A young artist has just accepted a YAP contract and is now agonizing over whether to spend money on a mainstage audition to which he’s been invited. A young singer who aspires to a solo career waffles over how to best spend her limited extracurricular time—in the chorus of the big regional opera company or performing as a soloist in a low-budget community group? An established professional artist must decide whether to accept the offer of a lucrative contract with a big-name company—for a small role in a Fach he doesn’t sing.
Artists must constantly make choices about how to best allocate their resources and maximize their opportunities—and it’s a constant source of angst, especially for the unprepared. Unprepared and perhaps uninformed, many singers squander their already limited resources, going after auditions that may not be appropriate for them or ignoring what they need most in order to pursue something that seems like a bigger step up—but which may not be if they’re not ready to take full advantage of it. These decisions are rarely easy or cut and dried, and there’s almost always some risk involved. Here’s how to soften the blow of hard choices by preparing for them.
First, let’s provoke a few thoughts. In order to ply our trade, singers have to convince producers of our abilities and suitabilities, usually via auditions. Auditions are our job interviews. And they cost all sorts of resources—money, time, the goodwill of friends with auspiciously located sofas. As previously noted (“The Entrepreneurial Artist,” March 2012), when one chooses to become a singer, one is not only choosing to become an artiste, one is choosing to become a small business owner. And this is a fact which is frequently overlooked when selecting a performing arts career. Businesses require funding, and so does your career. Young singers are often caught off guard by how much funding is actually required.
Every singer must, as soon as they possibly can, create a fund to help finance their careers. Take a look at your budget and figure out what percentage of every single dollar you make can go into paying for auditions, travel, lessons, studio rentals, accompanists, and any of the other myriad expenses that may arise. Put it in a money market. Invest it. Feed it. Don’t wait until a big project comes up to build it up—the idea is to have something of a reserve. Sure, you may have to make extra fundraising efforts for special projects, but you should plan to enter each audition season with an idea of how much you can spend. This will help you prioritize auditions.
Spend time thinking about how to husband your other resources as well. Time is always an expensive commodity, and if (like many singers) you have a day job as well as a singing career, this must be taken into account when planning auditions, lessons, and performances. If you’re serious about establishing a solo career, it’s essential that you do everything possible to arrange your life so that you can pursue singing opportunities when they come! If you are stuck in a day job that offers little flexibility, then it should offer other benefits that offset that, such as a good salary that allows you to sock some money away (saving up, perhaps, to be able to quit that job or take a sabbatical to do a big audition tour) and plenty of vacation and personal days which you can take when an important gig comes up. If, on the other hand, your day job doesn’t pay much, it should offer a lot of flexibility so you can take time off when you need it for your singing career.
Stuck in one or the other? Set a deadline for yourself past which you will not stay in that job and work toward goals that will help you get a more workable position. Train for a more lucrative day job, save money so you can quit working for a while and concentrate on your singing career, pare down your belongings so that you can afford to live on very little while you get established. Too many singers allow themselves to be trapped in day jobs that don’t really give them what they need to do their real work of singing. One day, years later, they wake up and realize that instead of being professional singers whose day jobs contribute to their livelihood, they are secretaries or analysts or store managers who continue to live the dream of a singing career but, in reality, merely have an expensive hobby.
Educate yourself about what is involved in a singing career and in different types of singing careers. Not long ago, I spoke to a university student whose post-graduate plans included his wife traveling with him to every gig, where they would rent an apartment and she would get a job in her (non-music) field while he was singing. Neither of them had any idea that most opera gigs—festivals and YAPs excluded—last a month, at the most. Another singer told me she planned to sing opera, but only within a 150-mile radius of her hometown, so she wouldn’t have to spend too much time away from her family. She had not considered the number of opera companies which existed in this limited area—or thought about the odds of getting hired by even one of them let alone enough of them to keep her employed on a regular basis. Yet another singer, a devout Jew, hoped to build an opera career in which he wouldn’t have to rehearse or perform on Saturdays. Perhaps in Israel?
