In the spring semester of 1994, while I was working on my doctorate in music at the University of Southern California, it seemed as if everyone with whom I collaborated was performing a full recital—and I had one of my own degree performances. During one of what was probably a series of panicked and overwhelmed calls to my mother, I moaned, “How will I ever get all this music learned?” In a typical moment of mom wisdom (never mind how annoying those can be) she interrupted my tirade with a question: “How do you eat an elephant?”
It stopped me in my tracks, unable to figure out what pachyderms had to do with my educational crisis, so she answered for me, “One bite at a time.”
It may seem silly, but this moment was a real epiphany. I had been thinking of myself as a victim of scheduling circumstances. Suddenly I realized that I could apply my brainpower in a much more productive way to be, in the words of Gandhi, “an agent of change.” Rather than fretting over the big picture of a crowded performance and academic calendar, I could just figure out what that first bite would be and move forward from that point, bite by snack-sized bite.
Now that I am in a position to mentor young singers at a similar point in their careers, I see many of them experiencing the same challenges, and part of my role is to help guide them through the process of managing a busy schedule. The performers I work with are full-time young artists who are constantly being assigned large quantities of new repertoire. Then there are the full-time, free-lance artists, who may be performing one difficult role while preparing the next (which invariably starts the day after the first show closes). Others may be singers with full-time temp jobs, trying to keep their singing chops in shape and learn new material after an exhausting 9-to-5 day framed by a harrowing commute, or singers who somehow juggle work, singing, and parenthood.
There are as many excuses for not having time as there are singers, but excuses only get in the way of realizing your potential. Whether singing is your only job or the first of two or three, it is still your chosen profession and as such, demands your focus and attention. You are not a victim of your schedule, and you can create moments to practice effectively, if you really put your mind to it.
The first step in “eating the elephant” is to identify what your goals are and what the deadline is for each of them. If you are preparing for a performance, the final deadline is obvious, but self-imposed intermediate deadlines are essential to the process. Once you have identified a performance deadline, work backwards on your calendar to establish memorization deadlines, coaching deadlines, translation deadlines, and character analysis deadlines. “Deadline” does not refer to some vague date in the future, such as “I will memorize this by the summer.” I encourage the same specificity on your earlier, intermediate goals as you have for a final performance date. Write down all your deadlines on a calendar in ink. Whether you have six months or six days to prepare, you must set each of these deadlines. It’s even more urgent to set deadlines when you have a true time crunch—that’s when the elephant seems biggest, on the Monday you are called to step into a Bach passion the following Sunday night.
Once you’ve set your deadlines, what’s next? Divide your elephant into bite-sized chunks.
When I’m learning an opera score, I typically set an intermediate goal of being very familiar with the entire work. Let’s say the deadline for that goal is three weeks from today. I do something very obvious: I divide the number of pages by 18. That tells me how much I have to learn each day. Notice I used 18 instead of 21. I strongly believe in planning free time during the learning process. One of my singer friends has a different method. She uses colored plastic tabs to mark each section of an opera where her character appears, and then works on each tab on its scheduled day.
Everyone must find his or her own method of marking and dividing repertoire. I like to work from the tail to the head, that is, begin at the end of an opera or song cycle and work my way forward. Have you ever had the experience where you knew Act I of The Marriage of Figaro brilliantly, but the end of Act IV seemed a bit hazy as you went into rehearsals? Learn the end of a piece cold, and I can guarantee you will get the first part under your belt easily.
Now you need to begin to chomp down on your pachyderm, which brings us to the issue of practice time. Make it a habit to set aside practice time on your calendar. Besides the obvious reasons, this yields some more subtle benefits. If your practice time is already set on your calendar, you can plan other activities around it (obvious exceptions being outside commitments such as work or your children’s school performances). I plan practice time a week at a time, and block it out on Microsoft Outlook, then anyone who sees my calendar sees that certain times are not available. If you are concerned that “practice” doesn’t sound important enough to those around you, call it whatever you like, but make it happen.
When you plan practice time, know yourself and your energy levels, and if possible, plan your practice times for your most alert times. Are you a morning person, or a night owl? If you need an hour to wind down after work before you can practice effectively, plan that time into your schedule, rather than engaging in a wasted hour of ineffective practice.
Apartment dwellers have extra challenges—consideration for neighbors—so their situations may demand extra thinking and problem solving. Be creative in discovering practice spaces other than your apartment, especially if your most productive hours are outside the typically accepted hours for noise in your living situation. [For practicing tips for apartment dwellers, see last month’s article “Pique Performance” by Rachel Antman. -ed.]
No matter how fantastic your calendar planning has been up to this point, it will all be futile if you arrive at your daily practice time without a plan. Every vocal warmup exercise has a goal. Every time you sing a note, a phrase, or a piece, you should have a goal in mind, whether it be stamina, memorization, or perfect diction.
Depending on how much practice time you have in any given day, don’t feel as if you have to use it all singing. If you have the remarkable gift of four hours, you can use much of that time for non-singing activity, so develop some practice skills that don’t require you to sing. You can analyze text patterns or musical structure to facilitate memorization or phrasing choices, translate texts or transcribe texts into IPA, or write texts on note cards. Exchange ideas with your colleagues to increase your “bag of tricks” exponentially.
Assess each practice session at the end of the day, through journaling or a time of self-examination, and determine any adjustments you need to make before your next session. Scheduling is not a rigid art. Some days you may find that you accomplish far more than you planned, and other days may be less productive because of a bad day at work or other life stress.
The final point I want to leave you with is this. Your life is never going to “calm down” completely, and you cannot leave your planning to chance and inspiration in the moment. Enjoy solving the daily puzzle of life and scheduling rather than allowing it to overwhelm you.
One of my young artists shared this great quote from another coach, “If you take care of your art, your art will take care of you.”
Nothing creates a greater sense of ease and confidence in your art than true and thorough preparation. Take the first step with this sort of planning, and your initial good results will breed more success. In a surprisingly short time that elephant will be a pile of bones and you will be stuffed with a banquet of accomplishments.
