What do you most love about singing or about being a singer? What experiences got you hooked on singing?
I asked friends and students to answer these questions. They all responded with passion and enthusiasm.
Some cited the power with which they can communicate emotional intensity to complete strangers, transcending barriers of language and culture to create a unifying experience with an immediacy and depth that only music can facilitate. Some valued the way ongoing creative engagement keeps them grounded and provides them with context when life feels highly chaotic and society superficial. Others, like me, love the way in which embodying a fascinating character or interpreting a compelling text can unlock new worlds of feeling and experience within us.
Singing connects us to one another as well as to our own imaginations. It enables us to inhabit epic stories. It expands our ability to experience life and to share ourselves and our feelings with our audiences. It empowers us to know our own hearts and minds and to speak what is in them.
Auditions, not so much.
A Twitter muse with the handle “Overheard at Nola” debuted in 2015 and has been reporting on the somewhat less elevated utterances that singers sometimes emit when faced with the prospect of baring their souls in suboptimal circumstances.
Any singer who has attended even a single audition at Nola, Shetler, or any similar collection of rehearsal studios in NYC, has overheard many such comments. If we’re honest, we’ll admit to having similar thoughts from time to time, even if we possess the decency not to utter them ourselves.
I have to believe that for the most part, any singer who attains a high enough level of skill and artistry to be invited to such auditions must hold in their heart the kind of noble, impassioned sentiments articulated by those I surveyed. So how does a singer begin with a commitment to facilitating transcendent and unifying experiences and then find themselves saying such alienating things?
I have never met a singer who loves auditions. They’re an unpleasant means to a glorious end, much like the soggy beans your parents insisted you swallow as a condition of receiving some ice cream for dessert.
Auditions, like performances, can induce anxiety in many of us, and we would benefit from strategies to contend with it. I feel that there is something inherent in audition situations, however, that can inspire otherwise passionate, grounded, ethical singers to respond by behaving in ways that are uncharacteristically catty and traumatizing.
You were motivated to become a singer by the power of music to communicate emotion, elevate and unify performers and audience, engage in an impactful discipline, and empower you to remain grounded in the values you believe in while everyone around you seems to be losing their minds.
By contrast, auditions can tap into a desire to “get it right,” receive validation, and land a money-making gig.
Of the many people I approached about what they most love about singing, not one mentioned a desire for accuracy, validation, or affluence. None of us puts in the hours of soul-searching and technical woodshedding required to perform an aria beautifully simply for the satisfaction of delivering an accurate rendition of the notes, rhythms, phonemes, and dynamics. While we understand that rave reviews and the adulation of producing organizations and audiences are important for our careers, they are the mere happy byproducts of our performances and not the goal. And while we aspire to earn a living doing what we love, none of us decides to pursue a singing career with the hope of attaining great affluence.
Nevertheless, when we perform an audition, concerns relating to accuracy, validation, and gainful employment can unfortunately supplant our desire for connection, expression, and artistic transcendence. As a result, we can become disconnected from our inspiration, creativity, and the sheer pleasure of making music at the very moment when our ability to remain grounded in these things has the potential to connect us to the producing organizations and audiences that stand to gain the most from our gifts.
I would argue that you cannot simultaneously be motivated by both the desire for unfettered expression and the desire for validation. The former depends solely on your own creative impulses and meticulous preparation; the latter is entirely beyond your control. It is within your ability to offer up the best of your artistry, but futile and disempowering to try to second guess what it would mean to be “good enough” for someone else.
Auditions can thus create an intense, anxiety-producing inner conflict. Your love of singing and earnest desire to share what is in the depths of your soul is at war with a fear of being judged, objectified, and found lacking. This conflict can manifest on a physical level as the body tenses and defensively armors itself, preempting the pain of potential failure and criticism. Such a response limits the free flow of emotion and expressive vulnerability essential for impactful singing. Perhaps your breathing instinctively shuts down, necessitating a kick start at the beginning of each phrase. Or the ecstatic release that motivates your most beautiful high notes eludes you, and you end up muscling them out. Some singers may still be able to produce an impressive sound and deliver artful musicianship under such conditions, but their ability to connect deeply with their own feelings and their listeners is greatly compromised.
Many singers grapple with performance anxiety, not only in auditions but also in performance, at some point in their training and career. Marvelous resources and techniques are available for ameliorating “stage fright,” but it is not the point of this column to address this phenomenon or offer methods for dealing with it. My desire is to raise awareness of the essential conflict that is all but hard wired into audition dynamics and invite all members of our community to consider how to improve them.
If we reduce this dilemma to an issue of performance anxiety, we place the burden of solving this problem entirely on the singers. We’re essentially saying that they are supposed to be capable of making themselves completely vulnerable and pour their hearts out in a situation where any sane person would instead run screaming from the room. We can hardly blame them for reacting by discharging some snark in the hallways.
Just as we cannot place the burden of solving this problem solely on singers, we also cannot hold audition panels responsible for creating an ideal performance environment. These panels are by and large composed of music lovers who are just as passionate and committed to the creation of transcendent art as the singers who audition for them. They want you to feel free to sing your heart out and to be moved by the best of your artistry. But it is exhausting to have to assess many singers in brief windows under conditions that do not allow them to register the depth of emotional response they would be capable of in a performance.
We hear horror stories each audition season about the reprehensible behavior singers sometimes encounter at the hands of audition panels, and we should continue to expect producing organizations to demonstrate respect for our time and effort. But let us also respect the challenges inherent in their job.
Singing is risky by definition. No one can create a safe space for auditions.
We can admonish singers to deal with their performance anxiety issues. We can demand audition panels behave more respectfully. But this problem will never be addressed until we as a community acknowledge the ways in which the audition process is inherently fraught for those on both sides of the table.
We must honor the extraordinary skill and vulnerability required for impactful singing and, to the best of our abilities, create conditions that facilitate rather than inhibit courageous expression. If we fail to do that, we are asking singers to be okay with the idea of exposing their souls only to be rewarded with humiliation. We are signaling to audition panels that it is somehow par for the course to respond to a singer who has toiled for years at great personal sacrifice for the privilege of singing for them by tossing their résumé in the trash. We are treating something surpassingly intimate as though it is worthless.
If this is how our community treats our own art form and those who strive to excel at it, how are we ever to communicate its inestimable value to prospective audiences?