I’m not saying it’s not possible to craft a career which operates around certain limitations—but before you inscribe your grand scheme on plates of gold—or just spend a lot of money pursuing it before you realize that Part A doesn’t fit into Slot B—it might be best to do some research and figure out how the business really works and what is realistic for you.
This will also help you prioritize your life, which in turn will help you avoid mistakes. A very promising young singer I know recently was kicking herself for canceling a mainstage audition. This unmanaged singer has a good day job and for quite some time has been making extra money as a chorister. She sings leads in community productions. She is just starting to get regional work. But when offered a chorus gig which conflicted with the audition, she jumped at the extra money—which was nice but not essential—and didn’t look at the big picture, which is to transition to professional solo work. She sheepishly admitted that she hadn’t thought it through. She hasn’t made a plan for building her solo career, she hasn’t thought about her priorities and resources—and this resulted in an important missed opportunity.
How do you decide which opportunities are important and worth the resources you must spend on them?
First, you have to evaluate your current situation—not only what resources are available to you, but what you as a singer are lacking. Do you still have major technical issues? Do you live in a city with little in the way of opportunity for artistic growth? Are you missing some key connections to help you get to the next level? Whatever you need, the first step is to identify it.
Say you hope to establish a thriving voice studio in your city. You need to have connections and an advertising budget. You need to figure out how to get students in the door and keep them. What hours are most people looking for? Where should you advertise? How do the local high school choirs hire their voice teachers? Is there a choral culture in your city which you can draw from? Where do the local pros and aspiring pros study?
Let’s say you want to keep your lucrative day job and limit your solo singing to concert work, recordings, and perhaps the occasional opera. How much time can you get off work? How much flexibility do you have on a daily basis? Do you or your agent have connections with local and regional choruses and symphonies? Do you know conductors and composers? Do you have a library of sound clips with you performing core repertoire in your Fach?
And here is where many singers miss a step or two: they fail to actually research the market, relying instead on vague information they received in school (which, in some cases, may have been a while ago), hearsay from other singers, or partially correct advice from well meaning local teachers who may not have been performing professionally for some time, if ever. Research is an important step in establishing any business. A restaurateur who fails to key in to a good location and a menu that will attract the locals is doomed to failure, and so will you be if you don’t take the time to really find out what the requirements of your particular career path may be. A perfect example would be the young singer who can’t get into a YAP on this side of the pond, and so flits off to Germany because she’s heard that “they love Americans there.” Or the singer who has just changed Fachs, still has major technical issues, has not mastered his languages, and has never sung a full role—but decides to throw his savings into doing major competitions or auditioning for high-level YAPs because he’s afraid time is running out.
Research, evaluate, and establish as realistic an idea as you can manage of where you stand in relationship to the competition. And then stay open to other ideas and information. Listen to the advice you get in school, from other singers, from your teacher—but don’t stop there. Look at the careers of those a little further along than you and try to figure out what they did and are doing. Learn how a symphony works, how an opera company works. When people tell you what they are looking for, listen.
And then make a plan. Plan concrete steps you can take to fill in the gaps in your technique, your résumé, your network, and your team. As you work on these, you will be moving toward the next step in your career. And armed with your evaluation, your understanding of your current resources, and your research, you will be able to seek out current opportunities that are good and appropriate for you and that support your plan.
You will be able, for example, to look at that mainstage audition that has come up and say, “Can I afford to do this audition? Can I afford to miss it? What will I gain by doing this audition and what will I potentially lose?” You’ll be able to evaluate a pay-to-sing program and determine whether it seems likely to offer you the training, performance opportunities, and connections to get you to the next level. You’ll be able to look at two gigs you’ve been offered and decide which one ultimately will benefit you the most.
Will you agonize less? A little, perhaps. You’ll certainly be a lot less likely to waste time and money on “opportunities” that turn out to be anything but. The decisions may never be easy—but when you are prepared, when you have done your homework, and when you have been honest with yourself about where you stand as a singer in the path you’ve chosen to take, neither will they be shots in the dark.
