Just Sing

Sometimes, as young singers, we are told it is imperative to pick a style and stick with it. It will makes us more marketable (not confusing the audiences when it comes to what we are as a product) and, to a certain extent, it makes us members of our secret clan. We are classical singers; we are pop artists; we are musical theatre performers; we stick together and understand each other; we know nothing of the other clans. Sounds a bit "West Side Storiesque" to me. And haven't we agreed in many other fields that this is kind of passé?

Why limit ourselves as young artists when there are endless possibilities and adventures to be had on the stage? A solid technique and a dependable group of coaches will ensure that we each are the best singer we can be. So as a singer, go sing: whatever, whenever. Do it well and do it as often as you can. One of the most important untold lessons of our training is to be comfortable with whom you are as a performer in all situations. So practice being on stage and going out of your comfort zone. Sing a classical song, perform a straight monologue, or join a cabaret. Entertain and have fun: that is the point.

Cabaret -- July 21, 2010 -- The Players, NYC

Time to Make the Leap

"The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is there’s no ground." -Chogyam Trungpa

I resigned yesterday from my full-time job as a copywriter in an ad agency. I've tried to give a concise reason as for why I would leave a job that I like, with people I like, and a salary that is dependable and steady. Alas, I have failed to be concise, but I think the following is clear.

Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel J. Levitin, among others, are proponents of the following theory:

"...ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is roughly equivalent to three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."
from This Is your Brain on Music

After thorough investigation and tabulation, I discovered the following about myself:

I have 13,170 hours of practice in music, but only 5,169 hours in vocal technique/study.

My boss told me on Friday that she wanted to make sure I didn't quit too quickly and then wonder “what if”. For two days I thought “what if?”, “what if...what?” I never wanted a career specifically in advertising. I can start writing at any other time, study it any other time, do it any other time. And right now, I have a whole bag of “what ifs”: What if I had left my job three years ago and dedicated 4 hours a day to my singing? Where would I be now?

The numbers above summarize me perfectly: an excellent musician and a good singer. I don't want to be good. I want to be excellent. I want to be Callas. And in three years, if I dedicate 4 hours a day to my singing, I will have reached 10K.

Daniel Gilbert, psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness says that we never regret what we do, we regret what we don't do: inaction. Therefore, and because it seems right now some stars have aligned, and there are opportunities that I must follow, I must leave my job. I have to leave it because I cannot let financial fear define who I am. I have to leave because I cannot let one of my best traits—my perseverance, my refusal to quit—become one of my worse enemies—losing sight of my goals, losing perspective, not being able to tell apart what I can do from what I want to do and what I should do.

So I'm off to a 10K hour journey to excellence.

Crossing Over

Maybe you've heard the news: Renee Fleming has just released a pop/indie rock album, "Dark Hope." I hadn't heard anything about it until today, when I stumbled upon no fewer than three articles about it in the New York Times. On May 25, two reviews of this album were published: one by the classical reviewer, Anthony Tommasini ("Even Sopranos Get the Blues"), and the other by the pop reviewer, Jon Pareles ("Letting Desdemona Rock Out a Little"). Then today, the arts section featured an excerpt of a conversation between the two reviewers: "Opera Diva Tries a Rock Album. Cue Controversy." (Their full discussion is here.) 

Wow, where to begin... Here are a few observations on these articles, divided into the Good, the Not-so-good, and the Ugly.

The Good:

• I agree with the reviewers that the best crossover artists bring something essential of themselves into their new effort, whatever it may be. As Tommasini puts it, "To me the most admirable crossover ventures have involved great artists who have leapt right over the divide and found their own ways to perform music from another genre." 
• Both writers make some interesting comments about the differences between classical and pop technique. Pareles believes, "Classical training strives to control or eliminate the rough spots. But pop makes the rough spots some of the most expressive moments." I'm not sure if I agree across the board, but it's an intriguing observation. Maybe we classical singers could learn to let some "rough spots" show through occasionally in order to express more? 

The Not-so-good

• Both reviewers seem to wonder, Who is she making this album for? Who is the target audience? To which we respond, "Who cares?" Do we need to have the audience in mind at every moment while we create our art, or can we say what we want to say and hope that people (anyone, anywhere) will be touched by it? I think there may be a lot more "crossover" between pop and classical audiences in our generation than these reviewers think. Music is music.

The Ugly

• This section by Pareles really took me aback: "...The classical folks often seem to think that their virtuosity is the only kind of virtuosity, so of course it will work in every context. When opera singers deign to sing what, to them, are clearly trivial ditties, they often end up sounding silly and pretentious." What?! Let me speak from personal experience here. I am one of those classical singers who sound "silly" and maybe even "pretentious" singing popular music. But it is never, ever, because I think that this music is any more "trivial" than classical music. I think my early musical training, combined with natural vocal tendencies, has just given me vocal habits that feel very difficult to break. Pareles seems to think that we opera singers look down on all other kinds of music. I don't think this could be any further from the truth.

And, for the record, the album doesn't sound half bad to me. What do you think? What factors make crossover work for you, in either direction?

-Miriam

Recital June 11 -- Click on image for larger view

Resurrection Parish

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Homogenization and Art

I was talking to a friend yesterday who told me he was teaching his young daughter not to use the word “coger” in Spanish (“to take”) because in some countries (the vast minority), the word has a sexual alternate meaning, just like the word “take” in English (Oh, baby, take me now). I smiled and said, “you can’t possibly bring up an international child,” to which he answered, “oh, yes, I can.”

