Over a period of years, first as a professional singer, then as a teacher of advanced students, I have become convinced that the possibilities of the human voice and the act of singing are vastly greater than the limitations we accept in the traditional career path. I set out on an odyssey, which has been a rich and fruitful pathway.
I invite you on a journey in the next few months, via the magazine and at the upcoming Classical Singer Convention, with the intent that you discover new dimensions of your own powers and choices. The articles will prepare you, with some new understanding, and some new questions; the experiential workshops will provide explorations into personal answers.
I am by nature a burrower, and as I encountered troubling elements of the status quo in the world of professional singing, I began digging. Your Classical Singer editor asked me to write about the root-rattling rewards of a decade of that digging. These include the standard accumulation of books, tapes, videos, etc., piles of notes from workshops, conversations, seminars, and endless hours of debate and discussion with myself.
The questions that began to niggle at me as a professional singer grew to proportions of real discomfort as a teacher of advanced students, and they came to full flower as a university professor, eventually wielding a torturous force sufficient to cause me to resign from my university job in order to pursue some solutions to a problem that had become intolerable to me.
That altered path explains in part why this morning I completed a full reading of an issue of Classical Singer, a publication that concerns a world I had set aside, that had been good to me, but which I found had done damage to many others. As I read honest and to-the-point interviews and articles, I marveled at the resources now available to the professional singer and those who aspire to become part of that dizzying, frustrating, and painfully, intoxicating world. I found my current singer/teacher self dangling somewhere among CJ’s editorial (and her experience with an autistic nephew), Katrina Hays’ Finding Joy in Small Places, and Marion Gough’s most impressive The Healing Power of Music. My sense is that there is need for a linking, an integration of currently disparate pieces and perhaps a new horizon for today’s singers. To do that will require plumbing the depths of the question posed in the title, “Why Singing?”
Learning how to sing takes a long time. Learning what to sing takes an enormous investment of resource. Learning where and when to sing develops out of the other two, and becomes its own challenge. The “Why sing?” question, however, is rarely asked, much less explored.
Be brutally honest. Why did you start singing? Why are you singing now? Some answers are obvious, and the rest are always individual, personal, and often deeply touching, but being brutally honest about the question is difficult and leads to many other equally difficult questions. After a decade of passionate and fruitful pursuit of this why question, I am convinced that the world of the singer—and the larger world as a result—could be altered, expanded, invigorated, and made kinder by a generation of singers with a deepened view of their work on Planet Earth.
Audacious? Perhaps, but then we singers are known for our audacity. Why not? At this point my view is from outside the singing career stream, and I have nothing to fear from my own audacity. It’s a great feeling to be fully authentic and to have something that has the possibility of being authentically valuable to others. My job is to pose some questions this month, some of them tough, and then add a few things next month to prompt some expanded personal inquiry and expansion in those giant, electrified hearts of singers. Here are a few of those questions:
IS THE PATIENT THRIVING?
If the human voice is truly the fundamental expression, an “acoustic fingerprint of the soul,” the evolution of a singer could be expected to lead to ever-increasing satisfaction and well-being.
Does it? Are you feeling an increasing sense of satisfaction and well-being as you go forward in your career? If not, why not?
HOW COSTLY IS THE ADDICTION?
The artistic experience, according to a famous educator I once heard, can be 50 times greater than a drug experience. He was of course a proponent of arts education, as we all are, but an arts addiction can be real, also. Why do we get hooked on the singing itself?
As a fan of M. Scott Peck’s writing, I was intrigued with the notion presented in his self-exposing autobiographical book, In Search of Stones, that we are all addicts; that some addictions are more damaging than others and some more acceptable in the society than others, but all are addictions, regardless.
Think about it. It’s not just the intoxication of fame and glory, but the act of singing itself that gets us. A singer with laryngitis is a walking identity crisis! And presuming that vocal addiction is a reality, what is its cost? Is there a similarity between an addict’s dependence on a drug supplier and our need for those able to provide us with our fix?
