Frustration! April 23, 2009

It is 2:30 in the morning, and I have a recital in 17 hours. I cannot sleep!!! I didn’t think I was nervous, but aparently I was wrong. So frustrating! So right now I’m drinking a rum & coke (heavy on the rum), hoping the alcohol in it knocks me out.

So my second semester of my master’s degree is almost over. I entered two different competitions this semester and didn’t place in either one. That was disappointing. But I did make it into the summer program I applied for, so that is good. It’s a program specifically geared toward improving stage performance, which I need immensely.

I’ve also been guaranteed a role in our spring opera production at my school, although the opera we’ll be doing is still up in the air. The latest idea that’s been kicked around is Donizetti’s L’elisir d’Amore, which I really hope we do, because I will get the role of Adina, which I am dying to sing! It’s my favorite opera!

Whoa! Really starting to feel that rum… Time to try to catch some Z’s!

Back to School January 23, 2009

Week one of seventeen. Check!

The first week of a semester is always stressful. You get umpteen syllabi, all listing each professor’s seemingly unreasonable demands. Requirements, assignments, exams… They all get piled on top of you until you feel you will burst and want to scream at your professors, “Do you honestly think this is the only class I have!?!”

I must admit that I only had a mild case of that sentiment this week. There were moments, like when I got my vocal pedagogy syllabus, with yet another research paper required, that I wanted to drop everything and cry. Or rather, I would have cried if I were a crying sort of person. I’m not. I tend to think this is a very good thing at times. All in all, though, this hasn’t been a bad week. Of course classes didn’t start until Wednesday, so I still haven’t had my theory class (which I’m determined NOT to stress out about), and I had to cancel lessons on Thursday because of a less-than-wonderful mandatory meeting about my TA position. Next week will be my first full week, with everything but my performance ensemble. (Note to self: Meet with faculty advisor and other members of this ensemble to iron out details.) There is never an end to the “stuff” that has to get done.

Why can’t a degree in performance just be about the performance? That would be nice. Of course I totally understand the need for language, research and history classes… But I am not thrilled about having to take theory again. I am not thrilled about doing research, but at some level I enjoy it. The college is holding a Graduate Research Symposium in May. I am hoping to present a paper on vocal pedagogy. I’ve been researching Cornelius Reid, who is an interesting character. His theories are controversial, which is probably why I find him interesting. I had originally hoped to do a comparative study of Reid and Richard Miller, who are two of the most prominent American vocal pedagogues of our time, but it turned out to be much too broad a topic. Maybe for my doctorate… If I go that far.

Back in the Saddle Again January 7, 2009

This break has been long. I haven’t really been bored… I’ve had plenty to keep me busy (cleaning/organizing my apartment, planning for my 15 voice students, planning for the music appreciation class that I’ll be teaching, getting started on learning the hour-and-a-half worth of music I have to sing this semester, etc.), but I was still very glad when campus opened back up on Monday. It’s still a ghost town, but the buildings are open, the library is back up and running, and I don’t have to spend my days holed up in my apartment. I’m a bit worried about what this next comment might say about me… I realized recently that my office at school feels more like my “home” than my apartment does. So far today I’ve spent almost four hours in my office, most of that time getting work done on the above mentioned projects, and I plan to spend another couple hours. My only annoyance at the moment is that the practice rooms are locked for some stupid reason and I don’t have a key.

Next week I will start teaching lessons again. I have 15 students this semester. Yikes! That has made it difficult to find music enough for all of them (without doubling them up on literature). I am excited, though… I convinced the department head to move their “master class” to Tuesdays, so I can be there. The idea is that  will be able to (at least partially) take over the master classes and hopefully have time to start teaching them some IPA. It makes sense, since I teach two thirds of the voice majors. I’m also hoping to do an opera scenes class with them in the fall.

I was planning a recital for this semester at COS (where I teach lessons), but it has had to be cancelled. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I was really looking forward to it, but on the other hand, it’s a relief that I don’t have to worry about it. I still have to learn a ton of music. I just have a little bit longer until I have to have it all performance ready.

Oh, well… I am happy to be back at school, even if classes haven’t started yet. I know I’ll be incredibly stressed out once they do. For now it’s nice to be here and be able to get work done without feeling like a crazy person because of looming due dates.

filling in the gap December 5, 2008

Wow! It’s been a really long time since I posted. I have been super busy with school and work… The semester is almost over. After this weekend I will feel like I’m home free. I have a couple tests, one paper, and a song exam in the next two weeks. This weekend, though, I am singing Messiah. Last night was our dress rehearsal. I was annoyed. The made all of the soloists get there at 6:45, but didn’t have us sing until at least 8. Then the orchestra insisted that they had to go home at exactly 9:45. I didn’t even get to go through two of my solos with them. I was annoyed. Yeah, it was the paid orchestra (that lives locally) that had to get home, not the unpaid soloists who still had to drive an hour to get home. Grr.

