I’m ending my 4+ year working relationship with one of my clients. It’s just time. I have too many other jobs. I can’t attend to his projects properly, and that makes me feel perpetually guilty and frustrated. But just because it’s the right thing to do, and will be good in the long-run doesn’t make it any easier.
It does sort of feel like a break-up. After all, I do like the guy personally, which is more than I can say for another of my clients who drives me nuts. I don’t think it’s common to find people who you really click with, so it’s important to value those relationships when they come along. But liking and respecting someone isn’t a good enough reason to keep working on projects that don’t suit you. After money and loyalty, you still have to consider the actual work, and the work no longer interests me.
He said something the other day that struck me. We were IM’ing and he wrote:
you are more of an artsy person than i understood and less of a lawyerish person than i guessed
I’m not sure I realized that was true until fairly recently. Since singing picked up, I have been feeling much more like a singer and much less like a … worker bee, for lack of a better term. Until recently, I have had to keep singing on the sidelines while working this job or others to pay the bills. I have worked as an admin for a real estate agent, as an admin at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, as a server in several restaurants, as a FOIA analyst for the Coast Guard, and as a legal assistant. None of these was a dream job, though they all had their certain perks. read more…
Many vocalists and voice teachers talk about the voice as a ladder. Each note has its own rung, and to sing properly, you must find where each rung sits. If you try to sing a note with the wrong placement, it’s like slipping off the ladder, or skipping a rung on your way up or down. It can be done, but it’s not safe or pretty.
I had rehearsal yesterday with Wendy and Harvey. We went through the duets first. What fun! I’m so excited about doing a truly collaborative recital, not just be singing “my” stuff and Wendy singing “her” stuff. We’re doing 6 duets interspersed between other solo song repertoire. Arias get all the glory, but duets are inevitably more fun because you get to harmonize and play off of one another. It’s always more exciting and less scary to be singing with someone else on stage with you.
As we moved on to my solo repertoire, I found myself “clicking in” to the ladder. Muscle memory kicked in. I started remembering how to sing. Things felt a little different, a little foreign because I haven’t prepared for a recital in quite a while, but also familiar. It was a relief. Like, oh, yeah, I do know how to sing. It also helped that I was having a good vocal day, which any singer can attest happens seemingly rarely and never for performances. read more…
So. I’m singing a joint recital in 11 days. Yikes.
I’ve been doing what seems to be my pattern when I’m not in school or don’t have a performance goal ahead of me. I don’t practice, and then I panic. So yesterday I practiced. Clearly, it’s time to get a new teacher, new goals. Fortunately, most of the music is stuff I’ve already performed. But I need to get back up to speed and polish things up to get them performance-ready again.
I have a rehearsal this afternoon with my collaborators. Then we’ll have a run-thru next week. I’ll probably beg for another session if we can fit one in. I like to be prepared. In the meantime, I need to sketch out a practice schedule for myself so I can go into this feeling confident. Harvey wants it to be low-stress, but I’m unconvinced that I can simply not worry about it. I think I was seduced into thinking I could just coast on through because he’s so generous with singers and seemingly relaxed, but there’s a chance I may end up with egg on my face if I don’t kick it into high gear. Nothing has to be memorized, either, which has also given me a false sense of security. Just because it doesn’t have to be memorized doesn’t mean I can be any less prepared.
OK, so I’ll be digging in over the next week and a half. My husband thinks I should wear the dress I wore at my last recital. He thinks I need new associations with it. Is this the right occasion? Hm.
I’m finally getting the hang of public transit here. I’ve always found the subway pretty easy to manage, but I still feel the need to check the map now and then. Occasionally I find myself wishing I had one handy on short notice when I walk into a station, a train is pulling up, and I’m unsure of its trajectory since I typically take another line that runs on the same track, or intersects at the same station. More than once, I’ve stepped onto a train assuming one thing and find myself hurtling east instead of south, or going express when I needed local. There are still some stations that confuse the hell out of me, but those are few, and if I’m not in a rush I can decipher the signage and get where I’m going.
One of the most baffling things has been the exit signs. They are very usefully labeled with the intersection and direction, like “SW.” However, this is only relevant if you know which street runs north-south and which runs east-west. Now that I have my bearings better, these signs actually help me walk the right direction on the first try when I exit a station. Miraculous.
I’ve never been a fan of buses, but I have started to see the light. Now that I have to get to the upper east side every week, and sometimes multiple times a week, I have found buses to be invaluable. When one has to cross Central Park, it is good to also have an alternate that goes around it. That place is an event magnet on weekends. I now have routes to the church from the north, south and west. read more…
I went to see Taylor Mac’s new show, The Lily’s Revenge, at HERE Arts Center on Saturday night, which also happened to be Halloween. So many things make this show worth seeing, and overall I highly recommend it.
*This review contains spoilers*
The format is based on the Japanese noh theatre tradition, which is an extended theatrical experience. Lily is 5 acts over about 5 hours. It is an all-evening affair. It’s an event. There are intermissions, during which there are various activities and kyogen performances to watch. There is a “Discussion Disco” where many of the performers hang out, a Flickr photo pool to which you can add your own picture instantaneously, a live Twitter feed documenting tweets about the show, and video testimonials looping on flat screen TVs.
