Here are some qualities that can help establish you as a successful singer. What do you have, and what are you missing? What can you acquire? How does your unique combination of talent, personality and skill help you compensate for important qualities that may not be your strong suit?
Talent:
• Beauty, uniqueness and/or interest of tone. Great voices aren’t always gorgeous voices, but they are interesting and engaging.
• Ability to communicate. Can you express the emotion the director is asking you for? Are you saying what you think you’re saying in auditions?
• Having your own message or stamp to put on the art form. Performances become great when they are filtered through the personality, ideas and unique abilities of the performer.
• Musicality. Without it, you’re just boring.
Technique:
• Good musicianship
• Good intonation
• Legato
• Messa di voce
• Uniformity of tone from top to bottom
• Easy access to all parts of the voice
• Stamina
• Audibility/projection
• Focus
Acting Ability:
• Stage presence
• Understanding of and comfort with one’s body
• Ability to move and gesture naturally
• Ability to communicate naturally with body language and gestures
Languages:
• Good diction. Certainly there are examples of great singers who are famous not only for their great singing but their spectacularly poor diction. But you’ll have a much better time of it if you can be understood in the languages in which you sing.
• Degree of fluency. You cannot hope to achieve great artistry if you can’t communicate and connect with your audience. You must have a functional understanding of the language in which you’re singing.
<b.Savvy: • Business acumen. Develop an understanding of how the industry works and how you can best work with it.
• Perspective. “You have to let go of the idea that this career will be fair, make sense, or be predictable. I often joke that if I ever write an autobiography, I’ll call it ‘Not What I Thought’,” writes one soprano. “You can plan all you want to, but it’s never gonna be what you think.”
• Education. Many singers don’t have a realistic view of their own abilities because they don’t know what good singing sounds like. They haven’t attended enough high-level performances or listened to enough recordings. Worse, they rely on others to form their opinions for them.
• Time management skills. Any self-employed person can tell you that one of their biggest challenges is staying on task and using time wisely. It’s easy to let time slip away without any product to show for it—and it’s easy to find your career slipping away for lack of attention to accomplishing goals.
Personal Qualities:
• Drive/Perseverance.Think of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, repeatedly getting his butt kicked by a much more accomplished warrior, and repeatedly hauling his battered carcass out of the muck for one more try. It’s not always the most talented who succeed—it’s the ones who take life’s hits and keep getting up off the floor.
• Self-discipline. No matter how good you are, there are times when you have to sit down and woodshed a score, even though your team is winning the Super Bowl. There are times when you can’t have another drink or a piece of pie. There are times when you have to get off the phone with your best friend—who really, really needs a shoulder to cry on—because you have a show the next day and you need to rest and focus.
• Detachment. The ability to separate the professional from the personal so that you can focus your energy and attention on the things that matter for your career, without becoming distracted.
• Self-care. Some might call it selfishness, but that old adage that you can’t care well for others unless you care for yourself first is true. The most successful singers are able to prioritize themselves and their careers.
• Balance. It’s much easier to attain your goals if you know what they are, what you want and need to make you happiest and most productive over time.
• Image. You don’t have to be a movie star, but you do have to find, develop, and present your personal best.
Resources:
• Mental, emotional, and physical health. If you don’t have them, you can still be a successful singer; it’s just harder. Take the best care of your body, mind, and spirit that you can, and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
• Good advisers. Every singer needs a team of what tenor and teacher Joey Evans, head of Vocal Pedagogy at the University of Houston, likes to call “guide dogs”: teachers, coaches, managers, and other consultants who offer sound advice on everything from technique to career moves to image.
<b.• Financial. News flash: Studying, getting a career off the ground, and maintaining a career are expensive. You need reliable financial resources and money management savvy.
• Support structure. Some singers’ enormous inner strength inspires them to succeed in spite (or because of?) a lack of support and caring in the people closest to them. But life is sure a lot easier and more pleasant with loved ones and advisers who believe in you and encourage you, and who are available to lend emotional and other kinds of support when you need them.
Connections:
• It is who you know. Opera is too expensive an undertaking to take big risks on the unknown and unproven. You improve your chances of being hired by making sure people know your name and your work, and by establishing relationships with those in a position to help you.
Luck:
• The big break. How many times have we all heard it? Being in the right place at the right time is practically a requirement for the big break to the next level. But luck isn’t enough. Like the Boy Scouts, we have to be prepared to make the most of it when that opportunity comes along.
Thanks to the posters at the Classical Singer Forum
(www.classicalsinger.com) and New Forum for Classical Singers (www.nfcs.net) for their help in developing this list.
