New Year, New Plans

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

It has been a few months since I have updated the world about my life, I apologize.  The end of 2013 marked some important changes in my singing life.  In the most recent audition season, I sent out nearly 25 applications and was granted five auditions.  I am still waiting to hear back from some of those auditions, but as of right now I have no offers on the table.  In the interest of understanding my situation and furthering my career along, I had a meeting with my voice teacher to discuss the coming year and what we can do.  The answer, primarily, has been to change my repertoire around.  Specifically he told me, "You have to start doing things that other singers struggle with."  With that statement I have officially moved into the Bel Canto repertoire.  My future repertoire finds itself sitting a lot higher, but ultimately feels fairly comfortable in my voice at this point.  I am looking forward to the next year with this repertoire and the possibilities it may bring.

Along those same lines, this year I have decided to really increase my work level towards my career.  This includes more lessons, coachings, study/practice time, and hopefully more performing.  Part of this also concerns my health.  I am about 60 pounds overweight and need to work to lower that number considerably before next season.  All of this change will involve making a new daily schedule to accommodate everything I have to do on a give day, and planning out what I need to work on when I do work.  This year is the year of "working smart."

In the language aspect of my life I have somewhat let that part of my life linger for a while.  This technically should be my year for Russian, but I am contemplating going back and trying to further either my French or German.  This is partly due to practicality and partly due to money.  We shall see where my heart ultimately leads me.  

Coming in like a lion

This has been a rough month for me.  The amount of things I have to do at work, which is when I usually study, has increased considerably and taken away my time that I can work on German.  Suffice it to say that I have not been able to make much progress so far this month.  I have tried to maintain at least one aspect of my study per day though, usually Michel Thomas.  I am in the process of trying to restructure my day so that I can fit in my Assimil and LingQ work daily again.  The one positive from this month thus far is that I am at a basic conversational level in German.  I define this as being able to greet and speak candidly with others about menial, day to day things (i.e. How are you?, What are you doing this weekend?, etc.).  I am very pleased and excited about this, especially since I have not been able to put much time in as of late.  When I can get back to more regular study I anticipate being able to count this language as being fully conversational by mid-summer, which makes fluency by December 31 very attainable.

I am still in a very good place vocally as well.  Since my lesson in February I can feel my voice getting stronger every day.  My A-natural (A4) has really solidified as of late and I am now working on B-flat (Bb4) and B (B4).  Even my repertory has taken a step up as I have begun to earnestly work on "La donna e mobile" and "E la solita storia."  My hope for this session between lessons is to have a reliable B-flat and a workable B natural.  Assuming I keep up my newfound pace, I believe I will definitely be audition ready for the fall.  I have about two months until my next trip to New York City and am planning on having a lesson and at least a couple of coachings while I am down.  Until then, I have much work to do so that I can build on the momentum I have gained from my last lesson.

Big Progress!

I had my first lesson in quite a while this past Friday with Jean-Ronald LaFond.  My lesson this time around was one of discovery and great advancement for my part.  During the course of the lesson I felt myself singing in a way I never had before and I liked it.  It was a great experience for me and we even talked about me doing auditions in the fall if I can get a few more things to line up vocally.  Since I've been home, I have continued to work with the new concepts I was given and can employ them fairly well in my vocalises (at least I think I do), however I am struggling to put these things through into my repertoire work.  This is especially frustrating since I was singing so well at my lesson.  I chalk up my difficulties to the fact that I am not in front of JRL receiving guidance as I am singing.  I will ultimately figure out how to incorporate and synthesize these concepts into my singing and know that if I continue with the work ethic I have been developping that I will be fine.

Linguistically, however, is a different story.  I have had a rough couple of weeks with my language learning time.  This is mainly due to a largely increased workload at my actual job which results in less time for study.  I am hoping that things will slow back down to normal at work next week and that I will be able to get back to my normal routine, otherwise I am going to have to find a new time to study.  This is very frustrating to me because I was on such a good pace with German and now I feel as though I have skidded to a stop.  Luckily I still do manage to get in at least a little time with the language, mostly my Michel Thomas recordings.  Again my mantra is, as always:  Slow and steady wins the race.

