Motivation

I'm electing not to choose the title of this post before I write it. This is important for you to know so that you are forewarned--my intention is to talk about motivation in what is essentially a freelance career and possibly the explanation for my perpetual writer's block, but if I don't write in a title who knows what will actually happen?

That's kind of exciting.

I am happy to say that I have a paying singing gig lined up for every month of 2010 up through June. Between gigs and my apprenticeship, I've been keeping busy learning four full roles and an oratorio. Happily, in a huge change from last year's dearth of reaction to me during audition season, this year I've been offered 2 contracts (not enough money to be able to accept them, but they were offered) and 4 alternates (always the bridesmaid, never the bride.)

I cannot even begin to say what a difference this makes from last year around this time when I believed that I had nothing to offer as a singer and that I was on the cusp of a lifetime of failure. I am so thankful for last year. It taught me what it was to truly doubt, and then it taught me how to use all my resources. Fully five different programs wanted me in some capacity for their summer season (1 contract and 1 alt position were for the same program)--for a soprano to be in consistent demand means I must have been doing something right. Hitting bottom last year truly taught me to open up and search honestly for ways to improve, and obviously it worked. None of my usual means bearing any fruit meant I had to try new things, and thank God for that.

I tried new things, I filled up my spring calendar, and now... What the hell do I do for the rest of my year? The tiny companies I've been working for don't have their next season contracted yet, the bigger companies I want to move up to have already filled theirs. I'm terrified of an end of the year that looks like last year. Yet this time I know that I have control. If I don't get outside paying gigs, I now know that I can program my own concerts. I can determine my own fate.

However, I have to actually put the work in first.

I programmed a series of concerts in January. They were (by my standards) extremely successful. I turned a huge profit considering the money spent, everyone involved got paid, I learned rep I'd always wanted to. I now have these musicians on call for other concerts involving the same program--next time we perform this music it will involve even less time and effort, which means more profit, which everybody likes! Now that I've done this once, I can easily do this again... theoretically.

This brings me to the crux of what has always been my problem, and what I think is a problem for just about every single singer coming out of academia: how does one keep their motivation when their artistic time suddenly becomes completely unstructured?

It's amazing how much we completely hamstring our conservatory students. Thank god I'm relatively bright and had a fantastic class my last year called "Business of Music"--these two things gave me places to start. But to take a person who has been in the business of academics for 22 solid years and then spill them out into the real world outside of the externally imposed structure of a YAP? It's a recipe for disaster. At least I've answered the question of "what to do now" for myself, but there still exists the question of "how".

I'm trying to counteract my own inertia by swearing off my usual day job--waitressing--and using financial terror as an incentive to finally start my own voice studio and to program concerts for April and through the summer. But I'm living in a new place right now and I feel like all I do is research--what churches host concerts? Where can I get studio space? What is the structure of a private non-classical voice lesson? Where are the local, YA level concert series? For that matter, what local YA-level opera companies are hiring?

(Tangent for another time: that is the operative word, "hiring". This voice cost $70,000 to train and sounds pretty darn awesome. You don't get to listen to it for free anymore. My best friend and I were discussing this in terms of dating, but it's equally applicable to being a young singer--I am not a beggar for anyone. I may not be the best yet, but I am worthy, and you will treat me that way.)

How do I get to the point where I'm actually scheduling things?

On some level, I know that this is the way that I usually write amazing research papers. I read a billion books, I research thousands of sources, I write three outlines and random snippets of meaninglessness, I walk away from it for a few days and forget I have to do it, then the day before it's due I churn out some incredible 10-page monument to music in a matter of hours. This is the reading and researching part. I'm still figuring out the Philly scene, and most of the people I know are fellow apprentices with Center City who either already have externally imposed order (other training programs) or aren't really self-starters, so I don't have a lot of real connections yet. However, I drank coffee all afternoon and sat over my laptop reading up on how to start my own voice studio, but didn't actually stop by the place that offered me studio space to confirm with them.

I just wish I knew how to navigate my own mind, sometimes. I feel like it's a recalcitrant child that I have to bribe to do what I want, but I don't know what the appropriate candy is. Coffee sometimes works, but not lately. I occassionally wonder about whether I might have a touch of ADD, but my friend has a bad case of it and I did some research on it with her. If I do have it, it's borderline, and, frankly, perhaps I'm scared that if I do go see a psychiatrist about it, it'll turn out that I'm just lazy.

