babydramatic_1950

My mother always defined herself as a writer, although her published writings were sparse. She wrote one book under her own steam, a memoir about her time in Paris the year before I was born, and then, after my father died, various small books about personal health, which were an assignment from a publisher. Otherwise she mostly just wrote encyclopedia entries. She was always pushing me to write, something in which I had minimal interest. I hated school and I hated writing term papers, but I will always be eternally grateful to her for (after watching me struggle – at the age of 10 – to write a rather lengthy term paper by hand, in what’s now referred to as “cursive”) walking me over to her manual typewriter and showing me that even if I only typed with two fingers, I could put thoughts on paper faster than I would if I wrote by hand, and my hand would get less tired. A few weeks later, she started teaching me how to touch type. Many people my age brag about how they refused to learn to type because they did want to be (eeew) secretaries, but I can say with gratitude that because I learned to type, I got a good job as a secretary, which led to a decent job as an editor, with nothing but a high school diploma, and that I never had to work in food services or retail at a minimum wage with no benefits.

I think my mother had dreams and projections not so much about my writing, as about my being a writer: the kind who didn’t care about fashion and didn’t wear makeup, but rather wore large hoop earrings and hideous open toe sandals in the summer, and grew into young adulthood dating scruffy men with beards (when I was in grade school, a number of college-age girls we knew who wrote poetry were this type). To me this would have been a fate worse than death and the thought of ending up this way just compounded my dislike of schoolwork (although as I got older I read quite a lot of serious literature).

The only thing I remember working hard at as a teenager (other than my three or four unsuccessful attempts at dieting; I would lose 30 pounds and gain it back every other year until I was 18) was playing the piano. I practiced really really hard and entered several competitions for young people. I even got to the semi-finals in one. I was also interested in singing and had spent my childhood imitating Julie Andrews, but wires got crossed and when I was 13 or 14, a few weeks after a music teacher friend of my mother’s told us that I had an exceptional singing voice, I started smoking because I had heard that it would spoil my appetite. (I returned to singing twice: once at 26 after I quit smoking the first time, and again, permanently at 54, and it has been an obsession ever since.)

I also began writing when I was 54. I was in a state of unrequited lust over the gay man who had encouraged me to sing,* and the story of him and me was spinning around in my head, but I couldn’t talk about it out loud because I didn’t know anyone who didn’t either know me in connection with my partner Betty or know me from work. So I turned the episode into a play. The play mirrored the real situation almost word for word (this man had said some absolutely ridiculous and smarmy things, and it was healing to read them out loud and laugh), but I didn’t think any audience would believe that a woman in her 50s living in New York could be that stupid or naïve, so I changed the demographics so that the heroine was in her 20s and living in Texas. The play turned out to be a rather amusing RomCom and was produced at a community theater in Texas. (It has since languished because I just don’t think it will pass muster during the Me Too era.)

I gave my mother a copy, which she kept in her bedroom. As a point of comparison, she kept a young male friend’s novel-in-progress, which she and I both agreed was pretentiously opaque, on her coffee table in the living room, perhaps because it was “postmodern” and added to her image of herself, whereas having a daughter who wrote the theatrical equivalent of a “chick flick” did not.

As I was writing the play, I certainly didn’t think of myself as having homework. I felt that a devil was behind me with a pitchfork, and maybe one was: the man I was writing about looked a lot like Mephistopheles even down to owning an orange leather suit! I felt so compelled to write that I spent my lunch hours and time on subway platforms scribbling in a notebook and then came home and transferred what I had written to a computer file.

My first experience with writing-as-homework was when a therapist told me I would feel less blocked (as a person working at home in a dull job, not as a writer, per se) if I “did” The Artist’s Way**. This program included writing three pages in longhand (which considering the size and childishness of my handwriting meant that they would contain less prose than most people’s) every morning. I suppose I “cheated” because I had coffee and fed the cats first, but it was a useful exercise. Doing that led me to decide to write a memoir.

