In October 2014, a strongly worded petition began making the rounds on social media. Sponsored by the website Opera Candy (www.OperaCandy.com), the petition decries “predatory fees” charged to singers applying for Young Artist Programs, calls on singers to “crack down” on competitions and companies who charge them, and demands that OPERA America work with independent businesses such as YAP Tracker and Classical Singer magazine to prohibit accepting advertising or listings from any organization that requires an application fee.
Audition and application fees have been widely criticized by young singers who can easily spend $500 or more each season in accumulated fees before ever setting foot in front of a panel—if, indeed, they are lucky enough to be chosen for a hearing—and the petition received what Opera Candy Executive Editor L. C. Grey calls “an explosive response.” At the time of this writing, Grey says the petition has 1,054 signatures, with numerous comments and “likes” on the original post and Facebook page and “a life of its own on social media.”
Those many discussions on social media piqued my interest, and I published a series of three posts on my blog, Mezzo with Character (www.MezzoWithCharacter.com) with the intention of following up with a fourth. Michelle Latour addressed this issue in the October and November issues of CS (“YAP Fees: Singers’ Perspectives” and “Young Artist Program Directors Speak Up,” respectively), but Editor-in-Chief Sara Thomas agreed that the subject deserves additional coverage. What follows is an updated and expanded version of my first blog article in the series.
Opera Candy’s petition, entitled “Stop Predatory Audition Fees,” reads as follows:
Petition Background (Preamble):
People seeking employment should not be subjected to predatory fees. The audition process for singers is loaded with fees for accompanist, wardrobe, travel, housing and worst of all application fees.
Please help us in cracking down on competitions and auditions who ask for application fees.
Singers should not pay people to listen to them. They are applying for a job.
Petition:
We, the undersigned, call on OPERA America to work with organizations such as YAP Tracker, Classical Singer and other audition posting sites to prohibit the advertisement of any organization that requires a singer to submit an application fee.
These fees are predatory and are not regulated. Auditions are a job interview that are the expense of the people conducting the job search, not the job seeker.
(www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-predatory-audition-fees.html)
“We love singers and know this has been an escalating struggle for a long time,” Grey asserts. “We wouldn’t change a thing [about the petition]. We are happy to have created a dialogue about one aspect of opera that needs more financial transparency.”
While agreeing that greater transparency is needed and that audition/application fees need revision, I find the language of the petition to be unnecessarily inflammatory and the design somewhat problematic, as do many of my colleagues (many of whom read it as they sorted through hundreds of applications for the programs they run).
The language of the petition does not distinguish between audition fees, charged for the privilege of being heard, and application fees, charged for the privilege of applying with no audition guaranteed. It lumps the fees together with travel, housing, accompanist fees, and wardrobe, which are cost of doing business and not the responsibility of the companies.
It decries the fees as “unregulated”—but individual companies report only to their respective boards. There is no authority in charge of “regulating” all opera companies in this country. Certainly AGMA signatories must abide by agreements with the union, but many companies are not signatories. It calls for a “crackdown” on entities charging the fees—but other than calling on OPERA America (opera’s national service organization, which has no authority over companies) to influence independent businesses which sponsor audition listings, it offers no suggestions on how this crackdown should be enacted.
It claims that people seeking employment should not be subjected to predatory fees, but competitions and YAPs are not employment opportunities. YAPs are apprenticeships in which participants are paid to sing, but are also provided with special training, coaching, experience, and other benefits which would not be available to regular, full-time employees.
Furthermore, asking private companies to decline advertising which makes up a large part of their bread and butter, thereby putting accessibility to their other services at risk, does not seem like a potentially successful strategy. Fewer audition listings do not help singers, and companies won’t stop charging fees just because they can’t list in Classical Singer or Yap Tracker. They know singers will still come to them.
A better plan would be to encourage companies to find a way to afford audition trips without subsidies from audition fees; as well as to educate and encourage singers to make better decisions about how to spend their resources. After all, no one forces singers to pay audition and application fees. Every singer makes a choice to do so.
Despite its shortcomings, however, the petition is valuable. It has ignited an important discussion about the ethics of audition/application fees and highlighted a serious problem for young singers: the crippling expenses involved in starting a career as a classical singer, a problem the industry cannot ignore. How tragic that the very talent we as an industry seek to nurture and present to the world may be sidelined for lack of funds before it ever has a chance to develop.
The problem, as I see it, begins with the lack of information and training in the way the business actually, currently works. Talented young singers often emerge from university with newly minted degrees but little practical preparation or plans for how to develop into professionals.
Additionally, it is difficult for young singers to have a developed perspective about where they may fit into the professional world. They have been able to compare their skill set to only a relatively small group of competitors in school or training programs. They get most of their information about their development from their voice teachers and coaches, who may or may not be well connected to the current industry. They have little information about how the business is funded or how auditions work. Most believe their best shot at beginning their careers is to get into a Young Artist Program, and many of them simply begin throwing money at any and all of them.