I had never seen Taylor Mac live before, but I had seen a few of his YouTube videos. He is a bundle of energy. Enthusiastic, flamboyant, and immensely likable. He is a riveting performer with an amazingly flexible voice and plenty of things to say. There were times when I wondered how he will keep it up for many weeks, since he’s really putting his voice through its paces, going from what sounds like painful screaming to the most delicate, intimate pianissimos. He is mostly successful in maintaining this dynamic range, though a few times I thought I detected some grit in the louder belt portions. While it didn’t necessarily detract from the effectiveness of the performance, it did occasionally make my throat hurt in sympathy for his vocal folds. read more…
I was asked to sing two funerals this week. That makes one concert contract, 12 masses, one wedding, and two funerals. If that happened every month, I would be making a totally legitimate living singing. Wow. How easy it seems now. I know I can’t guarantee that I’ll continue to get concert gigs every month, and no one can time funerals, but I am on my way towards my original goal of “making a living singing,” whatever that means.
It’s funny when you ask the question, “how much money constitutes a living?” I’m not really sure. I suppose that whatever the base salary of an entry-level worker qualifies. I never said it had to be a good living. The fact that I’m anywhere close to that figure sort of blows my mind. Not that I thought it was an impossible feat, but I thought it would be harder, and for a while, it was. But when you’ve got a steady church job, you make the bulk of that fee fairly easily. It might kill my Sundays, but there’s no better way to spend a few hours than singing, in my view.
And choral gigs are time suckers, but the energy output is pretty minimal, and the pay is good. I made more money singing than at any of my other jobs this month. Cool.
As I do this more, I realize that it’s a job like any other, even if it’s nontraditional and some folks don’t really understand it. It means weird hours, and demands on your time are different than a normal 9 to 5. But I get to sing. At the end of the day, that’s what matters. I really don’t get as much joy from anything else. It is a job, and I am getting used to the idea of valuing my “gift.” That feels good.
So from what I gather the Catholic Church is welcoming more married Anglicans, and will allow a sort of Anglican church within the church. Huh?
I’m all for welcoming and including more people, but for an institution that is based on hundreds of years of tradition and is led by a conservative man who believes we should basically stick to our guns and not change based on pop culture, much less popular opinion, I find this news a little hard to swallow. This seems like nothing more than an attempt to fill our ranks with ever more conservative, homophobic, and gender-biased members. Aren’t these the people the Church is courting, those who are offended by the gay and women clergy and want to harken back to the good old days when gays stayed in the closet, and women stayed voiceless?
One bizarre aspect of the whole idea of allowing married Anglicans to become Catholic priests is that Catholics themselves are still unable to be married and serve as priests. As Andrew Sullivan points out, why should Anglicans get this special treatment, but not our own? I have always thought it strange that someone who is not married, nor can ever be, should be giving marital advice. read more…
The New York Times had a story recently about the risks inherent in fertility treatments. I came across it reading SLOG, in which Dan Savage provided some choice words about the couple who disregarded their doctor’s advice to “reduce” the number of fetuses, causing a difficult sextuplet pregnancy and the eventual death of four of the six babies. The couple decided to “let God do what he’s going to do.” Savage points out that if they were really going to do that, they would have remained childless or adopted.
This story annoyed the crap out of me. I suppose I’m meant to feel sorry for the families who wanted children so desperately that the endured insane medical procedures and were then faced with difficult decisions. It’s sad when children die, and it’s unfair that a woman who desperately wants to be a mother should have to make the decision to kill a fetus because she chose a more economical treatment over one that was safer and less likely to result in multiple embryos. But I find myself without much sympathy for these people. Why, in the context of fertility treatment, is it called “reduction” or “elimination” or even “termination,” but not “abortion”? It’s the same ghastly decision, the same ghastly consequence. And it could all be avoided.
Maybe my biological clock isn’t ticking loudly enough. I just don’t find the biological imperative to leave one’s DNA legacy to be so compelling as to warrant this insanity. Fertility treatments sound awful. They are expensive and stressful. For me, the costs outweigh the benefits here. Remaining childless is an option. Adoption is an option. Mentoring is an option. Babysitting or nannying is an option. Teaching is an option. Ug.
I was chuckling to myself as I watched our beagle sleep today, thinking how cute he is, and how much I love him. I thought that what I feel for him is as close to unconditional love as I may get in this life. I love my husband, of course, but is it unconditional?
The ever-popular Wikipedia makes the distinction between conditional love that is earned, and unconditional love that is freely given. Romantic love would be conditional, then, and not freely given.
It is said that a parent loves his child unconditionally. But is this really true? Does a child love his parent unconditionally? Does the very act of living and interacting create conditions on that love? Is it really possible to separate the person from his actions? Sometimes, I think, yes. But not always. Maybe it depends on the actions. Perhaps it is possible to love an infant unconditionally, but is it possible to love a child with free will and consciousness of his actions without conditions? Not being a parent, I wouldn’t know …
I do know that the idea unconditional love of a god or deity or supreme being is a comforting one. It is something I’m not sure we humans can achieve. But conditional love is good, too. The conditional love in my marriage is satisfying and comforting and wonderful because of the conditions inherent in its existence. It is a two-way street, a constant negotiation, and a bond that is based on growth and experience and not a blind, stagnant fact.
Is unconditional love as big a fantasy as love at first sight?