I now write something every day: a bit of memoir, a blog post, pieces for this writing competition. I found that it is not that hard if I just sit down and do it. On the other hand, if someone asked me “who are you?” “a writer” is probably the last thing I would say. And if someone asks me “what do you doooo” (an irksome question for those of us who may have had interesting lives but never had an interesting job) I say “I sing”. I probably spend more hours of the day writing, or copy editing to earn money, than singing, but never mind. It is when I am singing that I feel most alive. Most people I meet for the first time ask me if I am some kind of performer because I always wear “stage makeup,” even to the laundry room. If I were going to “be” something I would much rather be a singer (big hair, perfect posture) than a writer (snarled hair, round shoulders). Although of course the world has moved on and writers look all sorts of ways, particularly since many of them these days end up as talking heads on television.

The best thing about writing is it is a way to leave a legacy. I wouldn’t even have to be published; I could just put instructions on how to access my computer files in my will. Mostly I write because I don’t want to die anonymous. Which is a good reason for giving myself “homework”.

[*He is mentioned at the beginning of my earlier piece “Periphery”babydramatic-1950.dreamwidth.org/4090.html

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artist%27s_Way]

On February 15, 2004, a man whom I refer to only as “The Mentor” (who a few months earlier had gotten me to sing for the first time in over 20 years, telling me I had a gift that I could not run away from) sang Samson to my Dalila in the aria/duet "Mon Coeur S'Ouvre a ta Voix" at a church service on Valentine’s Day, ending with his spinning me around in his arms, bending me over backwards, staring into my eyes like Svengali, and changing me forever. Since then it has been a long and painful journey, but I would never want to go back.

Not shortly thereafter, I sank into despondency that the feelings The Mentor had stirred up in me were misplaced; he was gay. (Although I thought to myself if I, who had never been attracted to anyone male, could be attracted to him, couldn’t the reverse also be true, that he, who had never been attracted to anyone female, might be attracted to me? He certainly behaved as if he was.)

But there was worse to come. Because I could sing an aria in a pretty dress and garner a few “bravas”, I assumed that I could readily gain a toehold in the universe of amateur opera. I wasn’t expecting a big career. It was too late for that. I was 54. But I did think I could sort of pick up where I had left off in 1980; singing a leading role occasionally with an opera company that did not pay people. I had done that then, when my voice was much smaller and my stamina minimal. Returning to singing in my 50s, now 30 years away from my last alcoholic drink and almost as far away from my last cigarette, my voice was bigger, more beautiful, and more easily managed than it had been in my 20s. When I was in my 20s, many of the people singing leading roles in those amateur companies had been as old as I was now and many had had a variety of vocal flaws. Most did not have a music degree, had minimal sight reading skills, and occasionally mispronounced the odd foreign word. They stuck to the standard repertoire and had mostly learned roles from coaches. So the path forward seemed clear.

Sadly, I couldn’t have been more wrong. To my bitter disappointment, I found that no matter how well I sang, I simply had no place in the twenty-first century “world” of singing, particularly in New York, where I lived not because I sang, but because the maternal half of my family had been here for three generations. The opera companies I had sung with (now defunct) had become the punchlines of jokes. Now you were nobody if you hadn’t been a vocal performance major (or at least a music major of some kind), preferably at a “name” college or conservatory. Everybody knew everybody and behaved in that “clubby with each other and dismissive of outsiders” way that people do who bond over shared experiences in a rarefied environment.

Over the course of 7 or 8 years, I applied to sing at (and was rejected by) every non-paying opera company in Manhattan and some beyond. One outfit called me up and screamed at me for “wasting their time” sending them a resume. What on earth would have made me think they would have been interested in me? Another outfit complimented me on my singing but told me tactfully that they could not use me; I was not a “future investment”. (I was 58; 10 years later I sing 20 or 30 times better.) Everyone who came to those auditions knew each other. Most of the people auditioning were in their 20s and 30s. The oldest people were in their 40s and these had had years of experience on these audition rounds. In all honesty, most of these people were not going to have major careers. Most would sing the occasional paid gig, a number of unpaid gigs, maybe teach a little, and have a day job. But there was nobody there like me. And no, I wasn’t going to sing in the chorus (or what a singing blogger calls a “che avvenne”* role) for free. Time was running out.

