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.

Vocal Epiphany!

The last two weeks I have focused almost completely on the music side of my life.  With Rinuccio approaching in a month I have been working feverishly in preparing the role.  As I am beginning sing through the role in one sitting, I noticed at first that my endurance was an issue.  Luckily as with most muscular actions, the brain adapts quickly and I am having less and less issue with consistency getting through the role. In coaching the role for the first time this past week I had a bit of an epiphany.

At a coaching a month or so ago I was told to be careful of my pitch on descending lines as I tended to go out of tune.  I found this to be odd, because I generally don't suffer from pitch problems anymore.  Nevertheless, I have since been paying extra attention to my descending lines to make sure they are in tune.  At my coaching last week, with a different coach who knows me and my voice better, I was told again to be careful of descending lines.  The catch and epiphany however, was that this coach told me that I was coming out of my resonance.  Ah ha!  Upon hearing this I was easily able to address the problem and found things to click much quicker.  I learned that if I come out of my resonance that I sound as though I am out of tune, but it is more that I become flat in tone rather than pitch.  I also learned at this most recent coaching the need for pacing myself.  Admittedly I do not really know how to do this, so I am experimenting on my own and doing the best I can to save my big vocalizing for my most "dramatic" parts of this role.

In addition to Rinuccio, I learned last week that I also need to prepare Tinca from Il Tabarro for the same read through.  This doesn't bother me much, although I am now stuck waiting for a score before I can learn the role.  The estimated delivery time is 10 July, which will give me about three weeks to learn the role.  Luckily, the role is even smaller than Rinuccio.

Since my focus has been so much on this upcoming event my language studies have faltered a bit.  I still listen to radio horeb and speak with my German speaking friend rather regularly and feel that I am in a good place with German still.