out to be a little disappointing.  The pianist is not proficient enough to play the Spanish art songs so instead of singing three I will be singing only one, which the director may very well play herself.  And one Spanish Christmas carol as a solo.  Otherwise it is six women singing Christmas and Chanukah songs in two part harmony.  The director seems to think I am a soprano, which is fine.

I have gotten so much conflicting information about my voice type over the years.  If I can barely reach a high C (and this is something that never changes; all that has changed is that the notes I do have - up to a B - sound better more consistently and I have lost the break I used to have above middle C) I am not a soprano, at least not where opera is concerned.  On the other hand, I am most comfortable singing in the upper middle part of my voice, which means for choral purposes I am a second soprano not an alto.  I would say even for oratorio solo purposes.  I am not someone who sings "O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion" well.  I sound  much better singing "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth".

But when I posted something about my vocal "sweet spot" (F to F on the staff) on the the Forum, a well-respected voice teacher said that meant I was a "low mezzo". Huh? I think of low mezzos as, well, women who love singing "O Thou that Tellest".

Interestingly, the woman who runs these seasonal concerts is always telling me to sing "brighter" vowels, while my teacher tells me to sing "darker" vowels.  Both of them want my voice to be freer, so who is right?  I know when I first started studying I had been artificially "whitening" my voice to sound like a soprano (what I call my "fake Julie Andrews voice", which actually serves me quite well up to a G or G sharp but does not easily go higher) which my teacher said was choking off the higher notes by making them "spread".  Although now I find if I sing "happy", on some of the high climaxes (involving As and A flats) it makes those notes easier.

And I seem to have finally found a real head resonance.  Is that because I am being diligent about blasting all the crud out of my sinuses?  I think I was always congested behind my nasal passages, which is not something I ever noticed until I began trying to figure out why I had such a "gargly" sound in my upper passagio.  Anyhow, after the New Year I am going to get a referral to an ENT. I have always been leery of getting on the merry-go-round of medication for nasal stuff because it either makes you speedy or makes you sleepy and I have seen my partner spend a lifetime, more or less, being partially dysfunctional due to the combination of asthma medicines and allergy medicines.  But who knows?  Maybe the ENT will have some other kind of advice.  I am using nasal spray but what happens is it loosens up all the junk and then I spend hours "snuffling" although eventually it gets cleared out.

But getting back to the Christmas concerts, I really like the woman in charge of these because she is nice and friendly and treats me with respect, which I find people rarely do in the talent-stuffed New York singing scene.

As for choir, I am definitely singing a solo (one of the Spanish art songs) on Epiphany, and will probably sing Wagner's "Angel" song on Annunciation Sunday (the third Sunday in Advent).  That is one of our pastor's favorite songs.  It was the second solo I sang after I was "discovered" ("Mon Coeur" was actually the third - the first was "Dido's Lament") and was chosen for me by the choir director at the Unitarian church to sing at Christmas and I have kept it in my repertoire ever since.  It will be interesting to hear how that pianissimo high G sounds with my improved technique.

Last but not least, tonight is the kickoff rehearsal for the Requiem.  At first my partner was teed off, but it is only an hour, and this is something I have been planning for over a year.  I am responsible for assembling the singers and pianist and arranging rehearsals, the church will donate the space and give the ticket money to the social outreach program of their choice, and will handle the marketing and promotion.

The purpose of this rehearsal will be to finalize cuts and sing through the big ensemble pieces.  The soprano is the one who sang in my Verdi concert and the tenor is a friend of my teacher's who sings in the Met chorus.  I am lucky to have him.  The only problem is the bass.  He is someone I know from Facebook (I think he friended me after meeting me at an audition) and he said he was working on the Requiem and yes, would be interested in this (he can just view it as a big rehearsal) but that Thursday was not a good day to rehearse.  So I said we could probably switch to Tuesday after the New Year but that I just wanted to know if he could make the rehearsal today.  Over the course of two weeks I have sent him emails and left a message on his cell phone but have not heard anything. I am pretty sure he is still in the land of the living because I think he has posted things on Facebook.  So - huh??

Well, if I don't hear from him by the end of 2012 I will try to get someone else.

And I will line up someone to be on "partner patrol" in case she has a (real or manufactured, but not life threatening) crisis the week leading up to the concert.

Gratitude or Giving Up?

A while back I posted something on Facebook (was it as long ago as last Thanksgiving?) where I said I found it hard to tell the difference between gratitude and laziness.

People think I am not grateful because I so often feel frustrated at how anonymous and irrelevant I feel...no matter how well I sing (or do anything for that matter) I am surrounded in this city and particularly in this neighborhood by a suffocating mass of people who can do it better.

It is easy to say, OK, I have it pretty good.  I have someone who loves me, however flawed our relationship is, something to do for a modest living that I can do on my own schedule, a cheap apartment in a pricey ZIP code, not to mention that I am old enough now to know that no matter who is President, I, personally, will not fall through the cracks.  I spent 35 years bored out of my wits for most of the day and what I have to show for it is two 401ks and health insurance for life.  And now I earn little enough that I could probably qualify for lower middle income subsidized senior housing if I lost this apartment.

But I have this huge hunger in me to be somebody and in this environment I am nobody even if I leave the house every day flawlessly made up, looking like I am going for a photo shoot or at the very least a curtain call....no  mean feat at 62 when nobody cares how I look but me and my significant other.  It ain't in my job description.

Lately I have just felt like giving up.  One thing I learned (surprisingly) during the hurricane was how lovely it was to lie in bed in the dark (I could have done with a little heat) listening to the radio with my significant other with few pressures other than having to run home for a few hours a day to work at my laptop (I had power in the apartment, she didn't).  The competition was on hold

I want to run away to Ogunquit Maine.  Almost every summer we spent a week here. And this picture doesn't even do it justice. This room looks out on a Japanese garden that was written up in a magazine (I can't remember which one, now).

Just think if I lived in Ogunquit.  Well, I would have to walk everywhere except in July and August when the trolley is running, which would mean walking the equivalent of ten blocks, possibly in the snow, to buy overpriced groceries at a small convenience store.  Or maybe there might be someplace I could order groceries online?  There would only be one church within walking distance, and chances are I would get to be the star soloist full stop.  I would get bored pretty quickly...there are a few art galleries and a summer theater from which I would have to walk home the equivalent of 15 blocks with a flashlight, because it's not on the trolley route, and two movie theaters.  Maybe once a month or so I could take the bus to Portland but I would probably only get to spend 4 hours there because the last bus gets back fairly early, I think.  I would be bored, but I wouldn't feel like I was drowning at the bottom of a pool of talent, so far down at the bottom of the pool that no one can even see my nose.

If I hadn't been born in New York it would be easy.  I could go "home", presumably somewhere where I would be a bigger fish than I am here, and I would feel less overwhelmed.  But I have noplace to go home to.

I could choose to live a simple life here: just close my eyes to the mass of talented people, never go to another audition, stop reading Classical Singer, unfriend all the working singers on Facebook who don't know me and certainly don't care about me even if we met once or twice at a "meetup", and be an unpaid choir soloist and go caroling in nursing homes and sing a few art songs.  But is that giving up?  Is that admitting that I am a failure?  Or is it being grateful?

Next week I have the first rehearsal for this Requiem that I have been planning for over a year.  I will probably get flak about it from my significant other, but I will deal with it.  Maybe this will be the last  "big" thing I will ever do.