I went to my last audition about 5 years ago, for a woman who has people sing through an opera from a score in her living room for a fee. Surely (I thought) that would be just about my speed. But no. She decided to give the opportunity to a woman who was going to sing that role in a real performance. I learned then, unequivocally, that even the humblest of venues are really just test drives or rehearsals for the pros. Not for amateurs. Not for me.

Somewhere along the way someone suggested “Meeups”. So I joined two, thinking, again, that a get-together for people to sing arias for an entry fee of $25 to pay for an accompanist would not exactly be catering to the stars of tomorrow. I thought it might be a place to get my feet wet. Um, no. These meetups were places for “emergings” (an industry name for singers in their 20s and 30s who hope to have a career) and the odd 40something wanting to test new repertoire to practice for auditions. So the older people extended mentorly advice to the younger people and the younger people were all over the older people with questions and I just, well, hung out on the periphery. Occasionally someone said I sounded nice, but the one time there was a sort of agent there (he was the husband of one of the other singers) he walked out of the room when I was singing, presumably for a bathroom break.

If I felt isolated and without a role (no pun intended) at auditions and meetups, I felt even worse once I stumbled upon online forums. I had (again stupidly) thought that the kind of people who had the time and lack of confidence to frequent these places would be people like me: amateurs who were obsessed. Wrong. These forums were mostly ruled by disgruntled semi-professional singers (or professionals who didn’t think they were getting the gigs they deserved) and a handful of voice teachers. Snark ruled. If someone asked a “stupid” question s/he was laughed at. I was mostly ignored. I felt like I was back in junior high school, with the popular girls talking around me and giving me looks (yes, talking “around” someone in a thread in an online forum is giving someone a “look”) or telling me if not directly then by implication that I was too big for my britches.

The low point came when I sang in a bookstore for free. The (very low budget) publisher, who had posted an initial invitation on this forum, hadn’t intended to pay anyone, which was hardly surprising as this gig involved singing for less than 10 minutes as a publicity stunt. I jumped at the chance, had a ball, and got a free video out of it. No, it wasn’t the most professional of videos; if I had had a “screen test” for example, I would have worn a different top and remembered to put makeup on my arms (I was singing the “Habanera” from Carmen), but at that point I didn’t have any videos so I was thrilled to have this one. (To date, it has 12 “likes” and 4 “dislikes” on Youtube. Which is fine. I would rather have a video with “dislikes” than none at all. I would rather have sung this gig, despite all the vitriol, than have spent another afternoon singing in front of my mirror.)

Quite shockingly, my singing this bookstore gig for free, which I had enjoyed more than I had enjoyed anything in a long time, and the video, triggered weeks and months of online snark (including a damning with faint praise magazine article) against people who ask singers to sing for free (from the same singers who take all the non-paying opportunities away from amateurs because they want to use them as rehearsals), against amateurs who have the hubris to call themselves “opera singers” (actually it was the publisher who called me that, not me), and by implication against every slightly unpolished performer who enjoys the opportunity of getting up and singing “well enough” to make an audience and themselves happy. So basically, the message I got from this whole thing was “How dare you be happy – you’re nobody;” an example being that when I used the word “fun” to defend my experience, someone snapped back with obvious contempt “Fun is for amateurs!”

******************************************************************************

That was in 2013. I sing much better now. One day in 2015 or thereabouts (possibly because I began keeping my sinuses cleared out) I noticed that singing seemed so much easier than it had been. Not long after, sometime around my 65^th birthday, I found that I had magically added two or three notes to my upper register.

