The bustle of the big fall audition season is past, and now we find ourselves in the season of anxiety—the season of waiting. Young Artist Program hopefuls and main-stage artists alike are waiting restlessly to hear how much work they’ll have next season, and where. And we are waiting for the inevitable rejection letters, often referred to dryly in acronyms so colorful I am not permitted to mention them here.
Rejection and criticism are a steady and unavoidable part of our business. We’ve all been told a million times that we have to develop a thick skin, yet we also have to develop a rather brutally honest sense of self-perception. How can we do both? Aren’t they, well, mutually exclusive?
Self-perception is a survival skill for singers. If we don’t have it, we can’t possibly understand the artistic product we are selling, or who our customer base is. Developing a good sense of self-perception is an ongoing and enormously involved task. A critical element of self-perception is not only knowing what isn’t good and needs to be bolstered or fixed, but also what is good: what’s better than anyone else’s. Herein lies the basis of our strength in the face of rejection.
Own Your Art
You are not just an artist; you are the owner, CEO, chief bottle washer, and general factotum of your very own small business. Your life as an artist is very important; it is an essential part of who you are (or else you’d be in some profession where you actually made money and most of your colleagues were relatively sane). But your life as a businessperson, growing the artist’s career, is equally important; as a businessperson, you lead the artist to appropriate outlets and financial rewards, and you help the artist reach artistic goals.
When you realize that you are not your art, and that your art is your product, you don’t have to take rejection and criticism so personally. Products can be adjusted to appeal to certain markets; suitable markets can be found for products.
It’s also important to take a stand on your own product. Not everyone is going to like it, no matter what you do, so you have to please yourself before you can please others. By insisting on ownership of your art/product, you become the person in charge of your career. For better or for worse, for right or wrong, the decisions, the work, the triumphs, and the failures belong to you, not to your teacher, your coach, your manager, the conductor, or the director.
This doesn’t mean you should take a defensive or disrespectful attitude towards your advisors and employers—far from it. Their input is important, and must be carefully analyzed. Ultimately, however, you must define success for yourself, and that definition should be the one that matters most.
Just Deal!
No matter how well-defined your idea of personal success or how healthy your ego, rejection is going to hurt. There’s no way around it. Rejection is essentially another person—perhaps a person whose opinion you admire—telling you they don’t like you or that you’re just not good enough. They’re telling you you’re not going to get what you want, at least not today. Criticism is, of course, a form of rejection.
Rejection hurts us inside, in the place where we are still—and always will be—children. It hurts the part of us that desperately wants to be liked and to fit in. So when we are rejected, often our inner child is the first to react, and does so in a childish way. I say: let it! Pain held inside festers and rots. Pain first desires release. So release it.
Hang up the phone, put down the letter, and take a deep breath. Breakables secured, your lungs well supplied with air, your diet in jeopardy, indulge yourself in a temper tantrum, a primal scream, and a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk.
My brilliant friend, writer and organizational expert Anna K. Cox-Havron, is no stranger to rejection, but she has an especially creative way of handling it: She has appointed a Personal Fan.
“His job is to make me a spectacularly good margarita, and tell me I am brilliant and wonderful, and that the people who rejected me are cultural Neanderthals who can’t distinguish lettering from the ragged scratch marks they leave on their skin in lieu of modern hygiene practices,” she says cheerfully. Friends are there to listen to you whine and rant (assuming you don’t abuse the privilege, and that you return the favor without turning the conversation back to yourself), so use them. Margarita-making skills are a plus.
Once the margarita or ice cream buzz wears off, however, you may begin to feel upset in a different way. Rejection makes us angry, and channeled anger can be a healthy way of dealing with pain.
“I occasionally stage a ritual burning, if the rejection is hurtful enough,” Anna says. (I assume she is referring to rejection letters, criticisms, or effigies, rather than the critics themselves.)
It may feel silly to burn or otherwise ritually dispose of rejection letters, but it can also help free you from their unpleasant emotional burden. By getting rid of this physical evidence of attack, you are choosing to remove the hurt from your presence. You are reaffirming your strength, your value, and your belief in yourself. You’re announcing that you don’t have to hoard and dwell on the negativity; you are capable of absorbing its lessons and moving on to greater success.
Rejection also calls for some judicious ego-boosting. Anna keeps a document she refers to as “Da Fan Club.” In it she records all the nice things people have said about her, as well as all her proudest accomplishments. In times of need, she can refer to Da Fan Club as a way of reassuring herself that despite this one rejection and failure, there have been many acceptances and accomplishments, and there will be more.
Finally, humor is a wonderful, healthy way to manage rejection or criticism and diffuse the pain that comes with them. Who was it who wrote to the critic who had panned him: “Dear Sir, I am sitting in the smallest room of my house with your criticism before me; soon it will be behind me”?
Another favorite quote came to me from tenor Jerry Hadley, who spoke to me very candidly about his own experiences with criticism, and cheerfully ended by paraphrasing the late Irish writer, Brandan Behan: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’ve seen it done; they know how it’s done; they just can’t do it themselves!” And of course, singers themselves have entered the aforementioned colorful acronyms into the lexicon, thus adding a touch of dark humor to a painful event that each of us must deal with on a regular basis.
Rejection and criticism should not be dismissed without examination, but they must be processed. The first step is to diffuse the hurt; the next, to analyze and use it.