The semester (thank God it’s almost done!) has been good, but really busy. I’ve been trying to get used to just being on stage again. That’s been interesting. My opera workshop performance was a couple weeks ago. It went well, but it was not an entirely fantastic experience. The director (Prof. dJ) wasn’t all that helpful to those, like myself, who were new to it, and when she was giving notes at rehearsals she could be really sarcastic and rude. So I’m trying to put together a chamber music group so that I don’t have to be in opera workshop next semester. If it flies it will be really fun. It will be me and two guitarists. I’ve found some really fun music for soprano and guitar, so I’m really excited about it. Next year my voice teacher, T, is taking over opera workshop, so I’m going to be in it then, but for now I’m going to try to avoid Prof. dJ.

Teaching has been going well, too. Most of my students are really great. I do have a couple of flakes, one of whom I’m going to ask to find a different teacher next semester. He’s lazy and doesn’t think he needs to show up to his lessons. He’s got another thing coming when he gets his grade.

I got to see La Bohème twice this semester – once in Fresno and once in San Francisco. In San Francisco Mimi was sung by Angela Gheorghiu. Where I was sitting it was hard to hear, but she was still awesome.

Go all out September 17, 2008

Something my voice teacher, Tony, said in my lesson on Monday is stuck in my head, and I keep thinking about it… He asked me if I’ve ever really gone for broke… just gone all out. I realized that I really haven’t. I’ve never really given my all to anything. I’m very careful, very cautious. In some things that’s good, but I’m realizing it’s not so great when it comes to music.

Tony was laughing at me last week… He was trying to get me to make ugly, “unfinished” sounds, but I couldn’t do it. He said all day long he’d been trying to get bad singers to sound good, and with me he couldn’t get a good singer to sound bad. He and Hatem (the amazing accompanist) keep saying that my ear is impeccable, but I’m TOO precise. I’m too careful. Grrr… Do you have any idea how hard a habit that is to break???

Trust the teacher. Trust the throat. Stop worrying about how you sound.

How does one do that?

Friends are good August 27, 2008

Tonight I had two new friends over for dinner. It was such a great time! We just sat and ate and talked and it was just so nice to have a conversation with like-minded people (meaning musicians). Not that we talked about music the whole time, but it was nice to be able to at all. I have felt rather isolated the last few years, with all of my musician friends being scattered. Even though we talk every once in a while and visit each other occasionally… It’s just not the same.

Anyhow… My lessons are going VERY well! Today I did something well in my lesson, and I’ve forgotten what exactly Tony said, but he just had this really huge smile on his face and he got all excited about it. And of course then I tried it again and it wasn’t quite as good, but there is definitely progress. He finally let me sing actual music today instead of just exercises, which was a relief. And now he wants me to perform it next week. Luckily te aria is Porgi amor from Figaro, so it’s familiar and not very long, which makes it easier.

The process Tony is taking with me is interesting to me. He’s taking my sound and breaking it down into it’s basic elements, such as head voice and chest voice… He isolates them, then brings them back together, and somehow it’s really helping to balance my voice out, and it’s making my high notes much easier to sing. He’s also very specific in my lessons about what he’s trying to accomplish and what I need to work on, which I love.

My diction class is SO fun! Sometimes I wonder, though, what must go through peoples’ minds as they walk past our classroom and hear us all chanting “boo, poo, boo, poo” or lists of seemingly random words, like “agree, affair, offend, jewel, variety, sofa, ago, coma.” It’s gotta sound really odd. We laugh a lot in that class.

Tomorrow is Bibliography & Research Methods. I hear it’s a horrible, but very valuable class. I’m not really looking forward to it.

Like Riding a Bike… August 18, 2008

I just got home from my first voice lesson with my new teacher. Wow! I have so many ideas rumbling around in my little head right now… He had me playing with falsetto (I’ve always thought women didn’t have falsetto) and straight tone and singing as quietly as I could and crescendoing and sliding… He had me trying things that I never would have thought of, but they worked. I was able to sing up to a high Eb without any strain, whereas for the past couple of years I’ve been struggling to sing A’s and B’s well. Craziness!

I said previously that I wished I had chosen to study at a bigger school, but I’m not so sure now. If this one lesson is any indication of how the next two years will go, I think I will be happy with this school, if only for my lessons.

Two things really surprised me during my lesson, technical issues aside. 1) He asked me NOT to practice. What?! He asked me to trust him with my voice. I can learn my music, but he asked me to mark while I sing. Interesting. But I’m willing to try it. 2) He seriously asked me if I am sure I want to teach. He said that he really likes my voice and thinks it may have professional possibilities. I was shocked. I’ve been told before that I have a good voice, but not that I could actually be a “real” singer.

Interesting. Good day. A half hour well spent. I’m looking forward to my next lesson.