So even though no opera company wants me, I will not give up. I will not give up studying, I will not give up singing as a soloist in front of audiences where I can find them, and I will not give up singing the “big girl” operatic music that my voice loves, even if now I alternate it with art songs and Broadway show tunes. I believe that God wants me to sing, otherwise S/he would not have introduced me to The Mentor. I would not have found my voice in a church.

And there are tiny moments of optimism. I have mastered vocal skills that I never had before. Despite my body aging, I have more stamina to sing than I ever did. And more importantly, I have found places “on the periphery” where I can sing. I can sing in a church (as the daughter of two atheists, this is rather ironic). I am currently an unpaid choir member and soloist at a Lutheran church where I have made a lot of friends. And I can sing in nursing homes and senior centers. My voice teacher and I have put together a program of arias, songs, and duets, which is ever evolving. I have contacts at several of these places and I look for new ones all the time. I now have a mission and a brand. A room full of seniors, even on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is thick with music lovers, would be hard put to tell the difference between me and the women I used to meet at auditions. They don’t care whether I do or don’t have a vocal performance degree.

And most importantly, I now have a long-range plan, something that will be manageable and give my life joy and meaning. One day when my angel** gets her wings, I am going to work with seniors, singing with them at their bedsides, the way I now sometimes sing to my angel.

And I remind myself every day that a life of bringing music and love to people who are lonely and in need, a life of service through music, will never be a life on the periphery.

[*”Che avvenne” means “what happened” in Italian. A “che avvenne” role is a sarcastic nickname for a comprimaria role that only consists of a few sung lines, usually in response to a lead singer’s aria.]

[**When I speak of “my angel” I am referring to Betty, whom I have written about in previous Idol entries.]

[Videos available on request.]

As some people say in the vernacular “This is a new one on me”.

I am definitely someone with a large vocabulary, including foreign words that have crept into English, but I will have to confess that I had to look this one up.

The first definition I found was “studied carelessness,” and the first “hit” I found said that “sprezzatura” is now a word primarily used to describe men’s fashion: not something that I am interested in, so it’s not surprising that I had never heard it.

Scrolling down a bit, I saw that the term could refer to any kind of studied carelessness. “Discourse” was mentioned, for example. I also saw that “sprezzatura” was in competition for “word of the year” in 2016. Someone wrote that it means what, in today’s parlance, is called “cool”, a word that I loathe, because today “cool” not only means “sprezzatura,” it can also mean everything from “innovative,” as in “I found a really cool new app”, to “ok” as in when Person A says “I will return your book when we meet for lunch” and Person B answers “cool”. But I digress.

Mostly, all this online scrolling made me very interested in the relationship between “sprezzatura” and singing (it’s an Italian word, after all). Isn’t that what the art of glorious classical singing is all about? Making it look effortless?

So I googled “sprezzatura” + “singing.” Some posts were about a piacere singing, a feature of both bel canto and jazz. Not strictly sticking to what’s written on the page, but improvising. Or making it sound as if you are improvising. I have done that with Handel.

Then there’s the effortless floating legato of the pure-voiced lyric soprano. For example, Montserrat Caballe in this video

youtu.be/UgbU88Pyq6I

or Leontyne Price in this one

youtu.be/74HvM1lDUdw

This technique is, yes, studied, but some voice types can learn it faster than others. A light soprano who has taken voice lessons since puberty will most likely be able to sing this way as a conservatory undergraduate. A dramatic mezzo like Yours Truly might need a decade or more of blood, sweat, and tears to achieve this and some never do. We are known for the power, rather than the beauty, of our voices, and can produce spine chilling drama, even rapid fire coloratura, sung at a breakneck pace at a volume of sound equal to that of several light lyrics, but an effortless-sounding pianissimo high note? Only the greats among us can do that regularly. It took me 12 years of study to be able to spin high notes sitting down at a choir rehearsal. I was about 66.