Well, yes, I’m sure he could, but the question here is: why?

I can’t help but be sad at the potential loss of cultural flavor in this new era of market homogenization. Not to mention that by choosing certain words that are pan-adequate, we are unavoidably categorizing vocabulary and idioms as acceptable/not-acceptable, better/worse, ensuring that one bigger group will assimilate the smaller ones, as if their contribution to the richness of human kind were less valuable.

This also strikes me as a concern characteristic of minorities. With this specific case, we can see the mentality of the Hispanic minority in the English-speaking US. Perhaps we as Hispanics feel stronger as a group, but we might be going to extravagant lengths to ensure we can, indeed, be categorized as a group. The homogenization of our language is one of those sacrifices. But have you ever heard of an American parent teaching his or her children not to say they have a “bloody nose” but rather than their “nose is bleeding,” or not to describe the dog as “shaggy” but rather as “hairy” or “messy”? Certainly these words can evoke other thoughts when heard by the Brits, but no one really cares.

My deeper concern here is creativity, art. We live in a world that more and more is encouraging individuality and diversity of expression when it comes to individuals, yet foments assimilation and seamless integration when it comes to whole societies. Where does this leave art? How are we to produce truly distinct individuals with their own visual, musical, verbal trends of expression if we remove colors from the equation, rather than teaching how or what these colors and tools may perform or evoke in different environments?

Remove the local flavor influence, and you would not be able to tell apart Puccini from Bizet or Tchaikovsky. How will this impact our future geniuses?

Divas and Divos Everywhere

An advertising agency gathers all of its employees in one large room for 3 hours. A huge presentation is given, defining the future of the company, the structure of the game, and the role of each group within the new plan: creative, account planning, media buying, account management, digital, linguistics, strategic planning, print studio. At the end of the meeting, two creatives (don't get me started on the use of this word as a noun) walk out together, and one of them says to the other:

"At the end of the day, all this is fine and dandy. But if the creative concept were not amazing, who cares about your media buy, how you handled the client, the correctness of language, the strategy. All of it really means nothing without us."

True as this statement is, let me propose a few others that are equally true.

• If you have an amazing campaign, published through the most effective media, targeting the perfect audience and at just the right time, and you publish a typo or a voiceover with a grammatical/language brain-fart on it, people will remember your campaign. But not because it was amazing, but because of your embarrassing mistake, which, by the way, just cost you credibility, on top of all the thousands of dollars in re-printing/re-producing.
• If you have the most amazing campaign, brilliant idea, beautifully redacted, perfectly proofread, flawlessly printed and produced, and no one sees it, or it is seen only by the non-consumerist Piraha tribe in Brazil, who cares?
• If you had to contact the client yourself, nurture your relationship with said client, organize and manage bookings of talent, studio, engineers, research markets and consumers, negotiate media time and fees with vendors and clients alike, when exactly would you expect to think and produce your awesome idea?

Don't take me wrong, it's not that I don't whole-heartedly agree with the creative's point of view. After all, I am a creative, and I've been creative my whole life—or what else do you call being a musician?

As a matter of fact, I hate the common doctrine that insists that no one is indispensable. I would like to propose instead that we all are. What a novel thought! We are all indispensable.

And why am I writing this on an opera company's blog? This false divo attitude is precisely what coópera seeks to eradicate. I say "false" because there's nothing divine about thinking yourself better than the orchestra, the wardrobe people, the planners, the marketers, the chorus, in the same way that there's no value in thinking yourself easily replaceable. 

I think it is a much better production, in every sense of the word, if we understand how intrinsically and incredibly necessary we are, and how intrinsically and incredibly necessary all the other parts are as well, and therefore consider ourselves lucky—truly lucky—to be so amazing, and to have found all of these other amazing people, to have been able to gather them in one place at one time, to form such an amazingly well-oiled machine that is therefore built to produce greatness.

I don't know about you, but I think this is what advertising and opera are all about.

Laura

"With great emotion comes great power" -- Gossip Girl

We might as well admit that we, too, have guilty pleasures. And, occasionally, we may even extract some surprising wisdom from them. Ah, Gossip Girl, the wise!

We have been doing some reading these past couple of months, and the unintentional common theme among the otherwise unrelated books seems to be happiness and the perception of emotion. Stumbling on Happiness and This Is Your Brain on Music have changed my life. From the conversation on how we fail to make the right choices in order to be happy to the treatment of music as an obsession, I find our existence, and especially that of the artist, fascinating. I will not bore you with my lousy synopsis of these fantastic books, but rather I will say that, again, I am inspired to create, to perform, regardless of financial retribution or even whether an audience is large or small. And I find that, indeed, our need to perform is somewhat of an obsession, and the pursuit of emotion, good, bad, pleasurable or painful, is inevitable, because it is said emotion that fuels our muse, our desire, our drive. Precisely, as Gossip Girl says, for us "with great emotion comes great power," the power of expression.

Today was a tough day at my day job. The company I work for had to face its critical staff and make amends for wrong turns made in the recent past. The room was filled, if not yet with hope, with passion. And it was inspiring and moving in itself, to see so much emotion, to share with those who we musicians call "normal people" that moment of intense feeling--no matter what that feeling was. For a moment, it made us all more alive, more ready. It was a taste of shared power.

So I leave you here with a video/ad that I'm sure many of you have seen, but it never gets old. And I tell you: go, feel, act.

Laura