Overcoached and Underpracticed.

Hello, fair Stinkers. It's been a long time. As usual, I became a useless entity in all aspects other than being at rehearsal (even when I was not, in fact, in rehearsal myself, but was rather sitting at home, waiting for hubby to come home from rehearsal) during production. This time, it was Mozart's Magic Flute, which really gives me no excuse. I was in 4 scenes. I did look pretty friggin' badass while I was in them, though:

and this badassedness permeated the rest of my life, and made me unable to do anything so civilized as write.

Ergo, I have written a short novel to make up for temps perdu.


I did manage to get a lot of other music together, and am now at the point of trying to get it nice and presentable for public consumption, which brings me to the topic of today's post. This is my thesis, and it is true: all singers are very very overcoached on the one end, and very very underpracticed on the other end, and fall into a sort of generalized, confused middle in performance. Myself included.

Unlike pretty much every instrument of the western classical tradition, singers have almost no solo music written for them. "What are you talking about, you crazy egotistical opera lady?!?!?!?" I am talking about solo music. Music you can make, in its entirety, by yourself; alone in a practice room, the way it could potentially be made on stage in front of thousands of people. There is no equivalent for the singer of western classical music. Whatever we do as we approach a piece in the practice room is a vague, incomplete sketch of the musical reality that will eventually make it to an audience, and it's this journey I'm interested in examining: from singer, to singer plus (usually) pianist, to singer plus pianist plus teacher, to singer plus pianist plus teacher plus coach(es), to singer plus pianist plus coach plus pianist's teacher, to singer plus pianist plus...holy lord we are NEVER GOING TO GET TO THE AUDIENCE!

*ahem* (For the sake of this post, I'm not going to get into the orchestra variable, largely because we spend so little time actually singing with them, compared to the vast amounts of time spent working with piano leading up to those four or five performances, not to mention auditions, coachings, lessons, recitals, etc.)

I am all about preparation, and the healthy exchange of ideas, and brainstorming, and all that good shit. I love it. I love encountering experts in my field and getting nuggets of golden wisdom from them. But if you think anyone other than a classical singer has ever walked onto a stage with more of other people's ideas in their heads than their own, I would have to call you just plain crazy. I ain't sayin' don't listen. And I ain't saying don't collaborate. If anything, I'm sayin' collaborate for real. Collaborate with people your age, and argue with them. You may, like I did just today, argue a point only to hear yourself on the recording proven wrong by your own ability, but that is a lesson that will stick with you in an experiential, conscious way.

Who is our audience? They are our audition panels, our competition judges, our opera audiences, our concert audiences. They are as diverse and as ready to be engaged as we are. If you are anything like me, you make lots of really great interpretive plans, and you sort of half-ass them in lessons, and maybe quarter-ass them in coachings (cause, y'know, your coach might not notice that scrunchy-forehead thing you do when you get like, super-expressive), but the singing that goes on in lessons and coachings can't really be considered practicing. What is happening there is a kind of combined instruction/practice, maybe we could call it a practicum. We bring our skills and our learned material, and the coach or teacher refines it, reorganizes it, and, sometimes, completely takes it apart and puts it back together again.

We as singers need to create purely practice situations for ourselves, situations that are expressly devoid of a teacher-student relationship. No audience wants to feel a performer thinking "how about that note? or...wait...that one? eh? good? no? wait...wait...how about...this one?!" It is one thing to give yourself the mental space to truly practice when you are alone in the room. To say, "I need to take what I have learned today and apply it, come what may, in the context of this music as a whole." When there's another person in the room, a person without whom the music can't exist, it comes out more like "Can we just, like, run this a couple times? I mean, if you hear something crazy or whatever, let me know, or like, if you have any suggestions, I mean, I'm open..." We need to grow a pair. We just do. We are so wholly reliant on others to be able to express ourselves fully that we need to bring a level of knowledge and conviction to our work that is twice that of a soloist.

We need to practice. With our contemporaries, in practice rooms, as equals. And then we need to go to someone else, present the fruits of our labors, receive instruction and judgment, and be prepared to throw it all out the window and try again. Without practice, however, what we bring to our instructors, and ultimately our audiences, will never be anything other than a crappy retelling of a story they already know.

Easier said than done, but I think we should all give it a try. Whaddya say?