Der Plan

As we have started a new year, I have already put in two days of study on my new language for the year, German.  I figure I would outline my basic plan for the year with regards to my acquisition of German.

Resources:
     German with Michel Thomas
     German with Ease by Assimil
     German on LingQ

In general, my goal is to spend ten hours a week studying German over the course of the next year.  As I do not study on my days off from work, that equates to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week.  I will go through one lesson/track per working day with MT and Assimil.  On LingQ, I plan to add approximately 100 known words to my vocabulary every working day.  This is a little bit slower of a pace than I would like on LingQ, but I think it is the best plan for the amount of time I have available to devote to this study.  As I go along I will have to read more and more material to acquire 100 new known words, so ultimately my exposure will grow exponentially as I become more accustomed to the language.

On the side, I plan to watch a German movie every month and listen to some German radio programming every week.  Also, I am going to start praying the Rosary in German and hopefully I will get to the point where I can spontaneously pray in German by the end of the year.  I also have a number of friends and acquaintances who speak German, so I will be practicing my spoken German from a very early stage, as soon as I start to know some more relevant material than:  Der Tee ist kalt.

Based on my previous work in French, I anticipate that I will get to a pretty comfortable place with German by the summer, at which point I will have finished both MT and Assimil.  The rest of my year in German will be spent focusing on listening comprehension and vocabulary building through LingQ.

German does present me with some challenges, the most striking one being that I have practically no previous coursework or study of the language outside of the one month I studied it last year.  With both French and Italian I had taken actual classes prior to my self-study, so I had a little bit of a head-start.  I am excited to see how I do with my first completely self-taught language and hope to be able to use this working plan as model for my future languages.

العربية - 3 أسبوع

This was a frustrating week in my language studies.  My best friend was up from Mississippi and then I traveled to NYC Friday and Saturday.  Thusly, I did not get very much studying in.  I did however, finish one introductory program this week, which was important.

Vocally, my reason behind going down to NYC was so that I could have a lesson.  The lesson was very encouraging.  I realized that I need to adjust my aural image of my voice if I want to progress.  I have noticed that when one goes a long time in between lessons, the progress that is made may be substantial, however to the singer it seems so miniscule.  I had this happen to me Friday at my lesson.  It had been six months since my last lesson and while I felt I had progressed, I was sure that it was minimal at best.  However I was informed otherwise, which is very nice.  I have my new set of things to work on for the next few months.  I plan to get down to the City again the next time JRL is in town and similarly like that for the rest of my time until I move.

Methodology Minute


Scheduling.  It is the bane of everyone's existence.  A long time ago I read an article in Classical Singer magazine which talked about the concept of place-matting.  Unfortunately it was part of a series and I never came across the subsequent articles, but I think I understand the general gist of what the author was getting at.  Essentially, during the course of a day, we all have activities that fall into three categories:

1.)  Must do (High Priority)
2.)  Should do (Medium Priority)
3.)  Like to do (Low Priority)

The average person should have about 16 productive hours with which they can accomplish tasks.  The idea behind place-matting is that at the beginning of your week you should schedule out your entire week's activities.  First, place in your Category 1 tasks (in my case:  work, practice, eating, sleep, etc.) for the entire week.  Then place in your Category 2 tasks (in my case:  language study, exercise, etc.).  Finally add in whatever Category 3 tasks fit into the time left over.

This process of scheduling your entire week by priority ensure that you accomplish the things that are most important every week.  Truthfully, this is something that I struggle with, but since I have posted it on here I am going to try to get myself to commit to this concept and see how I do.  You see that I even schedule sleep into my activities, I think this is very important.  If you set yourself a bedtime then you can guarantee yourself the amount of sleep you need every night.  I also think that it is important to schedule in free time (this can take whatever priority you want it to).  That is not to say that this schedule is inflexible; things happen and opportunities may present themselves at times other than those planned.  However, if you can maintain a schedule most of the time you will see your productivity increase greatly.

A great tool for this concept is Google Calendar.  The Calendar now has a function that can find a free time block to put your activities.  Again, I have not yet started to use this (I intend to tonight) but this will take some of the struggle out of your day.