Horrible, Ungrateful Musician Am I July 4, 2008

I must admit that lately I have been rather uninspired. I suppose a lot of that came from the emotional rollercoaster I was on with my grandpa passing, but as I think back I realize it started before that. It’s kinda funny how we sometimes go through cycles like that. Or maybe it’s just me. I will be really excited about something and then not care at all, and all the shades in between. Maybe I’m just fickle.

A good friend of mine (I’ll call her Clara, for Clarinetist)  just started taking lessons again. (As a side note, when my mother heard about it she asked, “Why does she need to take lessons anymore? She’s already got a master’s degree in clarinet.” Oh, my uninitiated mother, you just don’t understand.) And she’s been really enjoying it. Talking with her this week I got back a little of my enthusiasm. Well, actually at first she made me feel guilty. Here I am trying to get ready for grad school, which I’ll start in about a month and a half, and I hadn’t practiced in at least 3 weeks and I’d totally slacked on studying for my entrance exams.

Clara, my clarinet playing buddy, posted on LiveJournal about how much she’d practiced one day, so I, feeling like a sluggard and a horrible, ungrateful musician, trudged off to church, where I can practice without interruptions, prying ears, or complaining neighbors. I can’t say that I’ve done a lot of practicing this week, but I am looking forward to spending some quality time with my arias this weekend.

As far as my studying goes, I have been accused of being an overachiever at times, and I think some of my friends, including as Clara, are convinced that I’m worrying too much about my exams. Unfortunately I feel like I have forgotten EVERYTHING I ever learned in music history or music theory, so if I don’t study like mad I will be so nervous going into the darn things that I’ll do poorly simply because I won’t be able to concentrate because of my nerves. I always have kind of laughed at my grandma for being a “worry wart,” but I am coming to realize that she’s not the only one in the family.

So I’m going through the Grout/Palisca History of Western Music textbook, which I’m finding is a much better textbook than the one we used in undergrad (Stolba’s Development of Western Music). It also helps that I’ve got the anthology and study guide that go along with it.

I also had great intentions to get through several vocal pedagogy books this summer, including two Richard Miller books. If you have read any Richard Miller you should know that trying to get through two of his books (and understand them) is not a “light” affair. He tends to be incredibly technical. When I first got his Training Soprano Voices about 4 years ago, it took me several tries and quite a bit of my limited brainpower to figure out what he was saying. Now when he talks about appoggio, la lotta vocale, or the “expansion of the lateral abdominal and low dorsal walls of the torso” I understand what he is saying, but back then it was all gibberish to me.

Anyhow… All that to say I have a lot of work to do in the next month and a half. I don’t know if I’ll get it done, but I’ll try.

I think I’ll put in an opera tonight… I watched L’elisir d’Amore yesterday (love it!), so maybe tonight I’ll watch La fille du regiment. I never did finish that one.

Hello world! May 24, 2008

Well, this is my first post on this blog. I’m not quite sure what is going to go into this blog or how diligent I’ll be about keeping it updated.

I am in my late 20’s, a soprano, and about to start my master’s degree in vocal performance at a nearby state school. (Yes, I’m keeping this ambiguous on purpose.) I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t plan better so I could be going to a better school, but I have started the process so many times and then given up for various reasons that I just wanted to get in somewhere and get started. I was fairly certain that I’d get into this school, and it didn’t require incurring major travel expenses, so I applied, auditioned, took my GRE (which I did surprisingly well on), battled the inevitable lost paperwork issues, and now I’m all set to begin in August. I’m excited.

I got my BA in music ed a few years ago. By my last year I knew I wanted to go the performance route, but I knew I had some deficiencies, and I hadn’t planned well, so I planned to take a year off of school to take some language courses at the local junior college, get more lessons, give another recital, etc. Well, at the end of the summer, literally like two weeks before the semester started (I’d actually already started my language courses at the jc), I decided to ditch that for a teaching credential. I listened to my mom too much. She wanted me to be practical. And while I admit, at face value it sounds more practical to get a credential and teach in a high school, but if it’s not in your heart, it’s not very practical.

So I dropped my classes at the jc and enrolled at a university to get my credential. It started out really good. I enjoyed my classes, for the most part, although some of them really didn’t apply to teaching music. I even enjoyed student teaching for the first few weeks. Then I had a week from hell. I don’t remember what happened. I just remember how depressed and drained it made me, and I never recovered from that. I seriously considered dropping out. I didn’t, though, and I was miserable for the rest of the semester.

After I finished with that I moved back home with my parents. Yay me… 25 and living at home with mom and step-dad. (I’m actually doing that again for a few months while I wait to move for school.) I tried being a secretary for a while, but I was so bored, I just couldn’t handle it! I ended up subbing. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I hate subbing.

I finally got fed up with the holding pattern my life seemed to be in, so I decided to go for grad school. Instead of looking around for a really great school, I settled on the closest one and applied there. It’ll be ok. There are actually a lot of oportunites for me. I’m excited to get started.

Anyhow… I’ve gotta go get ready to give my grandpa a ride to the store. I’ll post more later.

~wannabe