A young(ish) opera singer's random thoughts and observations.

Thursday 18 February 2016

What is it that you actually want?


Auditions. Yuck! We all hate them. Some of us are good at them, others really struggle to show their best in that horrendously artificial environment. How good you are at auditions doesn't always reflect how good you are at the job of being a singer, because it doesn't have all that much in common with the process of rehearsing and performing an opera. Auditions don't afford you the opportunity to show if you're a good colleague, conscientious worker,a collaborative artist, quick to learn blocking or incorporate notes... You can show whether or not you can sing, and to an extent whether or not you can perform to a pretend audience. But you show one or two aspects of both of these - you give one reading of each piece you sing, despite the fact that 'on the job' you'll be experimenting with many different ones in collaboration with the MD, the director, cast members, designers, etc, and being married to your one reading can be very frustrating to everyone involved. You've heard the 'this is how I sing it' horror stories about legendary divas.

We all have to live with the fact that competition is fierce and we won't get all the jobs. But I for one prefer not to get a job for a solid reason. If I'm not on form in an audition, the rejection is easier to palate. If I feel I showed my best to the panel, then a rejection without feedback stings. If I get feedback that I can relate my audition experience to, then it's ok, I wasn't the right fit, and that's fine. But there are times when you get feedback that enrages you. 'He sang it very impressively, but it was a very conservative performance'. 

I make a choice about who the character is, say in this case an aristocrat, so a poised presence, not extrovert, with subtle flashes of emotion corresponding to the words. He's so important he doesn't need to do much, he draws people in, he isn't demonstrative. He's upper class, this is not a semaphore character. The audition room isn't vast, the venue the company will be performing in is fairly intimate as well, everyone will be able to see the subtleties. I also don't want to look like an overacting prat. So that's my choice, and I took it too far for that panel on that day. Damn.

And all I can think reading that feedback is: I wish they'd stopped me and asked for more. Or had me sing it again with some notes from them. Given me a shot at doing it their way. Checked to see if I respond to feedback on the fly. Instead they hear a second aria. Should I have made a polar opposite choice and overacted that one so they would think I can also do the middle ground and all the shades in between?

I have had auditions in which the panel was more involved. I once did an audition for Jonathan Miller, where he stopped me after verse one of 'Bella siccome un'angelo' and said to pretend he was Don Pasquale. He came out from behind the desk and reacted to every line I sang. When I got to the final round of the Opera North chorus auditions it took all day and consisted of a one-to-one coaching with a member of their music staff, a lovely informal interview with their chorus manager and head of casting, and then an audition run by a director who had me stage 3 different approaches to my aria. 

Those and similar experiences are the auditions I remember fondly, regardless of whether I get the job or not, because I feel that the panel have actually met me and had a proper taste of what I'm about. It feels fair. Walking into a strange room, singing to the dead eyes of disinterested or politely-indulgent people behind a desk, getting a 'thank you' and walking out with no idea of whether what just happened lined up with what they were looking for from the pieces I sang... Not so much.

I wish panels took more of a hands on approach. I feel they may be missing out, not only on my vast talents and superlative modesty*, but on lots of my favourite colleagues who confess to struggling in auditions, but whom I personally often rate a cut above some of the people who get the jobs, because they bring all the extra stuff to the table in the rehearsal room and on stage. And their standard of singing is just as high as that of the lucky job-getters, as are their instruments. Auditions are not the best way of casting anything, unless they're linked with previous experience of working with the singers in question and seeing them perform in real-world circumstances. But that means new faces are at a disadvantage, so to give them a chance I really think devoting 3-4 minutes of a 10min audition slot to doing a bit of a workshop on their aria would give employers a better idea of what kind of singer they're dealing with. But hey, that's just one man's opinion...



* sarcasm

Go go gadget score!

It's been a while (again, sorry) and what's more this entry will be purely functional rather than deeply philosophical. You'll have to wait until next week for something deeper, but I promise it's coming (spoiler: it'll be about auditions).

This post has been a long time coming, as I've been using my iPad for the bulk of my singing work for 5 years now. I was finally nudged to post it after being yet again asked how I get my scores onto the tablet, and why I bother.

