Why being a singer can suck

When a pianist gets a cold, they can still play (although I did witness a young woman's nose drip onto the keys during her senior recital).

When a violinist gets a cough, he can still play.

When a percussionist - or a brass player, or a woodwind player - gets a sore throat, he can still play.

All these people might be miserable while doing so, but they can still do their job. And depending on the severity of their illness, no one might know they're sick by looking at them.

When a singer gets a cold, all bets are off. We can't teach, we can't perform, we can't practice (yes, we can practice mentally, which is something, but it's small comfort when you have an audition or a performance coming up). All we can do is blow our noses, cough, suck on cough drops, and lose money.

This. Sucks.

I write this from my sick bed. On Saturday morning, I woke up with chest congestion and a slight cough. "What's this?" I thought. "I haven't had any symptoms, and this thing - which feels like bronchitis - is not the usual way I get sick. Perhaps it's a short term thing." It wasn't.

My usual bouts of URIs go like this:

36 hours of a really sore throat (during which I can't sing)
72 hours of a raging head cold, the first 36 of which I can sing, although I sound hyponasal, and the last 36 hours of which I begin coughing and all singing is out of the question.
2000 hours of bronchitis, which began during the last 12 hours of the head cold. That number may be a slight exaggeration.

This was backwards. I started with bronchitis - on church on Sunday, I arrived at choir to find that my voice was cracking and dry sounding, despite no real sore throat and no significant coughing. I got through it by holding off on the unison singing and saving myself for the anthem and parts on the hymns.

By Monday night, the head cold started, and it's still raging, 3 days later. I had to cancel everyone for T/W/Th, and I was going to go to the Voice Foundation in Philly on Friday (good thing I hadn't registered or bought my bus ticket yet).

The good news is that I have no performances till next weekend (Choral Shabbat Friday, cantoring Sunday) and no auditions till the 18th (Baltimore Theater Alliance), for which I know my material backwards and forwards. It could be worse. It was worse when I got sick like this opening weekend of Man of La Mancha, although that followed the usual progression, and I managed to get through my performances, although not up to my own personal standards.

And there is nothing I can do about this except rest. And cough. And wish I had taken up the marimba.

RIP, Reynaldo Reyes

My husband's piano teacher at Towson University passed away last night. I only met Reynaldo Reyes a handful of times - a few years ago when we came to visit Baltimore and stopped in at his office and Bill introduced me to him, 2 years ago at a recital given by his piano trio, and a little less than a year ago, at his retirement recital and celebration. His musicianship was stellar - I did not have the opportunity to hear him at the peak of his performing career, but the strength and intensity of his playing in the two performances I did see were extremely impressive.  At last year's event, I was struck by the glowing accolades given by his former students and colleagues of his pedagogical brilliance. I wish I had blogged while the insights from that event were still fresh in my mind. I might have journaled them somewhere, but I don't use paper journals anymore. (My journal app has a password and no one has it but me, so if I die suddenly, no one will read any of my secrets or whatever vitriol I may have directed on any particular day.) If I find my notes or suddenly have a vivid recollection of what impressed me the most that day, it will be fodder for another blog entry.

I don't want to make this about ME and say, "I hope my students will speak like that about me when I'm done teaching," because I wrote an obituary about Alfredo Kraus once for Classical Singer magazine, and a very self-indulgent and famous mezzo I contacted to ask for her insights said pretty much that and it struck me as "It's not about YOU, lady!" But at the same time, I do hope that I can have even half the impact on my students, personally and professionally, that Reynaldo Reyes had on his students, from my husband and his peers to his most recent charges, including Will Zellhoffer, who will begin his collegiate collaborative piano studies in the fall at Goucher. (Hopefully Will will be my studio pianist in the future - I'm kind of grooming him to be the Baltimore equivalent of Ryan Cappleman.)

My husband hasn't talked much about his feelings since he got the message that Professor Reyes had passed away last night. He did get to visit him in hospice the day before, so he was able to say goodbye to him. I know that Reynaldo Reyes was a significant influence in his life and many other lives and that he will be missed.

What cabaret means to me

This weekend, I was part of a cabaret performance entitled LoveSICK at An Die Musik on Charles Street in Baltimore. The theme of the show was dysfunctional love songs - whether the songs were inherently dysfunctional or we just performed them with a twist (and believe me, some of them were quite twisted) - and I sang them with Dyana Neal, Steven Lampredi, Jim Knost, and Sean Powell, who also served (brilliantly) as our pianist. We had a full house of wonderful, appreciative folks and it was a great place to sing!


What I like about cabaret is the avenue for self-expression it provides. It's not about being background music, singing songs for people drinking and talking at private tables who really don't care what you're doing. In fact, I will split with the traditional definition that the audience has to be seated at individual tables for it to be considered a cabaret and not a concert. Maybe the former setting is a cabaret setting, but I think cabaret can exist as a genre that is not defined by its setting.


I just read an article that said cabaret "is an overlapping group of constantly mutating forms of performance that can’t be pinned down." It is also referred to "transgressive, upending everyday ideas about art and bodies, politics and sex, provoking as well as pleasing. It loves you but sometimes it likes to see you squirm." This goes along with my friend Michael Tan's post after our show as, "I laughed, I cried, I was scared, it became a part of me." THAT's what cabaret should do. Be funny, be vulnerable, be sexy, be challenging. And I want to do more of it. Here and elsewhere. NYC, Chicago, wherever. 

And maybe next year we'll do another version of LoveSICK. LoveSICKER? LoveSICK, the Relapse? (That last one was Dyana's suggestion - I kind of like LoveSICKER.)

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....