This is where I hand the topic off to the smartest of all answer-makers--the internet! How do you get yourselves motivated? Better yet, how do you stay motivated? How do you continue to make consistent progress?

Let me know in the comments. There are so many of us who need to be self-motivated right now--how do you make it happen?

Quick Update

Some great news!  I was cast as Adina for Center City Opera Theater's production of L'Elisir d'Amore next Sunday!

Hence my radio silence.  Those of you who know me in real life know I was also contracted to sing Adina in February as well, but having to move my preparation schedule up by five weeks has wreaked havoc on my ability to socialize and update this blog.

I promise I'm still thinking about you, and have a ton of ideas!  Just be patient with me a little while longer.

Welcome To Your Breakdown!

It's interesting how we can continually convince ourselves that we've prepared for ever conceivable possibility, doubled down against every possible inconvenience, and fortified our resolve to the point where we can handle everything.  This despite all past evidence that, no matter how hard you try, one cannot do everything at once.

I cannot do everything at once.

In the past month, I have sung 9 auditions, travelled 2,000 miles, finished my MM, quit my job waitressing, ended my TA "career" at Johns Hopkins, left my home and moved 100 miles away.

Oh, and then I figured it'd be a smart idea to break up with my boyfriend, spend every penny I have, and do all of the above without any gainful employment lined up in advance in my new home.

In short?  I hurt.  I have the ideal apartment, I'm living in a city I love, and a universe of possibility is laying itself out before me.

I hurt.

When my mini-breakdown amid all this change happened, I was at my best friend's Brooklyn apartment.  She'd invited another friend, Deborah, over for dinner.  She happened to walk in just as I began to sob.  (Not the best first impression I'd ever made.)  I hid in the bedroom until I felt ready to talk, and in the meantime my best friend explained to her why I was so upset.

The exact trigger of that spate of crying was because the truck company called two days before my move to inform me that the truck I'd reserved a month before wasn't available.  Oh, and I didn't get a callback for an audition I'd had that day.  That was the trigger, but it wasn't the cause.

As Deborah explained to me kindly, a person can only take so much.  Apparently there are five major causes of stress in a person's life: financial, romantic, living situation, job, and life changes.  I'd taken on all five in a short amount of time.

Deborah smiled at me, and I smiled back, already in on the joke.  She opened her arms expansively and proclaimed, "Welcome to your breakdown!"

I couldn't help but giggle.

Coming off the adrenaline rush of Thanksgiving, breaking up, auditioning, traveling, and moving has been worse than the insanity of being in the middle of it.  Thank goodness I moved to a city where I already have many friends, but it is proving very difficult to change everything at once and keep my sanity.  Staying productive wasn't a challenge when I was still working off of that psychotic burst of energy I got from taking on too much, but now, having finally caught up on sleep, I see my finances.  I go to call my (now ex) boyfriend and realize I can't.  I go to ask one friend to come over and realize she's 120 miles away.

I am only human.

It's hard in these days to remember that.  We are surrounded by so many puppets, so many media representations of what life is supposed to look like.  We think of emotional suffering as being attached to times of great strife, of terrible danger and loss.  My anxieties are all too mundane.  Is anyone going to hire me?  Am I going to get into a summer program?  Do I want to get into a summer program?  What is my career going to look like?  When am I ever going to get laid if I don't have a steady boyfriend?  Will anyone else ever love me?  How am I going to find a new teacher?  Where am I going to find the money to pay for a coach?  I have two roles to memorize, when is that going to happen?  What about the concert tour I've organized that no one seems to be willing to work on but me?

And on and on and on like a carousel that keeps spinning until I'm sick to my stomach.

Sometimes it seems like this all would be so easy if I just had him back.  My partner-in-crime and my go-to guy for a year-and-a-half isn't waiting on the other end of the phone to be my calm reminder that things are fixable.  He can't fix things for me anymore--which is perhaps a good skill to finally learn for myself.  But I miss him, and while the mountain of other concerns gives me precious little time to mourn the loss of that relationship, it also makes the loss of it more acute.

I feel the absence of my peers.  I long for someone who knows what I'm going through, even though no one such person exists.

