First things first!

Not long ago a favorite student came to a coaching complaining of ‘having trouble with the interpretation’ of a French song he’d recently been assigned. This isn’t an uncommon complaint in my line of work, particularly coming from a young singer, and particularly when it comes to French.

Though not quite as puzzling as, say, something from the Surrealist camp, the poem in question and its musical setting held its share of elusive imagery and turns of phrase, especially for a student experiencing a first foray (pun intended!) into French mélodie. My student felt the poem lacked specific, tangible images to which he could hold; he longed for something straightforward and direct. After a brief lecture on the importance of working with, rather than against, the style and substance of the poetry (or musical setting, for that matter), we set to work trying to solve the apparent ‘interpretation issues’.

Step one, of course, was to deal with the translation.  A translation can make or break one’s understanding of a poem and, in turn, a song, and I stress to all my students the importance of having a solid, workable translation with them at each and every coaching. I asked my student simply to read the translation I knew he had available. And by the end of the first phrase I knew where the problems with interpretation lay. It wasn’t the interpretation that was eluding him – it was the translation itself!

I have no doubt that my student took the time to translate his poem. I know that he understood what each word meant. I was able to glean from his somewhat halting and circuitous speech that he had a basic (albeit vague) sense of the meaning of each phrase. In short, he had taken the initial steps in his translation work. But the biggest challenge facing him at this stage was actually speaking the text – first in a logical order and, ultimately, in a meaningful, expressive way. Until the basic act of speaking the translation fluently and purposefully was mastered (step one), more specific, detailed aspects of interpretation (along with steps two, three, four …) would continue to elude him.

It’s easy to get caught up in the pressure of all there is to do when we approach a new set of challenges – learning a new song, for instance. We could all use a reminder not to put the proverbial cart before the horse and, instead, master each challenge in its proper order. First steps aren’t only for those of us just learning to walk.; a solid footing – in this case, a translation – is what gets us from one place to the another with confidence and ease.

Getting (re)started

It’s been a busy year. I just wrapped up performances of The Mikado with DePaul Opera Theatre, a project I’d been involved with since mid-April. My semester at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University ended in early May (at some point in the semester I played five recitals in the span of six weeks). I spent all day last Friday, also opening night of The Mikado, playing for several young singers participating in the University Vocal Competition at the 2009 Classical Singer Convention.

Having spent the better part of my adult life in the academic world, my ‘year’ typically begins in September and finishes up in May. I look forward to the summers as a time to re-energize, catch up (on housework, sleep, exercise, time outdoors), and shift my focus back to personal projects and goals. Unless I’m working out of town, I tend to be less busy with day-to-day work obligations, and it’s nice to have time to reflect and regain perspective. This summer’s projects included aria-work in preparation for the fall audition season and plans for an all-Schumann recital at CCPA.

So The Mikado finished up yesterday, and I had been looking at the last show as a sort-of end point for the year: Mikado ends and summer begins. As May drew to a close, though, I found myself booked for a recital at the Chicago Cultural Center (June 15 with Juliet Petrus, soprano), a performance of Dominick Argento’s Pulitzer-Prize winning masterpiece, From the Diary of Virginia Woolf at Elastic Arts Foundation (June 27 with mezzo-soprano Caitlin McKechney). I’ll also be working with DuPage Opera Theatre’s production of L’Elisir d’Amore, which opens in late July. This will be, by far, the busiest summer I’ve had in Chicago since moving here three years ago.

I’m looking ahead at these projects and, once again, it seems like there’s not enough time to get everything learned (this is a common theme on this blog, I’m afraid). I woke up this morning, the first official day of my ’summer season’, eager to get started. Yet I sit here in my studio looking at all there is to do, and I can’t decide where to begin. And I’m avoiding making the decision by blogging about it, instead. But maybe that helps. Maybe taking some time to sit and think and mull isn’t such a bad thing, after all. The work will get done, because it has to. And I’m lucky to be involved with some very worthwhile, rewarding projects, on top of a steady stream of wonderful clients and my three (mostly) adorable piano students. The year isn’t quite over, I guess, but that’s a good thing …

Tips for coaching recitative

Great article appearing on Chris Foley’s blog.

