Dreary days

There's been a fair amount of radio silence in these parts lately. Perhaps I have been very busy, you may think. But, alas, I have no particularly good excuse for overlooking my scrapbook. In fact, it has been my relative absence of activity that has been the real culprit.

I am currently in between projects - or perhaps more appropriately, objectives. Having recently finished a round of auditions, I have not quite started working on my next venture. And, although I continue to have plans of what I want to achieve in my practice and in lessons or coachings, I've had a hard time mustering up the driving force to execute them this past week. I work; I analyze. But the better part of me is not quite there.

Ennui by Walter Richard Sickert, ca. 1914, Tate Collection.

It's a disappointing place to be in: At some point in their development, musicians learn to practice. Something shifts in our approach, understanding and/or capacities that transforms the chore we used to have to do because of external forces (a watchful parent, the threats of a teacher, an approaching concert) into an interesting opportunity to explore. Practicing becomes not simply a hateful means to more glorious endeavors, but an attractive end unto itself (at least some days). I myself have only found the confidence to truly enjoy working alone within the past two or three years. I used to be terrified that I wouldn't manage to recreate any of the sounds that I had achieved in lessons or, worse still, that I would botch my hard-earned new skills by practicing improperly. But, as basic technique became easier and even automatic, I realized I could not only practice as a means of staving off technical decay but as a way to progress on my own terms. I could trust myself to dig into the puzzle unsupervised.

Practice sessions that are focused and productive are energizing and exciting. The importance of a session's concrete goals (mastering a tricky passage, learning a piece, etc...) may even become secondary to the engrossing act of doing - creating and expanding in the moment. On the other hand, too many lackluster sessions are disheartening indeed. You can't help but wonder if you really enjoy what you're doing at all, what the point is.

Of course, this is normal, and in any field of interest or work. There are bound to be humdrum days. But there are also exhilarating days, assuming you are following a path you really do love (I recognize not everyone is in that comfy boat, unfortunately). Maybe you need to shift something in your approach. Maybe you need some form of new, external inspiration. Or maybe you just need to wait it out. As for my own enthusiasm troubles, I'm not too particularly worried - after all, there are flowers starting to appear in Prospect Park.

What am I doing here?

I was waiting at an audition last Saturday when an unfamiliarly enlightened thought struck me: I was not viewing the other singers around me as competition to be feared and loathed. I could hear snatches of warm-ups and last minute rehearsals from the practice rooms, and from these it was clear that the vocal caliber was quite high. But this didn’t throw me into a panic; I didn’t have the compulsion to compare my own shortcomings to these anonymous sounds. Instead, they reassured me of my worth: since we had already gone through a prescreening round, all the singers around me had been in some way selected to audition. Including me. “If the others are impressive,” I thought, “I must be as well, in some capacity.” I felt like an insider, and I felt flattered.

This isn’t usually the situation at an audition, when tension runs high. Moreover, most audition situations are not callbacks or invitation-based exams: in a general “cattle call,” it is exponentially more difficult to feel loved and wanted. (Except perhaps for the consummate egomaniac, but that’s not really the way to go either.) I realize I won’t have the luxury of feeling so cared for at every interview and audition, but it doesn’t mean I cannot synthesize a comfortable atmosphere through my perception of the situation and, more importantly, of myself in it.

via Skandalon

Ideally, we would not need so much comparative input from those around us, being able instead to have an inherent feeling of self-worth. Realistically, however, in a world and a career path where progress is an idée fixe, one person’s worth is constantly placed on a scale with his competition. An audition is not, ultimately, about finding the perfect singer, it means finding the best singer in a given group – so the comparison to others is that much more on candidates’ minds. That’s fine, and necessary, to some extent. It’s also helpful to track one’s own progress with the general level of others more or less in the same boat.

But drawing comparison, and the natural longing for a competitive edge, cannot become a debilitating loss of sense of self. Self-esteem means in part self-knowledge. It means knowing that you are your own working organism, rather than an entirely relative shadow of those around you.

via colormewithchaos

As I’m seeing, it gets easier with age – or rather, with maturity. It also gets easier with experience and a basic list of accomplishments that serve as a stabilizing base. Without these applicable “successes” – concerts, awards, even simple praise – it’s hard to shape a visible form out of the general mass of potential talent and practice hours. In much the same way as children have to develop a sense of their personalities, singers, and other career-people, have to create themselves over time. A balance must be struck between the developing internalized and externally-fueled senses of self.