HOW MANY LADDERS? HOW MANY WALLS?
From our first childhood performances in front of bedroom mirrors, dreaming of greater things, through graduate training and performances with operas and symphonies, each of us is keenly and perpetually aware of the ladder we are climbing, one rung at a time. What happens to those who get far enough up the ladder to see that, after all that money and time and effort (oops!) it’s leaning against the wrong wall? (“This fast pace is killing me!” “What it gives is much less than what it takes!” “All this travel is lonely and exhausting!” “I can’t stand the politics!” etc. ., etc.)
What about those who climb the ladder, and then aren’t invited to play on the roof? How big is the army of experienced, talented, and prepared artists who dropped off along the way? How many of them have the “not quite good enough” brand on their foreheads and spend a lifetime with it there—because there are too many ladders, and not enough walls?
Where do you fit in this picture, and how do you feel about it? Are you content or frustrated? Is it necessary to accept that as “just the way it is”?
IS THERE A PLACE FOR THE 999?
That question emerged gradually from my years as a university professor, when I realized the obvious ratio of 1’s to what I would guess are at least 999 others. You know the 1’s:
The shining few, the rising cream, the ones who from the start are spotted as those who have the whole package; the looks, the talent, the money, the luck, etc., everything needed to get all the way up the ladder, sprout wings and fly. It is presumed that many of you reading this article are 1’s.
I heard a famous baseball player asked on in a broadcast interview about the chances of a young baseball player making it to the big leagues. His answer: about one in 10,000. I have also heard that the chances of winning at the blackjack table at a casino are about 16% percent. Now, as one example of many, consider the number of gifted, capable winners, not just contestants, in the annual Met auditions around the country. How many of those gifted, skilled winners (the 1’s) are chosen to move ahead?
Get the picture? That’s hundreds of 1’s left behind, hoping to be acknowledged!
Remember the wonderful children’s story about “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where the emperor had been hoodwinked into thinking he had a wondrous new set of clothing, when in reality he was parading for the people in the nude, and only one honest little child dared say the truth? Bringing that principle to our discussion, then, if we focus on the 999 capable, trained, and eager singers, instead of the 1’s, do we find perhaps that the Emperor emperor is not fully clad?
Are we kidding ourselves? For teachers, engineers—even doctors, who hold lives in their hands—and many other professions, it is sufficient to be good enough. Must singers all be extra-extraordinary? And when the supply of even the extraordinary 1’s over-reaches the demand, what is the outcome?
TO NARROW OR TO BROADEN?
In the academic world, the pathway toward excellence, refinement, and new information is an ever-narrowing process. I was in attendance at a national choral convention with my husband where a prestigious award was given to a young university scholar for a paper, the title of which was Crossroads of Performance Practice and Theory in 16th Century Germany. I wholeheartedly salute the scholar. It’s truly amazing to know so much and be able to research and write to such a fine point. Obviously, he reached his academic goals. The information may be of practical value to some, and entirely appropriate and praiseworthy in the world of fine scholarship, but has precious little to do with life in the everyday world.
The same danger exists for the singer, who may emerge from a university program capable of doing everything required to qualify for a degree, yet less and less able to see purpose and possibility, unable to see the forest for the trees, and unable to access the roots from which the forest springs.
Almost comically, the issue goes even deeper in today’s world. It’s no longer just about not seeing the forest for the trees. We are now (forget the forest!) in hot pursuit of understanding the DNA structure in the eyeball of the bug on the leaf on the branch of the tree. As a society we have gained a great deal by such hair-splitting inquiry, but what have we lost in the process?
How does this apply to singing and our potential for usefulness in our fragmented society? In climbing the ladder (from our first question), the air gets thinner and thinner, and many are lost along the way, thinking they have failed, when in fact the problem may be simply a narrowed view of the singer’s world, where opera and concert singing become the world, rather than small but important satellites. We may have erroneously, unintentionally reversed the true picture, putting such adulation and focus on the 1’s and the ladder and the wall that we have missed most of the story. And where is the rest of the story (the roots, the forest) to be found?