It's such a mundane pain, but it helps so much just to itemize it all here.  I went through my quarter-life crisis this year, and I know I'm on my way out of the panic.  That helps.  These thoughts are a little scary, but for the most part I'd already worked most of them out.  But I can't ignore them.

We all feel the need sometimes to reduce or expand our emotions to meet expectations.   I make the proper comic offended noises, or I feign outrage, but I don't really admit to anyone in real life anymore that I just hurt.

Part of the process I've most hated about becoming an adult was learning to control my feelings.  I always considered it a skill akin to lying.  But I've somehow managed to master it and most of the time in real life lately, I can pretend not to feel as much as I do.

But here, at least, is a safe place to admit what I can't admit to the people who love me.

I took on too much.  No one, even with the best and most logical reasons, can expect to take on this kind of change and be unaffected.

Yes, I am doing fine.  I am lonely and overwhelmed, but I am handling everything very well.  I'm making all my plans and doing much better than I ever expected.  I am incredibly organized and most everything is crossed off my to-do list.

But I hurt.

I miss my Irish pub.  I hated working there sometimes, but when I walked in everyone knew me.  It was comfortable and easy.

I miss Peabody, even though it hasn't really been "mine" for a half-a-year.  I miss regimented schedules and teachers telling me what to do and clear expectations.

I miss him.  I miss him so, so badly.  I hate this internet age where I can read everything he's doing but not ask about it.  I hate that there are so many ways to break down and try to contact him.  I hate that not being with him is the right thing to do even when we both love each other.  

I miss his voice on the other end of the line.  He was so often infallibly patient when I needed it.  I miss running ideas by him.  I miss the physical comfort of him.

It's so hard to remember why not being with him is right when it's impossible for me to remember what was wrong.  We were always best in tough times, so we would have been brilliant right now.

I'm only human, so I hurt.

Even if it's only here, it's nice to have somewhere to admit it.

A New Home

I've been recently reminded that this blog exists.  

I was so proud of it in the beginning.  I diligently updated, I had a list of ideas to conquer at some point, and then, as it always seems to happen, I stopped thinking I had important things to say.

A part of it was the fact that this blog was originally conceived to be completely anonymous.  Well, I screwed the pooch on that the instant I created it because I started this blog at the behest of a very good colleague and friend.  Then I was going to try to be cryptic and veiled and generic and hope that my semi-anonymity would be a bulwark against dishonesty.

But writing under a nom-de-plume is a kind of dishonesty.  I'm at the very beginning of my career, and I worry that venting my frustrations will appear unprofessional.  Frankly, though, this industry needs a revolutionary.  Heck, it needs an army of them.  Change will not come because a bunch of sock puppets will it so, it will come because real people acknowledge and openly argue the fact that the parts of the system are unsustainable.

My name is Jessica Lennick.  I just handed in my last assignment for my M.M. from Peabody Conservatory this week--a story you'll hear about later--and deeply mired in the pay-to-play system most young artists find themselves struggling to find a place in post-higher education.  I've always been deeply curious about the world around me, which is how I found my way into classical music.  Nothing else in my life so far has been sufficiently complicated to keep my interest except singing.

My story this year has been a most interesting one.  I sang Pierrot Lunaire, which is the first piece I ever learned that actively scared the crap out of me.  I appeared (mostly) naked on stage.  I had my first nationally-publicized project, which proved to me that cross-marketing in classical music largely does not work (another post for another time.)  I began and ended the best romantic relationship I ever had and suddenly acutely understand the sacrifices this career will require of me.  In the last fiscal year I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on trying to find a place in this industry, and I'm finally feeling it as my loans come due.  I just moved up to Philadelphia both because I was accepted into an (not-for-pay) apprentice program and because Baltimore was growing stale.

I want to tell you about these things.  I don't want to have to say "moved from one East Coast city to a bigger one" or "am singing a role for a new company in the mid-Atlantic region."

Like anyone else in the performing arts, I went into this in large part because I want to be known.

My name is Jessica Lennick.  I am a singer.  I am profoundly in love with what I do.

I'm looking forward to meeting you.

Renaissance Woman

So spending a week in the wilds of Vermont doing close to nothing gives a person ample time to think.  At the end of this week, restless from a day of sitting reading and watching video games I finally decided to take some initiative and take a walk.  It was only five degrees outside, mind you, so it was a pretty short walk, but it had the marvelous effect of clearing my head so those thoughts could come to the surface.  I came in from the cold, nose stinging and toes numb, picked up a laptop and began to write.  A couple thousand words and about a half-an-hour later I stopped. 