What’s stressing me out

It’s happened again. Everything was going smoothly. I was busy but keeping my head above water and quietly preparing for the various projects I have coming up in March and April. Suddenly, without warning, I woke up one morning and realized that I was utterly swamped and wasn’t sure I’d make it through April. How did this happen? How did it sneak up on me like this?

I have myself to blame for much of it, of course. I spend about 20 hours a week coaching students at a local university; that commitment, along with the time I devote to seeing clients each week, means there’s little time left over for additional projects – recitals, auditions, competitions etc (and the preparation involved for such things). I also have a habit of not being be terribly discriminating about playing recitals, particularly when my students are involved. When my students ask me to perform their recitals with them, I have a really hard time saying, “no”. And, honestly, I’m still really flattered anytime someone asks me to play a recital. So I say, “yes” when I’m really too busy and have no business doing so.

But that isn’t really what got me into trouble this time. I played a recital in February, agreed to a few recitals between March and April (including two chamber music recitals), and was planning to use my ‘extra’ time getting ready to coach and play rehearsals for The Mikado at another local university between the end of April and early June. No worries.

Until I got a call about a rehearsal for an upcoming orchestral concert in Chicago. The two singers involved in this project are extremely well-known artists, and the conductor is someone I’d really like to work with. This is the kind of thing I came to Chicago to do. So, again, I said, “yes” (after negotiating a decent fee, of course), and now I’m in trouble. It’s amazing to me that, after all these years, I still have those weeks – the ones where everything is going smoothly and, poof!, I’m overwhelmed.

This all boils down to ‘the buffer’. I don’t do a good job of building into (or between) my projects the times it takes to recover from one and begin another. I’m also so used to being busy and working according to other peoples’ deadlines that I don’t always take the time to think carefully about how much preparation time a certain project entails. I think about whether the project is interesting to me (usually for musical reasons) or valuable in some other way (it’s my student’s recital, and I want help her do her best work), I think (roughly) about the other things I have going on in that general time frame, and I go with my gut. Lately, my gut keeps saying, “yes”.

I’m not sure how to fix that, but I guess I should start working on it. After all, it’s nice to be busy, and I don’t want that to end. It’s Friday night, and I’m continuing my week-long quest to track down piano/vocal scores of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn – in the orchestral keys (no mean feat!). Tomorrow is Saturday, and I’m headed to the studio for a coaching with a former student who has since moved on to other things but wants my input on some new rep she’s trying out. And then I have a rehearsal with terrific young singer for a competition she’s doing on Monday. At some point before that rehearsal, I have to figure out how I’m going to deal with the horrible page turns in “Schlagende Herzen” …

Not a Hobby

I read Penelope Trunk’s blog fairly often. She’s an engaging writer, she offers interesting and insightful career advice, and she always makes me think – even when I disagree with her.

This is from Penelope’s Feb. 6 (2009) entry, ‘How to Build a Career as an Artist‘: “I do not think that people who want to create art need to get paid to do it. Do you get paid to have sex? No. Same thing. You love it, but you just do it after work. And sometimes, if you are driven mad by it, you leave work in the middle of the day for it.”

Penelope goes on to offer advice to the ‘potential artist’ about what his or her priorities should be in making art. In short, if you’re an artist you’ll find a way to make art, and you don’t necessarily have to quit your ‘day job’ in order to do that. In fact, you shouldn’t, especially if you’re having trouble making ends meet. “People who need to make art make art no matter what”, she writes, and devoting yourself to art full time does not necessarily make you a better artist. This is true.

The problem I have with this blog post is two-fold: First, Penelope doesn’t write about how important it is for artists to market themselves (or hire someone to do it for them) and treat their art as a business. We live in a society whose interest in art continues to wane, and we can’t take for granted that, just because we make something, someone will want to see/hear it, much less PAY for it. Most professional performing musicians I know are grateful to be paid to do what they do, and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to create those opportunities for themselves.