It’s a soapbox issue for me. My sideline, the Business of Singing, is dedicated to helping close this education gap, and I often work one on one with singers who find themselves spinning their wheels, unable to progress as they would like in their careers due in large part to this lack of understanding. I also hear frequently from opera company and YAP administrators who are frustrated by this. It hinders their efforts as well as those of singers.
Keith Wolfe, executive director at Fort Worth Opera Festival (which does not charge audition fees), says that when reviewing applications, he often finds that singers don’t pay attention to their stated needs for the season and submit applications even when there is no opening for their voice types. “The responsibility goes both ways in making sure you fit the needs of the company,” he says.
“I am quite sure that the majority of people who oppose audition fees have zero idea of the actual expense and time—uncompensated extra time on top of everyone’s full-time work—that a yearly audition tour entails,” says coach and conductor Kathleen Kelly. “Before you react to that statement, let me add that this cluelessness is endemic throughout the business, at all levels, and can be found in every type of musician. Far, far too few of us have even the most basic idea of how our work is funded and who is paying for what.”
“Singers need to better self-select the programs that are realistically within their reach right now (and research to see which ones are not in the up and up!),” says soprano and University of Houston voice professor Cynthia Clayton.
“Companies can help by putting up bios and performance videos of the level of singers they hire (and some do this already). Until self-selection improves, companies will be inundated with applications that are simply wishful thinking, denial, or just clueless about where they fit in, developmentally and talent-wise.”
Where are students to get this knowledge? This is part of the problem. Universities and conservatories, generally speaking, are not doing a good job of training singers to be business savvy. Young singers entering the industry are often already loaded with debt and faced with massive expenses to get the career for which they have trained off the ground. Yet they frequently possess little-to-no practical business training and sometimes have been given advice that is out-and-out wrong.
No one has told them that they are starting a small business and need funding, knowledge, and a practical plan. No one has formally educated them on how they’re going to support themselves and pay down their massive debt while they try to climb the next rung up the career ladder. It’s overwhelming for these young singers, and they often just don’t know where to turn for advice. Meeting rejection after expensive rejection, many understandably become frustrated or even bitter.
“Either I was being told to grab every opportunity and apply for everything, or I was not being guided at all on what to apply for,” says soprano Christina Rivera. “We are fed ridiculous anecdotes of application, audition experiences, and success stories through strange and fateful events and coincidences. We are told that it is a crapshoot and that we must ‘get out there’ and not be swayed by rejections—that it is ‘part of the business.’ We already read bios of singers getting into major programs with no degree or little-to-no training from remote parts of the world. Therefore, many young singers are already going into this with minimal foresight but a whole lot of gumption.”
“This past year I did a gig with a handful of singers still in the ‘YAP-lication’ part of their careers and overheard a lot of complaining about app fees and feeling ‘victimized’ by the process,” mezzo soprano Alissa Anderson confides. “Along with the complaining, there did not seem to be much awareness as to which of these companies these singers should actually be applying to based on their experience and skill level. It seemed like they were either throwing their money at dozens of audition opportunities with abandon or assuming it was all a racket and not applying to anything.”
Anderson’s statement reflects the increasing polarization between singers and administrations. Now, more than ever, young singers seem to feel preyed upon by their own industry. And lacking the information or even the skill set to obtain it, they sometimes begin to see every administrator as an adversary who takes their hard-earned money and gives nothing in return, except to those lucky few who win a slot in the YAP or the competition. A general presumption that administrators don’t care about their situation or their challenges seems to be developing among many young singers.
Language and rhetoric in discussions on social media reflect this—although, to be fair, many singers also defend the administrators and the system even while calling for reasonable reform in audition/application processes. Still, the voices of those who feel battered by the process are loud and passionate and they bring to light the second part of the problem: many companies are dependent on these fees to fund audition trips. And while many (but certainly not all) singers are willing to pay a modest fee to audition, they are less sanguine about paying merely to have their applications processed. A lack of transparency about how the funds are used and how much it costs to fund an audition tour fuels singers’ resentment.
“I think it’s unethical to take financial advantage of people just because they are talented and passionate about what they do,” one singer responded to a discussion about audition fees. Another insisted that companies can “absolutely afford” New York audition trips and have “absolutely no reason” to charge audition fees. “They are obviously intent on making a profit out of it, which I find sickening,” she wrote. Yet another bemoaned the observation that “a lot of people feel like it’s not just a competitive business but also, often, a rigged business—rigged against singers,” adding, “but of course, that’s not 100 percent of the business.”
One frustrated singer raged against having to spend fees for rejection, no refunds, and no feedback. “How are we supposed to learn and improve upon something if we don’t know what was missing? I find it depressing, discouraging, and stressful. Especially these days with the economy going the way it is. . . . I want to sing and live in music, but I don’t want to be at mom’s or homeless.”