Sitting down and writing a thousand words in under twenty minutes always has the tendency to make my head feel empty and light. It's as though I've completely exhausted every original thought and my brain has to take a moment to generate more.   It's a good feeling, actually--it's the closest I get to a literally clear mind.  I used to be quite familiar with it.

You see, in high school I was a novelist.  I wrote two books, and my output in total must have topped five hundred thousand words; but almost a decade later it's become a foreign habit.  I haven’t written in months.  I was thinking today that this was the first time in over a year-and-a-half that I’ve had a vacation and the first time in at least two years since I’d had a massage.  Skiing yesterday was one of the first physical things I’ve done in a few months.  It’s like I’ve been completely ignoring myself in favor of feeling like I’m moving forward.  I have been doing that--I've been learning things and feeling like I'm gaining momentum.  I’ve been getting a lot more done, but I realized today that 'getting things done' is a task that's very limiting.  I've been moving forward, crossing things off my to-do list, but I haven’t been becoming a better person.

***

I remember writing some sort of rant in undergrad about singers who thought that they were only singers—that the only worthy thing they studied was voice and the only thing that concerned them was music--and even then, only their music was of any importance.  They didn’t know a thing about politics or history or art or technology.  Perhaps they knew a bit about marketing, but they weren’t well-rounded.  I used to despise those people.  I thought they were under-developed and, frankly, quite silly.

Somewhere along the way, I didn’t exactly become one of them—thank God my interest and intense curiosity in other things makes that impossible—but it seems that I started to emulate those singers.

I don’t want to be one of those singers!  I don’t want to eat, sleep, breathe, and excrete music.  I want to be a person!  I just want to be a person who happens to sing for a living. 

As I walked around in the cold today I thought to myself that music might be the thing I love to do more than anything else, but it is not the only thing I love to do.  In the end, I believe that will make me a better person, and being a better person makes me a better singer.

But even if it didn’t make me a better singer, it would still make me a better person, and that is always—SHOULD always-be the real point.

***

Lesson according to Smoofie: Be a person first and a singer second.

A Necessary Hiatus

I hate to do this because for once I'm actually sticking to my plan and regularly updating this, but (if you can't tell from the mentions in the last two posts) I am going on an extended vacation. If I am feeling exceptionally gregarious, I may post an update about how my laziness is going, but that seems counter to the whole spirit of the thing.

Happy Generic Winter Holiday of your choice! May your presents be useful, your loved ones healthy, and your families well-behaved.

See you next year!

On the Benefits of Laziness, Part II

Well, that last post turned into something entirely unintended. You see, normally when I write anything I have an outline with me. Sometimes it's very thought-out with a point-by-point progression of ideas, sometimes it's just a few notes scribbled on a piece of paper. The scribbles for that last post are still sitting next to me, but they're definitely not what wanted to be written. It's a nasty thing, posts that insist on writing themselves without my input. I would shake a disapproving finger at my monitor, but I don't think it'd do much good.

At any rate, I figured it would be worth it to attempt a second time to expand upon what was my original idea. It'll probably be just a basic sketch, but who knows? It might actually want to be written now.

***

So the original "thesis" for that last post was not going to be in reference to the very specific laziness which is a vacation--whether a three hour long vacation on a Thursday night or a nine-day vacation over the winter holiday--but instead cultivated laziness in certain situations. Though even the definition of laziness in this situation is different from the last post--the last post dealt with actual laziness, whereas for this purpose I merely mean "laid-back": which is to say, relaxation. Which is to say: the title of this post is a complete misnomer and what I really meant to talk about is how to relax.

My original sloppy talking points got half-covered in the last point, so I will try not to bore you with revisiting the same material. I will try to talk through the bits that didn't quite get covered.

***

As part of my self-imposed pop-culture rehabilitation program (Step I of Recovering from Graduate Studies) I've been listening to the Decemberists, among other bands. In all my travel on planes, trains, and automobiles this month I've had a lot of time to listen, and one of the things that struck me about pop music is the lack of obvious micro-managing when it comes to tempo. I am a bel canto enthusiast and will proselytize for hours about the indefinite art that is rubato and I wouldn't give that up for anything; however, I must say that there was something infinitely relaxing about being able to depend on periodically getting back to the same tempo for a long stretch of time. It gives a delicious sense that the music itself is solid somehow--that music is definite.

