Reading goals for 2016

I vowed to blog on the 1st and 15th of every month, and today's the 15th, so here goes....

I purchased a bunch of books over the last two years that I have simply had no time to read. So before I buy any more, I'm going to read them. And since school doesn't start back up for me till February 1 (!!!!), I have a little time. These books are:

1. The War of Art - I'm actually reading that now. Not completely blown away by it. I think it'd be a better podcast than a book.
2. Practical Vocal Acoustics by Ken Bozeman of Lawrence Conservatory. I bought this last year at the NATS Winter Workshop in WPB, Florida (where it was warm and I wish I could be there right now). This will be a challenge because it's science-y, and not science-y in a way that I can grasp easily, like vocal anatomy and physiology. No, it's acoustics, which tend to scramble my brain.
3. Body and Voice: Somatic Re-education by Marina Gilman. Also purchased last year.
4. The Vocal Athlete (and its companion workbook) co-written by fellow Peab and Somatic Voicework™The LoVetri Method colleague Marci Daniels Rosenberg. Amazon tells me I bought this in JULY 2014.
5.  Directing in Musical Theater: An Essential Guide. I bought this in November, because this is something that I MIGHT be starting to do in the fall. (I know, it's a cliché - "But what I really want to do is direct.")
6. One Voice: Integrating  Singing and Theater Voice Techniques by Joan Melton, with whom I took a workshop a couple of years back.
7. Singing in Musical Theater: The Training of Singers and Actors, also by Joan Melton. Both of these books were also purchased in November.
8. Various other books that are non-singing related that I purchased for no apparent reason and I'm not in a hurry to read them.

 I think I'm going to hit Marci's book first.

So I have no reason to play Bejeweled at night, when I have all this stuff to do, right?

I'll try to review them as a finish each one.

New Year, New Plans

I keep saying I'm not making any resolutions this year, that I'm going to have a central theme of organization that will govern the year (with a secondary theme of marketing myself as a singer and a teacher), but there are a few things that I'd like to do this year.

First of all, I have created reminders on the first and fifteenth of each month to write a blog entry. I think that my probably-excessive presence on social media has sapped me of finding things to write about, both in my own personal journal and here. So hopefully, these automatic reminders will get me back to doing what I intended to do, and writing about singing.

I realized that I didn't write about the most important thing I did this year, which was make my NYC debut in October. I was fortunate enough to be asked (through social media - which is one of the reasons I stay on it) to be on a tribute concert on the 25th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein's death. I was the only non-NYC person performing, and initially, I was only going to sing Madame Dilly's Carnegie Hall Pavane from On The Town, which really isn't much. But in the weeks leading up to it, my friend Lloyd Arriola put out the word that a couple of his mezzos bailed and did anyone want to pick up "Ohio," "We are Women" and "Some Other Time." I said, "Sure, I'll take the latter two!" and then found out 2 weeks before that Lloyd misunderstood and thought I was doing all 3. Fortunately, I've staged "Ohio" before for my studio recital, so I knew it pretty well.

It was a very successful performance - everyone was very good, and I made some new connections. But I did drop the ball on a couple of things afterwards.

A friend told me she'd talk to her agent about me. I haven't asked her about that. I need to.
There was an agent I was going to audition for in NYC in December. I didn't do that either. I felt overscheduled and just didn't get to it. Probably because I didn't have my materials organized.

So there's the organization thing again. If I had my materials ready to go - an up to date recording of myself, primarily - this would be a no-brainer. 

I also am not entirely pleased with my physical presence right now and want to get back to where I was in June 2013, when I was in really good shape. But I can't let that keep me from going forward.

A friend of mine told me she couldn't take voice lessons until she got her voice back in shape because she was too embarrassed to let a teacher hear her. I thought that was ridiculous until I realized I was doing the same thing in auditions and going to work out. I need to accept where I am right now and do what I can, when I can. Because time goes by so quickly and I can't waste any more of it.

I'll be back on the 15th with something coherent to say, I hope.

