Recently, Warner Classics sent me mezzo soprano Susan Graham’s latest release: French Operatta Arias. It’s a beautiful album and it’s been wonderful to watch Susan’s career take off and see the big companies vie for her talents.
But I have good news for singers who do not have recording companies knocking down their doors. New research indicates that performers no longer need the big record companies like they did before. The big companies are losing their power due to new technologies. (See “The Performing Arts in a New Era,” a report by the Rand non-profit research agency, at www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1367.) There are new ways for performers to make and market their own recordings thanks to the Internet and other new communication technologies. The power is shifting. While it is still wonderful to have a recording company contact you, you no longer have to sit and wait for that to happen.
Those lucrative recording contracts that were the backbone of singer’s careers in a bygone era now seem like pure fairy tales in today’s market. Even world-class singers are rarely signed to exclusive recording contracts. Many singers become quite frustrated when they get caught between the red tape of unions and the politics of record companies. Some have confided off the record (pun intended) to Classical Singer that they are thrilled to see pirate recordings being made of their performances! At least their performances are being captured.
We are also thrilled to see classical singers taking advantage of this new world of recordings. May often has been the month that CS answers your requests to feature non-famous singers. It’s “everyman” month as we feature three singers who are taking advantage of this new world. They have made their own recordings and are marketing them in various ways.
Robin Follman and her husband assembled a consortium of money people, raised a lot of money and a lot of friends to produce and market an orchestral recording of rare works. Jamie Baer Peterson planned to do her recording on a smaller budget, again with help and discounts from a lot of friends. She and her arranger David (Dee) Fletcher put together a recording of new songs and arrangements of Christmas songs and successfully marketed the recording both on Amazon.com and by doing soirees on the West and East coasts. Our youngest singer, Béatrice Beer, has been marketing her Holocaust-survivor father’s compositions with a recording and concerts in the New York area. And all this talk of recordings should be very familiar to CS readers who’ve been following the New Year’s resolutions of soprano Janeanne Houston. For five months, we’ve been reading about her marketing efforts for her first recording, and following her plans for her next recording.
Hopefully this issue will propel you to make your own mark on posterity. It might make you think: if Deutsche Grammophone gave you a blank ticket to make a recording, what would you like to do? In this issue, you’ll find four singers who made their dreams come true without the big recording company.
You can do it too, although after working on this issue, it is clear we need to present articles on how to raise money!
All of this leads me to the topic of this editorial, “The Ball is in Your Court.” I recently received an e-mail from a singer that was similar to so many heartfelt requests we get at CS. The singer was confused and frustrated that the career wasn’t going anywhere despite a Master’s Degree in voice received years before. Living outside of New York where opportunities were few, feelings of failure were hard to fight.
It’s all part of another fairy tale someone is spinning out there and I wish someone would put a stop to it! This tale has to do with some magical track that singers are supposed to follow that ends with singing lead roles at the best houses. The fairy tale ends with a note of caution that singers who don’t achieve this or who fall into forbidden paths such as Musical Theater (shock) are obviously failures!
I wonder if voice teachers are feeding this to their students because that’s what their teachers held up as “success” for them. I don’t know who started this “happily ever after” tale but we really need to open up the idea of what “success” is.
There are several big problems with that “lead role track.” One is that not every classical singer is cut out for that option. While I recently worked on the article about teacher abuse, I was getting really sad stories of teachers saying horrible things to singers who don’t meet these sometimes impossible expectations. There’s something wrong with this picture! Why can’t a classical singer be happily trained as a successful chorister, a character singer, a volunteer, a school performer, a comprimario, a voice teacher? The Classical Singer Community embraces all these and more.
There’s another problem with the “lead role track.” Being on a “track” assumes that you are a passive participant; someone else is moving you along. That is another fairy tale in today’s market. It also is a surefire recipe for unhappiness; you’ve given up your power to other people. If you are waiting for an opera company, manager or record company to call, you have given up your power. To make your life work, you have to keep the ball in your court. You have to constantly be thinking about what you can do right now.
Times have changed. The rules that made a career as a lead singer of operatic roles even 10 years ago rarely work today. As Rand’s “Performing Arts” report says over and over, artists are not going to be able to rely solely on big companies in the future. But this can be a very empowering thing. It means that the successful singer of the future will not stop to wait for the recording company—or opera company or any other company—to knock on his door. He will have to be an artist/businessman who will make his own opportunities and market his own product: his voice.
If one reads the Rand report, it is clear that a school that really prepares students for a career will no longer be able to teach art alone. Offering a token course on entrepreneurship will not be enough. Schools will need to begin to insist that a successful graduate also have courses in perhaps accounting, technology, advertising and marketing. Teachers also have to keep up with the changes so they can give counsel that is based on current reality, not experience based on an outdated market model.
We’ll be talking more about Rand’s “Performing Arts” report in the months ahead. But in the meantime, there is much you can be doing to find the version of success that works for you. The ball really is in your court.
—CJ Williamson, Editor
P.S. Join the new online community of singers who are working at improving their careers using Julia Cameron’s plan, as outlined in her book, Artist’s Way. We call the group “Peak Performance.” Find us on the Web at http://www.classicalsinger.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi.