It all started in 2011 in Banff, where I saw a tenor colleague taking his iPad into a coaching... It was an instant case of 'I want one!'. And while I do, of course, use my tablet for all the usual browsing, email, video consumption, games, etc, it has actually become my musical workhorse, to the point where I can't really remember how I used to function as a singer without it. I did function, and I probably could again, but it really has become an essential tool in my workflow. And I'll tell you why ;)

First of all, the Apple naysayers will ask why an iPad? Well, there are 2 reasons. The first is the 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen (not widescreen), which means that when you view sheet music on it, it corresponds to the dimensions of a standard sheet of paper. The second takes me into a list of all the apps I use, said list being the main reason behind this post.

forScore 
Only available on iOS, this app is what I fire up 99% of the time I work on any music. It's a pdf-viewer first and foremost. You scan in music, download it from IMSLP, buy digital copies, or get pdfs any number of other ways (straight from a composer's laptop), and forScore displays them on your iPad. What sets it apart from other pdf-viewers are the various things you can now do:
- Annotate - you can write on your score! Both with the ipad keyboard and with your finger/stylus. You can scribble, draw, in any colour you like, and also highlight. You can save a version of your score with your singery notes, and then write in staging notes on another version, etc.
- Share - you can send scores from your iPad by email, either with or without your scribblings
- Listen - you can assign recordings from your music library (the Music app, including the wealth of Apple Music) to a score and listen back to them while perusing the score. You can even slow them down (while preserving pitch) and loop sections.
- Play - forScore has a built in piano instrument, so you can play an onscreen keyboard
- Record - there's also an audio recorder, so you can record lessons, rehearsals, practice sessions, and these are attached to whatever score you are performing

Avid Scorch 
Simply put, this app plays back Sibelius files as you read the score. The sounds it uses for playback are horrible and always metronomically precise, but if you're learning contemporary music and your piano chops aren't quite up to the task of giving yourself an idea of how the thing is meant to sound, Scorch comes to the rescue. You can adjust the tempo to practise and also change the volume of parts in the score. It's fiddly and certainly not perfect, but it is useful.

TurboScan
To answer the question of how I get scores into forScore, I always ask my employers if they happen to have access to pdf files of the music. More and more often they do, which is great news for e-musicians (or should that be iMusicians?), providing you treat these as hired scores if they're in copyright: delete them after your contract is up. If the employer doesn't have a pdf score, I will try IMSLP, which I'm sure most musicians are familiar with. Failing that, I scan in hard copy scores I already own as and when I need them, for which I use TurboScan on my phone. It lets me take photos of each page and converts them to pdf. If you take 3 photos of each page, the app cleverly focuses on different areas, so you're guaranteed a high quality scan. I did own a conventional scanner, but have found this method is actually quicker for me, and lets me send the pdfs to my iPad over AirDrop very conveniently. I scan at a rate of around 100 pages per hour, so yes, getting an entire score over to pdf is a time investment, but I've found it to be very much worth it.

I also own and sometimes use music notation apps Notion and NotateMe, the latter having a useful feature called PhotoScore, which lets you take a photo of a page of music and have the app play it back. Besides that it's always handy to have a free piano app and whatever dictaphone app your tablet/phone comes with. Spotify also deserves a mention, though it isn't compatible with forScore in the way that Apple Music is.

With all these goodies loaded onto your iPad you can be productive practically anywhere you go, as long as you have headphones and don't mind the occasional weird glance from people around you as you hum or sotto voce falsetto your way through an opera in public. If you're doing a contract where you rehearse 3-4 operas, frequently more than 1 a day, you'll save yourself some back-ache by only carrying a tablet rather than 600 pages worth of scores. You'll always have copies of your audition pieces to hand, ready to print (with or without your scribbled annotations, for which pianists will be grateful). The battery generally lasts a full day of music use with no problems (just be professional and don't play games during rehearsals) and forScore is a very stable app, I've even performed from it on occasion (though I try to avoid it just in case something did go wrong). For lessons, coachings, music learning and rehearsals the iPad can be a wonderful tool, so if you already own one, why not give it a go? And I'm pretty sure there are Android equivalents to the apps listed above just a quick google away for those who don't buy into the Apple hype ;)