Shut up, inner voice

Yesterday I gave a lesson to a person I consider a peer. He is a pianist, singer, voice teacher, and music director in Baltimore, extremely well-respected. (Basically, he is the Baltimore equivalent of Milwaukee's Donna Kummer, right down to the law degree.) He has asked me for lessons a couple of times, and I have to admit it made me very nervous. I cancelled the first one, nearly a year ago, because I honestly was exhausted after a morning of rehearsals for O'er the Ramparts and didn't think I would be at my best. Since then, we just haven't been able to make the time work. So when he called me this time, I thought, okay, fine, let's do it. There were two reasons:

1. I am a good teacher and I have something to offer.
2. I really needed the money. It's been a lean summer.

But my inner voice was whispering, "Who do you think you are? He's a better pianist than you. He's more educated than you are. He might even be a better singer than you are. If you do badly, he'll tell everyone and then people will know that you really aren't very good."

For some odd reason, that voice has an Estonian accent. I don't know why. She whispers variations of this taunt in my head frequently. Most of the time, I keep her at bay, but once in awhile, she gets in my way. (Hey, that rhymed.) She has been known to keep me from trying new things, from taking risks, from living fully. Not as often as she used to, but she tries.

So when he came over, I admitted to him that I was a little nervous. And then I sat down behind the piano and that all disappeared. Because when I'm there, the little voice - oh, let's just call her "Renate," shall we? - has nothing to say. This is where I'm in my element, this is where I take control. The lesson was great. I had fun, he had fun, he paid me (yay!) and scheduled another lesson (double yay!).

And today I encountered another inner voice - this one had my own voice, or maybe it was that of art teachers in the past. I decided to try adult color books as a way of meditation. I've never been good at art. I can visualize what I want to do, I can come up with an idea, but when it comes time to create something within the visual arts, I ... suck. But the patterns, which were billed as "relaxing," were already created for me. All I have to do is to choose which one to start with, pick out the colors and go. I'm pretty good at decorating, so this should be a piece of cake.

So I did. I actually began it a couple of days ago. I started with the outside circle and did the outer ring first, got that far and called a day. Today I picked it up and decided to do a little more. And that's when the voice started.

"Why on earth did you choose black for the outline? That looks awful."
"That brown in the center boxes looks like mud. Why did you pick that?"
"The outer ring looks like band aids. Turquoise and blue band-aids. You suck at this."

I told the inner voice - we'll call her "Kristina" - to STFU and picked up an orange colored pencil and started to work on the center. Hey, that looks kind of cool. I really like that. I think I'll outline it with turquoise - oops, I went outside the lines. I'll just erase.... oh. There's no eraser. I can't erase it. I'll just continue. Maybe I'll fix it later. Just go. And it struck me that this is what I've been told - you can't be an artist and an editor/critic at the same time, whether that art is writing, drawing, singing, playing. You just have to create and fix what you can later, assuming it needs to be fixed.

And as I continued, Kristina shut up. I don't own coloring. I am not a master at it. Art is definitely outside my comfort zone. But when I was done, I was proud of it. There are things I'd change. I wouldn't use the black outline. That brown center doesn't really work with the turquoise and blue. But it's pretty. And maybe I'll get better at it. Or maybe I won't. No one will die if I don't become a better artist.

So here's the finished product. (Don't look too closely, okay?)

Getting better = having more fun

I saw this on Facebook this morning and it spoke to me. As most of my friends know, I was singing very little in Milwaukee for the last ten years that I was there. There just weren't that many opportunities for me, and it was very discouraging. When I sang at the Hal Leonard Publishers Showcase in 2012, I realized I still had something to give and really wanted to - no, I had to - give it. Plus I sang with some terrific singers, and I discovered how much I missed that. It made me step up my game so that I wouldn't be the weak link. (I know, that's my mom talking - "Everyone was good except you.")

My husband got the job offer in Baltimore in the middle of a total upstairs renovation. Most people were shocked that we were doing this at this point - except the tile guy on the project. He was a British guy who had been a session bass player in London. He told me that he wasn't all that good to begin with, but there was so much work available in the area that he got hired all the time, and as a result, he played with some people who were really good. That made him get better - so that he could keep up with people who ultimately became  his peers. (And then he fell in love with a girl in Milwaukee, had no one to play with and stopped playing the bass. So it wasn't just me!)


Since I've been here, I've felt better about myself as a singer and felt that I've gotten more respect as one.  And for however much time I have left as a singer, I'm not going to waste it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to practice some Rossini....