The larger problem, though, is Penelope’s apparent failure to see the making of art by a serious artist as, first and foremost, a JOB. For most of us, it isn’t something that we are able simply to do after work or on weekends, and it isn’t something that we do only when we feel inspired. We do it because we’ve committed our lives to it, it’s our job, and we even make time to do it on the days when we don’t really want to.

Penelope writes that a real artist finds a way to make art, period. I would argue that an artist who’s truly driven to make art also will find a way to survive on the art he or she makes, especially if a day job gets in the way of that happening. Even those artists who struggle to make ends meet solely on their art (like most aspiring singers I know) and have to get a day job in order to survive are still careful to find a job that will allow them the flexibility they need in order to take auditions, etc. The most successful of them treat their art as a second job. They never treat it as a ‘hobby’ or, like sex, simply as something fun to do after work.

There are other aspects of Penelope’s argument that I object to, not the least of which are some of the responses generated by the post. Take a look yourselves, though, and see what you think. It’s interesting food for thought, if nothing else.

Therapy for Overwhelmed Pianists

Hi everybody. This is Jerad, and this is my first blog entry. I’ve arrived, very early in the year, at that gut wrenching, stressful point where I’m not sure it’s all going to get done. I’m staring at three major works, three concerts, and my first professional recording, all of which need to be learned within the next month. So instead of using my free Saturday morning to work on this music, I’m writing.

After a week of worrying about how it all was going to get done, I realized that these projects were going to happen, regardless of my level of preparation, and that no magical force was going to take any of them away. (I’m still up for that, by the way!) So on Thursday I sat down and became an accountant. Using the pragmatic side of my brain, I broke everything down. All in all, I have to learn about 450 pages of music by mid March. (This number is enough to make me want to actually BE an accountant!) I’ve set very small goals: 10 pages of this work, 5 pages of that. It’s painfully specific, which sets my mind at ease, knowing it’s going to get taken care of. 450 pages doesn’t seem so bad when I know that today’s goal is only 20. I’d rather learn those 20 pages the right way than continue to plow through music aimlessly, never getting anything out of it. I’m learning music considered by some to be the greatest works every written. Why not enjoy it?

I’ve grown too much over the past 10 years of my life to resort to old preparation habits. I’m continuing to learn what works, and what causes me more stress. I’ve realized that putting in the proper preparation now, will result in a much more enjoyable and artistic experience later.

New Directions

So Nick, Jerad, and I were sitting around one afternoon discussing the future of our business. We opened Collaborative Works in 2006 as a way to offset some of the difficulties and, frankly, fears, associated with starting free-lance careers in Chicago. The past three years have brought challenges and successes, and we’ve been lucky to be able to have each other to share them with.

As we were talking today about new directions for Collaborative Works, we spent a lot of time reflecting on how important it has been to our individual careers that we’ve been able to rely on each other in so many different ways. Our studio is in the heart of Chicago’s Loop; we each have a private studio equipped with a grand piano, and there’s a waiting-room/office area, where we deal with the day-to-day business stuff and where clients wait for their appointments. It’s really cozy, incredibly convenient, and there’s no way I could have afforded that kind of space downtown had I been on my own.

(I guess I should mention what it is exactly that we do. We’re vocal coach/accompanist-types, who met at the University of Michigan, where we were working on various graduate degrees in Collaborative Piano with the incomparable Martin Katz.)

In addition to sharing office space, we share equally in the running of the business. I’m horrible at dealing with money (and I really hate it), so Jerad and Nick take care of the financial aspects of things. When one of us is looking for an aria, chances are one the other two has a copy. I was conflicted about how to deal with a problem a client was having recently, and I had two trusted business partners, intimately familiar with my line of work, to bounce ideas off of.

So we’ve figured out, sort-of, this new direction we’re headed, and that new direction involves a blog. Why a blog? The free-lance world can be a really lonely place, and we realize just how lucky we are to have had a support network already in place when we moved to Chicago. We’d love to share that experience with a broader community. We’ve learned a lot of interesting things during the last three years, and we know there are a lot of folks out there having similar experiences that we’d love to learn from, too.

We hope you’ll check back here from time to time, and we’re excited to share your comments! Feel free to visit Nick, Shannon, and Jerad at www.collaborativeworks.org.