The best example of vocal sprezzatura that I saw close up was from a 20-year-old lyric soprano who ended up (as the star – we’d never had one before) in our choir. She was given the soprano solo in the Brahms Requiem for Good Friday. She sat there in jeans, looking like the undergrad she was, and tossed it off with no muss, no fuss. The choir broke into applause. I went home and cried. And realized that no matter how impressively a woman with a lower voice can sing, lower voices are always “less than”. Because of course with most non-soprano church solos, you’re singing in the same range as the untrained singers. Better, of course, but people don’t realize that. So if they hear you sing an alto solo like “O Rest in the Lord” they think “Oh, I could do that.”

That was 5 years ago, now. During the ensuing years I learned that my high notes were effortful because I could not raise my soft palate, which was because I had a mammoth amount of sinus drainage weighting it down. I did not notice this in the ordinary course of things, because unless I was trying to sing high, I could not feel it. I began using a Neti pot. My tiny waist (which I’d had all my life even during periods of relative plumpness) filled out, mostly with muscle mass, thanks to Pilates class and, of course, singing. My teacher abandoned exercises on “loo”, which had made me choke on my tongue, and gave me exercises on “hoo”, which kept air flowing freely. I learned how to push my larynx down to counteract the “gag reflex” that would kick in every time I saw a note above an A5.

I now vocalize up to a high C every day. I don’t need to muster my forces, gird my loins, and pray in order to sing high notes. At choir rehearsals, I can sing in a range I never dreamed possible, for extended periods, without getting tired.

Does this mean that I sing with sprezzatura now? I got plenty of applause the last time I sang “Rejoice Greatly” in church, although that piece is mostly known for its fireworks, not its ethereal quality. On the other hand, I plowed through all the long runs without breathing, and, mostly, without looking faint, which, I suppose, was a form of studied carelessness.

Of course every time I begin singing, I have to rely on faith. Because it is so hard to believe that the notes coming out of my mouth now are mine. I’m a girl from New York, a former smoker (I had my last cigarette in 1980 or thereabouts) whose speaking voice sounds like Lauren Bacall’s.

If I work hard and don’t lose heart, maybe in 18 months, on my 70th birthday, I will have achieved true sprezzatura.

I had an LJ account about 9 years ago and although I made some friends there who are still friends (!) many of my experiences there were not happy. I wrote a lot about not being happy; having discovered a passion for classical singing at the age when most singers retire, trying to break into an "inner circle" of singers who all had the same networks and experiences, not being able to, really, and then being excoriated for writing about being sad, all of which was very toxic and certainly didn't help me feel better about myself or become more grateful.

I am still singing, better than ever, at the age of 68 the center of gravity of my voice is about a minor third higher and I've gained some extra notes! All doors are still closed (my last audition was for an outfit that charges people to sing through operas from a book in someone's living room; the role went to a "real" singer who was going to perform the role somewhere) except, ironically, for the church. I say ironically because I was raised as an atheist. So I am an unpaid church soloist and choir member, and get to mingle with lovely people who are supportive of each other, something I was not getting from the virtual world of singer's forums. I am not going to any more auditions. If I am Jonesing to sing opera, I now know of a few nursing homes and senior centers where I can put on recitals for the price of a pianist. This makes everyone happy, and I hope I can inspire someone as I am now not much younger than some of the residents in those venues.

Otherwise I am a caregiver to my former partner (who is still the love of my life). She is 84 and bedridden, and has dementia. Every day with her is precious.

I have currently joined this community so that I can write for LJIdol. That was a part of my previous LJ experience that I was very happy with and proud of.

I don't have a lot of free time, because I still have to do a little editing here at my laptop to earn a living, but there's always time to write!

(And I see here, typing in Rich Text, that I don't have to do the kind of html coding that I used to sweat over, and which took me weeks to learn!) Here is a link to a Youtube video of me singing "Mon Coeur".

https://youtu.be/VowfOkA6C3w