Singing Mindlessly/Scaring the Dog

This reminds me of sitting in my parents' house and doing lip trills w/o even knowing I was doing them, and my mother saying, "Are you cold? Do you need a sweater?" and I said, "No, mom, I'm fine." A little later, I did another one (again, unconsciously) and she said, "I can turn up the heat!" and I said, "No, I'm fine." Third time, I did it again, and she said, "I have a sweater if you're cold," and I said, "No, really, I'm fine." She said, "Why are you making that noise?" and I said, "It's a singer thing, I didn't even know I was doing it," and she said, "Well, stop it. You're scaring the dog."

It sounds like the young woman on the subway was making a conscious decision to vocalize publicly. Maybe she was on her way to an audition in a place where there were signs saying, "No vocalizing! Violators will be asked to leave!" (They exist.) Maybe she was ridiculously pleased with herself for being in NYC as a singer and wanted to share that with everyone. 

While I have made sounds publicly in inappropriate places (usually unconsciously) from time to time, they're usually limited to lip trills and puppy whimpers. I did vocalize walking down a street once on my way to an audition because I was in a hurry, it was noisy anyway, and I figured I wasn't standing still long enough for anyone to tell me to stop. (Kind of like why I run on the street instead of on the treadmill - because my swearing under my breath in a fixed place would be taken much less kindly than the same down a street while there's traffic noise that could possibly drown it out. Or at least I'm going fast enough for someone to say to himself, "Did she just say what I think she said?")

One thing I can say is that singing on the street in NYC, even if it's just lip trills and humming, will make a lot less heads turn than if you do the same in Milwaukee. Trust me on this.

Revisiting Chiaroscuro

I just got home from Philadelphia, a city to which I had never been before. One of the highlights of our mini-vacation was a trip to the beautiful Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was featuring an impressionism exhibition. I've always loved impressionist art, and this exhibit was particularly gorgeous.

One painting that caught my eye was Renoir's "Peonies." Renoir is usually known for his nudes and for pictures of people - I haven't seen that many of his still lifes. This painting reminded me of the blog I wrote several years ago in response to a performance given by a student of mine who had worked for months on the song "Astonishing," a long song from Little Women that requires layers of mood and the ability to switch vocal colors to match the journey that Jo is taking. The student and I spent months on it, only to have her director tell her, the night before the performance, that she wanted her to belt it all the way through, and, in fact, if she couldn't hit the high note (an e-flat) in a full, hard, no-mix belt, that she should just sing a different note. Which she did. It completely undermined our work together and showed a lack of respect from a colleague that, in all honestly, had a great deal to do with why I left Milwaukee. (But that's another story.)

I feel that what we had tried to get (and had succeeded!) in the three months leading up to the performance was akin to Renoir's painting duplicated below - a vase of flowers that are all in the same color family, but are not all one color.  Not only are there red flowers, but there are other colors, there is light, and there is shadow. The impressionists discovered that shadow was not brown or black, as had been commonly shown in paintings, but rather a reflection of the colors in the surrounding objects. A song shouldn't be all one color, or simply black and white, but reflect what is all around it. The text, the emotion, what has happened in the story and what is yet to happen. Having that palette of colors and the ability to draw upon them is what allows the artist to create and serve his/her art.

Strive for finding the colors within as you seek the right way to sing a song.  Those colors may change, depending on your perspective. Monet and Renoir set up easels at the same location and painted the same scenes, side-by-side - but the pictures are not the same (La Grenouillère, 1869). Each found a different way to interpret the same view.

*Caveat: I do not blame the singer for her decision to throw out all the work we'd done - she was under a great deal of pressure from an extremely intimidating director - who was an excellent stage director and choreographer, but was not knowledgeable of vocal training.*

Why I - self-care

This has nothing to do with singing but it just annoyed me this morning in a post on someone else's wall. This is my response.

If you think that I am not authentic because

1. I wear makeup.
2. I get my hair done. Cut and colored. 
3. I get my eyelashes done.
4. I may or may not have done injectables in the past and would do them again if I had the money. Assuming I've done them in the past. 
5. I like clothes that fit me well, are comfortable AND make me feel attractive.
6. I work out to feel and look better. Not as much as I'd like to or should but I do.

If you think any of these make me phony or superficial or less authentic than you are, then YOU DON'T KNOW ME.

And don't you dare suggest that I'm deceiving myself if I can take care of myself in the way that I like and also be a vital, creative, and damn powerful force of nature.

There.