I'm not sure if it's my fault or the fault of accompanists and conductors I've been working with or a little bit of everyone combined, but I haven't experienced that consistency in tempo in a long time. I realize that with many musicians, we have this desire to push the tempo. As though we'll lose the audience's interest if we give them a moment to think about it, we go faster, trying to hold their interest. As a coloratura, I'm known for blazing through cabalettas at suicidal speeds trying to show off my facility. However, I can't help but think that this is wrong-headed. Worse, I can't help but think that this is tension-inducing for everyone involved.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love me some dramatic tension (uhm, hello, it's opera) but pushing tempi to create it is just doing the wrong thing. Here I'm getting off track again. Let's see if I can put it this way...

Changing your tempi to create dramatic tension only works if the audience and musicians have a definite tempo established as a reference point. We have to know without a doubt that this acceleration, this deceleration, this sudden wholesale change is something of import. They can't just sit there scratching their heads thinking to themselves, "Well, gosh, I know something has changed, but what?" They must sit up straighter in their chairs, the air suddenly electric because something different is happening. The audience isn't stupid by any means, but they can't know that something different is happening unless we establish an undeviated baseline long enough that the audience can find their way back to it by instinct. It is only once the audience becomes comfortable that it becomes effective to change tempi.

It is here we have to relax. We have to resist the urge to make something happen right now because in doing so we render our musical choices moot. We have to allow the music to happen, trust the notes on the page, and wait for just the right time to act.

This same principal applies to technique. Who ever produced a high note while micromanaging it? Who ever sang a high F worth singing by obsessing? This might have a place in a practice room while you're finding your way, but in a performance you'll be completely hamstrung.

The lesson in this case, might be this: that to create a product worth experiencing requires relinquishing one's neuroses and abandoning the concept of music being a linear experience where the point is to get to the finish line.

In fact, the point of this blog may yet be the journey of just that--how to have a career with myriad failures and successes while jettisoning the idea of it being any sort of a linear experience. It's not a race, it's not a game. You're not racking up points or trying to get a better time.

You're trying to make art.

So, you know, relax.
(If you manage to do that, please tell me how!)

On the Benefits of Laziness

Ah, the wonder and glory of laziness. The unparalleled happiness of sitting around doing nothing. The incredible freedom of having no obligations. The power to delegate everything but sleeping and eating to someone else. Wondrous, rejuvenating laziness.

...Now, now, don't freak out immediately. I, of course, don't mean academic laziness or technical laziness. If you knew me in person, trust me, you'd know I would never advocate anything of the sort. But around this time of year my thoughts always turn to vacation and what it means to me.

As a hardcore academic, I've been in school non-stop now for going on twenty years. The academic track I chose found me in a pattern of ever-accelerating obligations, to the point where this winter break is the first span of consecutive free time longer than two days I've had in over a year-and-a-half. Last week also marked the first weekend I'd been able to take in two-and-a-half months. I am not by nature a "lazy" person.

However, it's because of that that I value my free time so much. I jealously guard the days off I can afford to take and will seldom allow them to be infringed upon. What with practice, classes, performances, internships, and the jobs I take to actually pay the rent, 12-16 hours days can become pretty normal during the semester. Actually, given the fact that my summer job was waiting tables at an Irish bar that closed at two in the morning, 12-14 hour days weren't too uncommon during summer break, either. All that stress builds up, and it has to go somewhere.

During the year it usually goes into an extra strenuous practice session--if I can afford to--or a long trip to the gym--if I have the time. But these are both stop-gap measures. At the end of the day, my body just can't be pushed any farther. At the end of the day, one needs some time to stand still.

Peaches and I have been talking about the fact that even the act of standing still is hard. We both want to be moving forward in our craft, and the prevailing opinion is that time spent resting is time wasted, but I would disagree.

A life with no time spent reflecting, no time allowed to process experience or remember what it's like to not live in a place where every moment of every day must be structured, lest one lose an instant of productivity, is a hollow one. If I'm going to use the popular metaphor of my brain being a computer--I only have so much processing power. I can only go for so long before all systems begin to simply freeze up.

