Passion & Planning

Wherever you may be right now in your training or professional life, I invite you to take a long, leisurely moment to visualize how you would like your career, artistry and lifestyle to evolve over the next year or decade. 

If you're like many of my colleagues and students, you are being neither as wildly outrageous nor as stone-cold practical as you'll need to be to fully realize your dreams.

I recently had intense discussions with two extremely gifted, committed young sopranos in my studio about their career prospects. Both wanted my opinion of what was viable for them as well as practical advice for pursuing it. But at least at first, neither was able to articulate a clear vision of what they wanted. 

I'll talk more about the specifics of these discussions in my next post, but I feel that it's important to first make this assertion: By far the most important thing you can do for your own career, artistry, and your very soul, is to give yourself completely unfettered permission to fantasize and allow yourself to become passionately swept up in your own vision. 

Viability and logistics are relatively minor concerns in comparison with the potential impact of your own dreams. I do not suggest for a moment that they are not important, but there are very few viability or logistical issues that are insurmountable in the face of a fierce personal vision. A strong enough commitment to your creative and professional aspirations will motivate you to triumph over the challenges and obstacles you encounter along the way. 

However, it can be very difficult to create and sustain a healthy relationship between one's dreams and the practical requirements for realizing them. This is because even when our educational institutions do a superb job of providing vocal and musicianship training, they fail miserably on two counts:
1. They set up a paradigm whereby you're constantly and obsessively seeking outside validation rather than receiving support for your own vision. Students are continually being graded, evaluated, handed new hoops to jump through, and compelled to audition against each other for a very limited number of performance opportunities. This encourages craving for faculty and opera department approval, focusing on how to please everyone, and viewing fellow students as the competition. Maybe you're lucky enough to have a teacher or a coach who is primarily interested in helping you to express yourself better, but they're still going to have to get you through juries with a passing grade even when that means learning lots of repertoire when what you really need is to rebuild your technique from the ground up. Yes: it is crucial that singers cultivate a merciless perspective on how they measure up to professional standards. But this is in no way incompatible with fostering individual passion for expression! By rewarding technical competence and continually comparing singers with one another, rather than showcasing what is unique and special about each, schools and conservatories fail to nurture their students' passion for the art.

2. They provide next to nothing in terms of practical career development and support. At best, they steer you towards the next educational milestone (young artist programs, grad schools) and give you basic audition preparation. But they rarely explain how to request a mainstage opera audition, pursue other performance opportunities, seek management, or go into the details of the various administrative skills you will need to keep it together.

Thus every year we graduate a newly minted population of highly skilled but completely freaked out young singers who spill onto the scene with their creative instincts hobbled, hoping someone will evaluate them as "good enough" but no idea how to actually find work. 

This is not a good business plan!

Here's an idea for coming up with a better one: 

• Your creative vision is your product.
• Your performance career is the business you open in order to sell it.

 

With very few exceptions, a professional singing career means being a self-employed freelance musician. You ARE a small business. You have to craft your brand; pursue short-term jobs; handle correspondence; publicize your work; evaluate areas that need improvement and strategies for achieving it; and create short- and long- term plans to ensure the realization of the things I asked you to visualize in the first line of this post. If you're fortunate, along the way you will acquire a manager, a publicist, and accountant who will give you a hand with some of these chores, but you're still the CEO of your small business - you'll always be the one responsible for its success and continued growth. 

 

Comments

[Invisible Oranges]

Great food for thought as always, Claudia! Dreaming big does get harder as one ages.

[Jeanronald]

Of course, you rock, my Dear! An excellent post!