A friend recently gave me pause with the observation that, “The the difference between good and great isn’t really all that much.” I agree. If we have a ratio of 999 good singers to one great singer, how might that scenario be altered? And who is going to change it?
There are other questions, but those may be the most pressing. For the purposes of this article, let’s turn to an examination of the paradigm concept.
Evolution is a fact in every field, in every person. We evolve. Our professions evolve. Our philosophies evolve. And every now and then it’s important to re-examine the paradigm—the matrix , the soup —from which we operate. It hasn’t been that long since most of America was rural. Music was an occasional luxury. The requirements of life were basic: food, clothing, and shelter—no CD’s, no radios, no TV, and big concert halls only in the big cities. A really good singer would be the one who sang for church and the occasional funeral or wedding, and training to become a highly accomplished professional singer would be available to only a handful in the entire country.
Life has changed. The opportunity to have a talent recognized and refined is available to not just to a handful, but to thousands. And the paradigms from which we operate have developed gradually, along with the changing musical scene. As the supply of excellent singers has continued to grow larger, the paradigms have narrowed. As examples, consider the following:
1. Only the perfect need apply. (Flawless technique, under 30, slim, doctorate preferred, good looking, unencumbered, fully developed repertoire, large voice, money to establish a career, etc., etc.)
2. There is important singing, and unimportant singing, judgments made by the elite in the process of preparing more of the elite to become elite. (Reminds me of a Dave Barry quote on music: “In matters of musical taste, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, and yours is wrong!”)
3. Art is the goal. Only significant artistic experiences are worthwhile, since singing exists for artistic purposes only.
4. In the pursuit of excellence as a singer, career options become increasingly narrow, leading almost exclusively to opera.
The above examples are not necessarily negative. They just grew. And they have for the most part served a segment of the society well, mostly those who had the resources to be trained in skill and discriminating tastes.
In daring to ask whether the four paradigms, and others not included above, could use some overhaul, we may find inspiration by looking outside the world of singing for some answers. Scientist/philosopher Ken Wilber has written extensively about the concept of holons, wherein each dimension of growth is depicted as a sphere, a whole, which in turn grows, not abandoning but transcending and including the former holon. The model is a nest of concentric spheres, endless in potential, and applicable as a framework for growth in any area. For singers, we can view the model from two perspectives:
First: In our narrowing focus on that bug on the leaf on the branch of the tree rather than on the forest, we are in danger of forgetting the roots (the transcended but included holon), their wisdom, their crucial influence on our progress, and the need of those roots for nourishment.
Second: If we adopt the transcend-and-include model, we have a choice as to whether to continue to (1) be reactive, accepting things as they have evolved, or (2) to take a hand in influencing the expanding holon, with endless possibilities. .
Which leads me to ask one last set of questions:
WHERE IS THE POWER?
In a recent Parade Magazine article, Dr. Ben Carson, a renowned neurosurgeon, wrote:
“Animals are victims of circumstance. They can only react to their environment. But humans, thanks to our frontal lobes, can plan, strategize and exercise control over our environments. We don’t have to … simply react.”
If singing an important force in the world, why and to whom does it matter? And if it is an important force, is the life of the individual singer compatible with that importance? Who is in charge of the singer’s remote control? Who pushes the buttons? Who gets to decide when and what the singer sings? How much time do most singers spend waiting for others to beckon? If the singer is contented with the answers to those questions, all is well. If not, however, why not, and what is the key to the next dimension of growth, the next holon?
It is no secret that concerts, recitals, school training, etc., have become peripheral in our society, expendable leaves on a large tree of higher priorities. But where do we find, or rediscover the roots, the fundamentals, the basic foundation of what we know to be a great force?
Could it be that the discovery of that answer, and its incorporation into the lives of singers, might occasion some refreshing changes? Where, indeed, does the power lie?
Think about it. See you next month.