Focus

The scene: The airport, Air Canada terminal, ten o’clock. I am about to enter the security queue when a terrible realization flashes before me: I’ve left my plastic ziplock bag of liquids and creams on the table by the door at home. (You know, so that I would be sure not to forget it…) At this point, you might ask, “Why is this such a tragedy, Sophie? Surely you can buy makeup and travel-size toothpaste in Montreal?” On this point, you are not mistaken: While a minor inconvenience, the need to purchase emergency audition makeup is certainly not earth shattering. But! I need contact lenses – contacts I am not currently wearing, and contacts I will need to be wearing for my audition. My heart sinks.

A representation of my troubled mien; my large glasses.

Of course, there is no written rule that says I cannot wear glasses while singing, but I would certainly prefer the third of my face that is obstructed from view by my bulky frames to be visible to my audience. Let us call it an unwritten rule, then. Nor am I integrally blind without contacts – I surely won’t be able to recognize any faces, but I probably won’t run into the wall, either. (Probably…) So why can’t I simply go in blurry-eyed?

Focus: when I cannot focus literally, I have a considerably harder time focusing in any other capacity. This was made excruciatingly clear to me last year during a studio class (wherein a teacher’s students attend and sing in an intra-studio masterclass). I went up to sing a relatively fresh piece, was asked to remove my glasses for expressive purposes, and felt immediately out of my element. Not only was the visual world blurry around me, the music sounded more unfamiliar. I struggled with the simple task of counting the beats; I couldn’t remember the words in advance. I was swimming through an aria I had already sung from memory earlier that day.

via pvks

Focus is a keystone to performing – on stage, as well as in any other field (how many books, coaches, and courses are dedicated to finding focus in sports, or business, etc…?) – and it is something that everyone is concerned with finding, refining, or keeping. It is not the same thing as thinking. Often, in fact, we (we singers, and we humans) are told to stop thinking and start doing. Because this is what performance is: the result of months or years of thinking, analyzing and practice come to a head in an instant of action. Concentration funnels all this training. The paradox is that the more focused we are, the more we are able to let ourselves go. It allows actors on stage to be simultaneously desensitized enough to the outside not to be taken aback by disruptions and aware of their surroundings enough to improvise when things go awry. But without focus (and previous, hard work!) you are simply left trying to think and process very fast. In certain cases it works, or at least well enough. But a performance is not about letting others in on the odds and ends of your work process; it is about sublimating these into something greater.

For the sake of our subject matter, let us get back on track. How does my woeful story of missing contacts pan out, you ask? Do I muster up the courage to go in blind? No: I arrive in Montreal, and with a bit of digging and a bit of luck, I come across an office that will fill my prescription without a new eye exam. So my odyssey comes perhaps to an overly neat end, but one that I certainly prefer!

Ritual, or "Fear does not prevent danger"

We all have our little rituals – this is certainly true of singers, whose live performances leave the door open to possible chaos. As I am currently in the thick of auditions, this fact is particularly apparent to me. Auditions are a vulnerable time, and it feels like any bit of extra snatched luck is imperative. So I have my rituals. In reality, of course, their good lies more in the comfort and confidence that “doing things right” imparts than in their power to stroke the Fates in the right direction, but this is not always easy to keep in mind.

via divinehood

The line between comforting superstition and functional necessity is a blurry one, and changes from person to person. Numerous are the accumulated dogmas of singers in “performance mode.” “A” swears that she cannot possibly eat tomatoes; “B” must have steak before a concert. A general list of rules for physical fitness is hard to determine, as each singer has a different relationship to his body, and each body reacts differently to foods or climates. So, the hard-held beliefs of singers are a constantly evolving list of discoveries. A young singer is told by teachers and peers what to do and not to do; over time, through trial and error, he comes up with his own list. Ultimately, which items are physical requirements, and which are purely psychological, is a tricky conclusion to draw…

Creature comforts: ubiquitous cardigan and scarf; music binder and practice log; emergency makeup and hairpins; water bottle; music.

As I have matured vocally and, more importantly, technically, I have pared down the members of my security blanket armada. When once the act of singing seemed like a high-wire act necessitating that all the elements of the universe converge in my favor, I am able now to rely more on the physical certainty of my body and my technique. I need fewer rules, and fewer rituals. I am less afraid of being sick: if I can sing without pain, so be it; if I cannot, I realize I will simply have to wait. I also do not adhere to any particular forbidden foods lists. In fact, most of my little rituals (because they certainly do exist) are not about fearfully avoidingperceived harms as if they were evil omens. Instead, they center on activities that make me feel more energetic, focused and at ease. But, lest I seem sickeningly pragmatic, I will admit two of my favorite irrational talismans: 1) I still hold my breath in cars when driving through tunnels, happily paying respects to this childhood relic of superstition. 2) I still love to hear my mother tell me “La peur n’évite pas le danger” (“Fear does not prevent danger”), which, although not a particularly helpful mantra, always brings a soothing surge of familiarity to my nerves.