We’ve all seen the news: opera is in trouble. Companies are folding, budgets are being slashed, and opera singers are getting nervous. Most other people in the production can just move on to another type of theatre: the director, the wig master, and the orchestra can all find jobs whether or not opera exists. Opera singers, however, don’t have much to fall back on unless their crossover skills are quality enough for the competitive musical theatre market.
We all like to imagine a musical career where we earn a handsome living solely on performance contracts and album sales—and maybe a book deal or a signature perfume to round things out. But let’s not be ashamed to admit that almost all of us have day jobs and always will. Even singers who perform at A houses often temp on the side. If a cubicle is good enough for a Met singer, it’s good enough for me!
If you’re on a dry spell between gigs, you might be looking at your lousy day job pittance and wondering what you can do to increase it—or maybe you’re looking at how to get a pittance in the first place. More and more, we artsy folk are turning to IT to turn our day careers around. Tech jobs aren’t perfect, but they are more available and higher paying than admin- and communications-based jobs. Become-a-Web-developer boot camps are springing up around the country with people like us as the marketers’ target audience: people who have intelligence, a great work ethic, and a degree in something that is not doing them much good in the finances department.
Becoming a software developer or a Web developer is probably too far afield for most of us—we are too busy being musicians to dedicate the time that takes—but there are a lot of smaller things you can do to set yourself apart. There is a lower barrier of entry to being a writer with technical skills (case in point: my writing this column) than there is to being a software engineer. Here are five tech skills that will not make you a developer, but which will probably make you the office whiz.
HTML, CSS
Hypertext Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets are the language of the Web. If you want to make a website, you will be using these tagging systems. Even if you are using a program where you just do the design work and the tagging is added on in the back end (known as a WYSIWYG editor, pronounced “whizzy-wig” and standing for “what you see is what you get”), if something unintended happens, you’ll need to manipulate the tags to get it fixed. The important thing is this: do not be afraid of the code. Learn enough about it so you can stare it down and say, “I’m not afraid of you, < and / signs. I know what “img src” stands for. I got this.”
Even if you don’t ever touch a website’s code, HTML tags sneak up all over the place. It’s good to know how to recognize them, how to use them, and how to manipulate them without breaking anything. Luckily for you, we have already covered everything you need to get started with HTML and CSS in “Making a Website, Parts 1 & 2” (Feb. and Mar. 2013).
XML
Extensible Markup Language is used to store and transport content. The code looks almost exactly like HTML, but it has a different purpose: HTML is meant to define how content is displayed (the look), while XML defines what content is. A document stored in XML can be fed into an HTML document (this is how an RSS feed works), or fed into a database, or transformed into a different type of XML.
The reason XML is so important is that a lot of what you write becomes XML at some point—even a blog post or a Microsoft Word document (if you are using Office 2007 or later). This will matter to you mostly if you are writing in an XML editor with a code view that will let you see the tags (in other words, not just “WYSIWIG”). A writer with XML skills will have a much easier time in the marketplace than one without.
The good news is that if you know HTML, there is not much more to learn with XML. It is a similar syntax for a different purpose.
Excel “Power User” Skills
Microsoft Excel is such a powerful tool that it can be mind-blowing at times. Sure, we’ve all plugged in some numbers or lists. But you haven’t lived until you’ve made a pivot table. While almost everyone who sits in a cube uses Excel at some point during their work week, very few people really know the ins and outs. Being a whiz at Excel can make you quite popular at the office. And considering that many temp agencies include an Excel proficiency exam as part of the application process, it might open a few doors for you as well.
We have already covered some of the basics in “Creating an Auditions Spreadsheet” (Sept. 2013), so if you see anything in there you don’t know yet, it’s a great place to get started.
Database Queries
When you live in the Information Age, a lot of what you do comes down to getting information. When you’re at home, this chore is largely whittled down to typing a couple words into the Google search box. But when you’re corporate, the information you want might not be on the World Wide Web—it might be in a database.
Database design is its own science. You can study normalizing techniques, learn to join tables, or create indexes . . . but for the average Joe or Jane, you don’t need to design the database, you just need to ask it a question. This usually comes down to a SELECT/FROM/WHERE query, which is actually pretty simple. SELECT: display these fields. FROM: the table where I know the information already is. WHERE: the criteria for which ones I want.
For example: “SELECT firstname, lastname FROM operasingers WHERE birthyear = 1895 AND country = Norway” would return “Kirsten Flagstad.” That’s an SQL-style query, which is what you’ll usually be dealing with. (Incidentally, I usually hear SQL pronounced “sequel,” not “squeal,” as I always want to.)
Alternatively, if you can get your hands on a copy of Microsoft Access, that’s a simple database with a friendly, Microsoft-y interface that a lot of companies use, which is an equally useful place to start.
Macros
Macros, which are a series of steps that have been automated, can be added to many software programs. They allow you to take things that you do over and over—for example, writing “I will not pledge allegiance to Bart” 50 times in a row—and do just one thing to make that happen. In this example, I might program a set of shortcut keys, such as CTRL+SHIFT+B, to type out the sequence “I-Space-w-i-l-l-Space-n-o-t-Space-p-l-e-d-g-e-Space-a-l-l-e-g-i-a-n-c-e-Space-t-o-Space-B-a-r-t-Enter.” Then I could just press CTRL+SHIFT+B as many times as I needed to that day. Or, I could add a button or a menu item that would do the same thing.
Macros are a neat trick—you don’t need to be a programmer to write them and you can use them to make people’s lives easier. Just look up the documentation for whatever software you use frequently and see if and how you can add macros to it.
Normally here at the Tech-Savvy Singer, we focus on skills you can use for your singing career. But sometimes the most helpful thing for your singing career is a steady income, no matter where it comes from. Learning these five skills won’t land you at La Scala, but they should at least help with the airfare.