Don’t Take It Personally
Many factors go into hiring decisions. Your rejection may have nothing to do with your merits as a singer and can even be based on relatively trivial matters or plain ol’ bad timing. Maybe you look a little too much like the GD’s ex-boyfriend. Maybe your voice won’t balance well with the tenor’s. Maybe they booked a recital similar to yours last season. Maybe they just signed a soprano who sings your exact repertoire. Maybe they already have a baritone on faculty. Or, as the popular book title says, maybe they’re just not that into you.
Regardless of why you didn’t get the job, remember, it is not necessarily an indictment of your personality, your voice, your skills, or your talent. Remember that your art is also a product you have to market, and view your rejection as evidence that you tried, and now have an opportunity to evaluate and try again—intelligently.
Embrace Intelligent Persistence
“Dear to us are those who love us … but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
As noted, self-perspective is a survival skill for singers. So is persistence. “You are a battering ram, darling. No door to the castle ever fell with just three hits,” a successful colleague once wrote to a discouraged young singer. And she was right.
But blind, dumb slogging away after a goal usually leads to frustration and wasted resources. How much better off we would be to employ what Ellen Jackson, the award-winning author of the children’s book The Grumpus Under the Rug, calls “intelligent persistence”—the ability to learn from mistakes and fix what we’re doing wrong.
Remember what Albert Einstein said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Yet singers do this constantly. Worse yet, it usually involves throwing good money after bad: another lesson with another new teacher who wasn’t thoroughly researched; another expensive application fee for a program that’s not designed to do what you want or need it to do for you; another audition with arias that ultimately aren’t working for you.
When we receive rejections or criticism, our wounded inner child may want to lash out. Our impulse may be to dismiss what we’ve been told as nonsense, to ridicule the source, to rationalize—in other words, to protect our egos. Yes, all of us will receive criticism worthy of ridicule from sources who couldn’t judge the difference between a tuba and a piccolo; and all of us will experience extenuating circumstances that prevent us from doing our best, but acting on these defensive impulses is counterproductive. Instead, pay careful attention. Analyze what is really being said, and equally important, what is not. Jackson tells young writers to regard specific criticism as a gift, and to use it to identify problem areas and work to correct them.
You may not get active feedback—you may have to deduce for yourself, or go to your teacher or drama coach and say, “Listen to me and watch me ‘audition.’ Tell me what I’m doing right, and what I’m doing wrong.” Show a more experienced colleague your materials packet or your teaching resume and ask them to analyze it for you. Tell them where you are sending it and what kind of response you’re getting. Talk to the people who are getting into the Young Artist Program you want, and figure out why they are there and you aren’t. This type of work should be a standard part of your career development and should receive regular attention.
Plan For Rejection
Remember your grandmother telling you things like, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? As singers, we tenderly place all our eggs into the barbwire-lined baskets of the various auditions we are doing, hoping to get hired. We know that a lot of those precious, fragile eggs are going to be shattered, but we hope that one or two will survive intact and something wonderful will grow out of our investment of time, skill, money, and passion. If it doesn’t, we are the ones who are shattered and discouraged, at a loss for where to find the courage to go on.
Yet, we know that we will be rejected. It’s part of the process, and it’s not going to go away. The best we can hope for is to be accepted some of the time, then more of the time, then, eventually and with luck, most of the time. I find this a passive attitude. Singers need to be in command; we need to be proactive.
“I make sure I always have more than one project going,” says my friend Anna. And she does—I’ve never met anyone who keeps more plates spinning at once. Anna doesn’t have much time to be rejected. She’s too busy launching her next project, and caring for and feeding the others.
If a rejection letter comes in the mail, be ready with more audition requests to send out. Have a recital in the planning. Book some coachings to work on a new role. Stage a mock audition night with friends. Review your business plan and be ready to cross a few steps off the list in pursuit of your goals. Know what you’re going to do if you don’t get into that Young Artist’s Program, if that university faculty position doesn’t come through, or if you don’t get any gigs for the summer. Know not just what you’ll do to survive on a day-to-day basis, but what you’ll do to survive as an artist.
“What is opportunity, and when does it knock?” wrote the late Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon and pioneer of the self-empowerment movement. “It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny.”
Take Back Your Power
There’s no question that the classical singing industry is a bully. It will beat you up and take your lunch money every day of the week, if you let it. And singers often allow themselves to be bullied rather by accident. One blow to the ego weakens us enough to make the next one cut more deeply, and on and on until we are so battered and bruised and hopeless that we lose all joy in singing and all idea of how to carry on.
I write and speak mainly about the business side of singing, because it is a greatly neglected area, and because there are plenty of wiser heads than mine to guide singers on artistic matters. But at the root of our singing businesses is our art; without it, none of the rest matters. Always nurture your passion. As Ellen Jackson writes, “Make the clear expression of your passion your primary goal.” And don’t just listen to your critics and the would-be employers who passed on your talent. Listen to your fans! Please yourself and please them. There is work we do for the joy of making art, and there is work we do to advance our career and bring in a paycheck. We strive to make those intersect at every opportunity, but they will not always combine.
If we can diffuse the hurt through friendship, perspective, and humor, we can stop rejection and criticism from crippling us. If we can turn rejection and criticism into tools, if we can learn to discern what is useful and what is merely harmful trash, we can be better singers and have more successful careers. If we are proactive in dealing with rejection and criticism, we can minimize their negative effect on us and move on to better opportunities for success. And if we keep at the core of our hearts our passion for singing and for bringing beauty into the world, we can hold not only the pain of rejection and criticism at bay, but we can experience artistic fulfillment and embrace our own self-defined success.