I think everyone has experienced this. I have. I know when I'm getting burnt out because the signs of it are everywhere. First to go is any semblance of order in my living space. Now, even in the best of times I live by the sentiment that a disorganized room is a sign of a well-organized mind, but when I begin to shut down, you stop being able to see the floor. Dirty laundry piles up on the floor of the bathroom. Scores and books stop making it back to the bookshelf and instead sit in piles mere feet from their proper places. It's the physical manifestation of beginning to give up. I've started to surrender to the idea that I can't maintain order in my life.

Second to go is my mental health. I stop being social. I can't carry on a conversation with any but my closest friends. I have problems making eye contact or meaningful connections in casual conversations. Then comes the crying. Movies, music, books, an innocently intended word; all are cause for waterworks.

After that, my body follows. I become more and more lethargic, even while I doggedly continue to drag myself to one obligation after the next. My voice--whose salient point is its clarity--begins to get ragged and dull. If I get even close to the lower end of my middle register I will find myself unceremoniously dumped into chest voice.

Lastly, of course, I get sick. My body finds a way to make me shut down and get the rest it needs. I used to do this like clockwork each year right around the same time--pneumonia one year, mono the next, the sinus infections from H-E-double-hockey-sticks two years running after that. Finally I learned the art of shutting down before my body made me do it.

This year, despite what must have been the most ridiculous semester on record--an internship at a B level opera company, my M.M. recital, a role in a mainstage production at my conservatory and twelve auditions on the Northeast coast--I have been healthy as a horse. I owe it all to a newly discovered appreciation of laziness. Okay, and an extremely comprehensive heath insurance plan that allowed me to finally get preventive care for some pre-existing conditions.

Still.

My best friend is a fantastically lazy person, with emphasis on "fantastic." She's an incredible musician and (as if this were even possible!) an even better friend. She is also one of the most enthusiastic nappers I have ever come across. She and I have whiled away countless evenings playing video games, doing word and number puzzles (her) and reading (me.) She places an incredible amount of importance on eating, sleeping, and making time for frivolity. It is, without a doubt, one of the biggest reasons for my continued sanity and productivity.

Yes, productivity.

Here's my point: cultivating laziness is productive if you do it right. Because that unseemly emphasis on rest means that I now don't feel ashamed to insist on my eight to nine hours of sleep per night. Learning how to value the time I spend cooking and eating and playing video games meant I made time for it. I finally learned how to make time for standing still. You know what I figured out? If I make room in my schedule to be lazy, I can fit into eight-to-twelve hours what I used to fit into twelve-to-sixteen. Even better than that, I am a much better colleague when I do it.

***

So as I head toward a Christmas Eve and Day with said best friend and some of my very favorite people along with a week after that spent luxuriously doing nothing, I'll keep in mind that even this beautiful halycon period of laziness is for a purpose. The store of energy I'm going to get from hoarding my resources during this precious week is what will get me through the inevitable disappointments and the rigorous planning that is waiting for me in the new year.

So you can work through your break if you want. You can take the over-extended frantic pace of the rest of your life and carry it with you all the time. I salute you. It takes a stouter heart, body, and mind than mine to bear that kind of a strain. As for me, I'll be over here, raising a glass and laughing with friends and remembering what other uses my heart and brain are good for other than getting ahead; and at the end of it...

It'll be a new year.

Disappointment

This blog was founded on the idea that I have things to say worth listening to. Over the past few weeks I have discovered that these things are not "rah-rah" speeches or a pedantic list of things you should do to get on your way. This is because I realized that... Well, I really don't know.

I know all the basics of auditioning--have well marked music for your accompanist, a Five that are so well-rehearsed you can sing them in your sleep, a dynamite dress that is memorable, modest, and accompanied by the right underpinnings, and a resume that looks delicious.

I was finally confronted this month with the fact that I don't know it all. That my knowledge isn't enough. The voice and the talent that breezed me right through undergrad and grad school and all manner of community productions are not enough anymore. Somewhere along the line, I listened a little too well and polished myself to a high gloss without bothering to tackle the stuff below the sheen.

High off of an incredibly successful grad career I expected doors to keep opening without a terribly huge amount of effort. I told myself not to expect much but really was looking for the world to just fall at my feet.