“It is disgraceful to suck the last $5 that already poor artists and musicians have in their pockets to pay just to submit their application,” wrote a commenter on the Opera Candy website. “It’s a shameful practice that should be disbanded.” Another commenter added, “Most of these companies know who they are going to hire, have those singers flown to the audition site in some cases, and the hundreds of other candidates are just killing themselves to audition for maybe one opening. The entire opera industry is about privilege.”
These are strong and sometimes bitter opinions, but not entirely unjustified. Many singers have application or audition war stories which have left them feeling taken advantage of if not cheated.
One such singer shared some of her own war stories. “I have personally auditioned for a pay-to-sing program where one of the lead soprano roles was advertised as available, only to be filled by the director’s wife, who gave birth the week of the auditions. (I’d really like to know if she paid the $65 fee to apply!) I have received rejection letters with ‘feedback’ that included arias not on my list, meaning I got someone else’s comments and someone else got mine; acceptance letters at my address where the inside letter was addressed to someone else; and no letter of acceptance or rejection, where months down the line I was included on an e-mail about flights to Italy, which involved trying to figure out if I was actually supposed to be accepted or they just offered me a spot after they made that mistake! In addition, the steep fees, lack of guidance from profs about which level singer should be applying to what, etc., make the business of it completely overwhelming to singers.”
Two singers wrote me separately regarding a competition associated with an opera company. They paid the $65 application fee and applied on time, and the deadline was later extended—and both singers were rejected from the competition but invited to pay an additional $65 to apply for the company’s summer Young Artist Program. One singer was told that he had originally been shortlisted for the competition, but someone who applied during the extended deadline was a better candidate and was given his slot. On further investigation, he was told that the competition and summer festival are separate entities, although the competition awards include monetary contracts for the festival, and that application funds supplemented the awards and the contracts. While there may be no actual wrongdoing here, it’s easy to see how a singer would feel taken advantage of and how this sort of practice could contribute to an adversarial attitude between singers and administration.
In discussions with my colleagues who are established in the profession, and even younger working singers in the early years of their careers, we’ve agreed that we don’t recall this kind of “us vs. them” mentality when we were beginning our careers. It seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon and is perhaps related to the state of the economy, the cost-cutting measures many companies are having to take just to stay afloat, the massive debt many young people now incur in an attempt to educate themselves, and the general lack of work for college graduates in all professions.
But this “us vs. them” mentality is quite unhealthy and counterproductive for singers and companies alike. We should not have an adversarial relationship with the people responsible for our training and, eventually, our jobs. They are, after all, fellow lovers of the art who are just as dedicated to the genre as the performers and who make it possible for us to work. And while there certainly are companies, competitions, training programs, and individuals who are unscrupulous in their business dealings and who take advantage of some singers’ naïveté, those who advocate for young singers take great offense at being lumped into one stewpot with the charlatans.
“I find the petition overly simplistic and inflammatory and particularly take offense at the word ‘predatory,’” says Laurie Rogers, director of Young Artist Programs and head of music staff at Saratoga Opera (responding while she waded through a record number of applications for the 2015 season). “While that may describe some shady competitions who charge triple-figure fees, it categorically does not describe the traditional Young Artist Programs who mostly charge between $30–$40. We are not getting rich off the backs of young singers, which is what the petition implies. . . . I am rather rankled by the accusations being hurled around about incompetent administrators, poor budgeting choices, ‘predatory’ fees, etc. Very few opera companies are rolling in it these days. Budgets are stretched precariously thin. Nobody is getting rich off of this.”
Rogers is also vocal in her dislike of the popular term “PFO,” which singers have long used as a darkly humorous description of their rejection letters. It does not, she says, reflect the spirit with which she and her colleagues deliver these rejections.
Darren Keith Woods, general and artistic director of Fort Worth Opera Festival, also defended his company’s deeply involved audition processing practices—which involve two employees sorting through 800 applications (including sound clips) for four spots before adding Woods to the mix, more days spent scheduling auditions and accounting for hundreds of manager recommendations, and audition tours lasting two to three weeks. All those involved in the process are at the director level. “I know Laurie Rogers, Michael Heaston [head of music staff and assistant coach/accompanist at Glimmerglass Opera], Bob Tweten [conductor and head of music staff at Santa Fe Opera], and many other companies do the same,” writes Woods. “It is not frivolous—if someone has concrete evidence to the contrary, I would love to see it.”
“When professionals take the chance to try and communicate about the process, they often get corrected and second guessed by people who have very strong ideas about how it should all work based on . . . well, not based on experience. I’m more than a little flabbergasted by that,” said Kelly.
So, what can be done to overcome this destructive “us vs. them” mentality?
I believe that the solution is multifaceted. I believe it begins with better business education for singers—educating them about how the business currently works and teaching them to be better consumers and businesspeople themselves—and continues with greater transparency and an improved audition process from the YAPs, competitions, and pay-to-sing programs. A respectful dialogue between singers and administrators is an important part of any attempt at reform.
In the next installment, we will examine various proposals for reforming the audition process.
