My return to Music School

Going back to school and forcing myself to hear intervals and memorize fucking German chords makes me not want to sing. I haven’t wanted to sing for 2 weeks. I have an audition on Tuesday and I could not be less enthused about it. I have barely worked on it and I’m hoping it’s not that apparent but somehow I am worried it will be.

I had to sing my new aria for Opera Workshop and the look on Pamela’s face was like, “what the fuck is she singing?” I had the rhythms all fucked up and probably some of the intonation and she said I was scooping and portamentoing all over the place. Made me feel like a Loser. Makes me feel like I’m not really any good at this and maybe I’ve just spent my whole life trying to do something that is forced and not really natural to me. I’m sure I’ll manage to make some friends who hate what I do too. But maybe it’s best to let them find me.

Except I know that’s not right. I know that’s only half the story. Parts of this are very natural to me. The actual singing has come pretty naturally, even if the coordination has tended to be inconsistent, the actual, pure singing part of his has been natural. The ability to color my voice and make actual music from my soul – that has always come naturally to me, which is why I think it’s hard for me to think of music in the dry clinical terms that music school forces upon you. I’ve always felt that the way music schools approach teaching music and ear training makes me want to run screaming from the room. I guess it’s like going to med school because you want to make people feel better. You want to fix them. You want them to leave better than they came in. And then they put a cadaver in front of you and ask you to pull it apart. While this is part of the learning process, it’s enough to make you puke and faint because the LAST thing you want is to pull dead bodies apart – right? You want to fix living, breathing beings. So, that’s kind of how I feel half the time. Like they’re making me deal with dead things when I soooo desire to work with the live things. And, truthfully, the problem at Rutgers, specifically, is that they don’t really have a program geared towards singing. Their program is general. It’s not targeted. And so, I think singers there aren’t really getting a concentration on some subjects they could really use and getting too much of other things they really don’t need as much. Like, no singer really ever will use the information I’m learning now on the German sixth. Not if you’re singing. Highly unlikely.

Anyway, despite feeling like my first run of the aria was less than wonderful, the woman sitting next to me, the one who’s also been to Mannes, she rubbed my shoulder after and said it was beautiful. I’ll have to make her a friend. I need some new friends and what better friend than one who actually likes what you do? That’s not an ego thing, it’s just if I’m going to make friends, it’s nice to know they’re already on my side. Isn’t that just the way we’re designed? Would you try to make friends with the person who was making nasty faces while you were singing? Not likely.