I have learned that it doesn't quite work that way, and I am on my way to discovering that that is a very good thing. This is the thing that makes this blog a little different--I'm going to go ahead and admit that I'm not perfect. I'm not. I need more core in my sound, I need a better Five, I need yet another coat of polish. I need to be memorable and not merely competent. We'll be discovering the how of that together along the line, and I have every intention of sharing. For now, though, we'll start at the very beginning.

***

I've been germinating the idea of a professional blog for a long time, but it never seemed to be the right moment. I never knew how anonymous I wanted it to be. The events of the last month made me realize that I want it to be completely anonymous so you can know me better. It needs to be completely anonymous so I can say what I have to say and not censor myself. It needs to be completely anonymous so I can tell you what I never, ever want any employer to know. In short, that I am not perfect.

This month I did my first "real" audition season. I applied to every summer program and YAP that I could, I bought three audition dresses, spent all semester polishing my rep, and at the height of the semester did all my work weeks early to leave school to audition for everyone who would hear me. In total, I believe I was heard by about twelve programs--an excellent start.

Results started coming in. My best friend was accepted into the Rolls-Royce of summer programs, her roommate was wait-listed at the Ferrari of Summer Programs, my ex-roommate was accepted at a mid-level program to cover two roles that I desperately love. The days have ticked by and I have no calls. There is a somewhat happy ending--I was wait-listed at a mid-level program and so I am quite hopeful that perhaps something else might happen for me, but the point to this is not my status in terms of having something to do this summer.

No, the point is what not having the outside validation of having a program accept me did to me. I was devastated. Somehow, somewhen I had begun expecting things. I had started to think that things were owed me as a singer. I've seen it happen to people around me and been disgusted by it but had never thought to look for it in myself. Well, I turned around a week ago and there it was. Suddenly, I expected validation to the point where it actually threatened how I saw myself.

Well, okay. It threatened how I saw myself for a day or two, then I mentally smacked myself and remembered that I am fantastic and just need to be more so. There are thousands of sopranos with high notes out these, so I need a little more work to stand out. That's not a bad or shameful thing, and I shouldn't need other people to bolster my ego. That's one of my goals, even beyond the technical work I have to do--rely on interior feedback.

It's also something that I think everyone in the profession has to address at one time or another. It is such a delicate balance keeping your head right in this game. Keeping your ego and self-esteem at a level which keeps you positive and insulated to small blows can often explode into an unmanageable ego. Instead of being hopeful, a person can become entitled. It's a very real danger and it makes for a bad artist. People who feel entitled to things don't feel the need to change and grow so they can deserve them; they just sit and let stuff fall into place. I'm aiming at growing a little extra humility this year and seeing where it gets me. Real humility: not the false modesty that keeps a person endlessly fishing for compliments, but real, honest-to-god, internal self-sufficiency, and a new clarity in how I look at myself professionally.

So now we begin.

Lesson of this post: No one owes you anything, and that's GOOD. If you didn't have to earn it, it wouldn't be worth anything.

The Big Reveal!

Okay, so all of one person follows this blog so far and she already knows who I am, but what is a blog if not the illusion that someone is listening and cares?

I started this blog with the vague thought that writing about this profession--this demanding, exhilarating, highly personal profession--might be easier under the guise of something very far from myself. When my roommate bought me a stuffed sheep for an early Hannukah present, I figured it was as good a persona as any.

However, in a profession such as this which becomes so much a part of personal identity, putting something else in between you and I just blocks the entire purpose of this blog. There are many blogs about opera. Most of the blogs about the business we read because they talk like they have things all figured out, from both sides of the table. But I realized as I read all these blogs that something was missing.

It was missing my perspective. It was missing an underdog. There are so many blogs and websites and forums that you can go to if you want people to tell you what to do, but when a person is searching for real honesty it can be hard to find. Most blogs are hidden beneath a professional veneer that in some ways is as fake as a talking stuffed animal. I haven't been able to find a one yet that speaks really honestly about the things that I care about.

So this is my contribution to the blog world. My little corner of the internet will be reserved for honesty.

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I guess that means it's time for a real introduction. I'm a coloratura soprano (but aren't we all!) just about to graduate from an MM program in a major city in the Northeast. In my day I've had monikers like "The Queen" and "The Diva" but these days I think I'd like to try on something a little more modest.

You can call me Smoofie.