The Waiting

The waiting is the hardest part.  I have done all of my auditions for the year (although I am trying to do one more in May), and now there is nothing left to do but wait for the last of them to get back to me.  It has been another year of progress, but another year of frustration as well.  It feels as though I have gone nowhere.  The next step has not yet been made.  In some respects I don't know if I know what the next step truly is.  I continue to work on my technique, characterization, languages, etc., but I am still not making that next level.  I read something today that sparked a thought in me.  It was a Lenten reflection from Fr. Robert Barron and he said this:  

"I suppose we human beings have always been in a hurry, but modern people especially seem to want what they want, when they want it.  We are driven, determined, goal-oriented, fast-moving.  I, for one, can't stand waiting.

But is it possible that we are made to wait because the track we are on is not the one God wants for us?  Maybe we're forced to wait because God wants us to seriously reconsider the course we've charted, to stop hurtling down a dangerous road."

This struck me hard today.  

I have been on this course for about a decade now, and am content to continue on this path if it is what I am truly called to do.  The waiting, though, is unbearable.  

I don't often talk about my faith on this blog, but in the last few years, months, and especially weeks, I have become more and more deeply ingrained in my faith.  I pray for my vocation as a singer daily, and I see affirmations of it often.  There are other times, like currently, where I feel as though I am in a void.  It is interesting that this Lent, my prayer life has been flashing bright neon signs at me that say "DETACHMENT;" perhaps this is what I need to do in order for my true vocation in singing to shine forth.  Detach myself from the desire.  Detach myself from the pride associated with pursuing this career.  Detach myself from the thinking that I am solely responsible for my success in this field.  

Halfway Through!

I am about halfway through my Kickstarter campaign at this point and I have reached 34% of my goal!  This is great news!  The unfortunate news is that I seem to have stagnated in my fund raising.  For this reason, I am starting my blog post this month with a plea to my readership; please consider helping me reach my goal.  If everyone can simply pledge $10 I will easily make my goal in time.  That is the price of only 2 lattes!  So, please help me attain my goal!

Click here to jump to my Kickstarter page!

In other news, I have a benefit event for the Cadenza Workshop that I am singing at the Saturday in Buffalo, NY.  On this program I am singing one aria and one duet with the program director, which is slightly intimidating.  I have prepared well, but I am going through some vocal difficulties which may be due to allergies.  Regardless I will do my best and give it my all.

A couple of weeks after this event, I have a recital on June 29 back home in Rochester.  This was originally going to be a fund raiser, but due to some conflicts that is no longer the case; the recital will function as a thank you to all those who have donated to my Kickstarter, which ends the night prior to the recital.  CD's will be available of this recital and can be reserved by donating $25 to the Kickstarter campaign.

Immediately following the holiday in July, I will begin my two programs for this summer.  I am a little overwhelmed with the amount of music I have had to learn, but I feel like I am in a good place and will be well prepared by the time I get to my first program on July 7.

Spanish is coming along slowly; I am attempting to get more consistent about working on the language including listening to a Spanish Pandora station.  I am not sure how much this actively helps me, but it does reinforce the things I do know when I am consciously paying attention to them.  I have noticed that I am beginning to understand more spoken and written word in Spanish, and I give LingQ all the credit for enabling that to happen.  For such a simple, and somewhat controversial system, it really does produce measurable results in language learning in a relatively short amount of time.  I suggest everyone check it out!

Thank you to all of you who have donated thus far to my Kickstarter campaign!  Your support is much appreciated.  Again I beg everyone else to please pledge to enable me to get my singing career off the ground, $10 from everyone will make my goal achievable.

Challenges and Excitements

It begins this week.  On Friday, I have my first YAP audition of the year.  This audition is for Ohio Light Opera.  I am both anxious and excited about this audition.  Anxious because of my last audition experience and because I have to have a monologue prepared, which is a new thing for me.  Excited because I feel like I have a lot to offer and that this year will be the year my career starts.  It has been a challenging last couple of weeks and I have realized some things that I didn't think were going to be such a problem when I started the audition process this year.

I have been denied auditions to a number of programs.  To date I have been denied auditions for 56% of the applications I have submitted, with 31% of programs having not yet responded one way or the other.  While I cannot say for certain what the reason is behind this, I believe it is due to a lack of experience.  When I was younger I was told that there were two ways to start a career in this field:

1.)  Go to grad school and make connections through the school's teachers.
2.)  Go straight into YAP's out of undergrad and make your own connections.

In that I was tired of schooling after undergrad I choose to take route 2.  The problem though, is that I also went through a technical change which led to a reclassification of my voice and three years without any stage credits.  So now, I am going to have to travel a very narrow path this year it seems, which may end up including a pay-to-sing opportunity, rather than a true YAP.  Ultimately I have faith in my process and in divine providence that I will be successful in attaining my goals.

My German is still progressing slowly but surely.  I have adopted a more intensive reading approach based on Dr. Arguelles' method of focusing on texts in which the percentage of unknown words is kept low so that you can focus on them and really ingrain them in your brain faster.  There is obvious upside and downside to this.  The upside was already mentioned; it is easier to get words to stick in your memory because you only need to focus on maybe five words instead of 20 or 30.  The downside is that it slows down the process considerably.  At this point my goal is to add approximately 10 new words to my known words total.  This may seem trivial but over the course of a month, that ends up being about 2,000 words if I am consistent with my five day work plan.  This will put me right about the same amount of known words as I have in French, which gives me a pretty good handle on the language.  I was hoping to be able to do more with German than I did with French since I had an extra four months, but with my wedding and auditions this year it just wasn't possible to spread myself out anymore.