Wolf Trap Opera

OK, I admit it. I’ve been cheating on you with some newer, sexier blogs. (Well actually, one blog and one podcast.)

But truth is, I miss you. Even though it’s been fun pretending to be a fancy Huffington Post blogger and a smooth-talking iTunes podcaster, it’s also been pretty exhausting. Those Huffington Post people expect insightful, witty, polished prose. And those podcast downloading people… well, I don’t have any idea what they’re looking for. But you? My loyal original blog readers? I can be myself with you. In that wear-your-ratty-sweatshirt-watch-bad-TV kind of way.

So I promise to get myself back to where I started. Here, where I began blogging in October 2004 – before most people in the opera business knew what it was and before anyone had the good sense to stop me.

The 2013 season audition tour is in the rear-view mirror, and we’re trying to make sense of it all. We spent the autumn running around the country (literally and figuratively; we jogged in 7 cities…) looking for inspiration. Trying to choose a handful of young professional singers with whom we can spend next summer, and on whom we create our whole season. Most of you know this, but I’ll repeat it: We do this backwards. Instead of looking for people to fill opera roles, we choose people then pick the operas they’ll sing. And then we decide when, where, how, and with whom. All in about 6 weeks. When we’re fried from running around the country.

But no matter. It’s exciting and rewarding work. I can’t tell you much about it until it’s done because the pieces are so crazily interlocking that almost none of it is stable until everything’s in place. And that’ll take till late January. So till then, check back here for random observations, some operatic, some loosely-related. Oh, and if you’re interested in those other people with whom I’ve been cheating on you, check out the two new tabs at the top of the blog.

I owe the singers out there some final aria lists from the audition tour, but I need a few hours to crunch the data, and I can’t get to it for another few days. (Currently preoccupied with data of another sort, the budgetary kind…)

What I do seem to have time for, though, is this quick musing on the small flurry of thank-you notes and emails we’ve received in the wake of the audition tour.

It happens every year. A few dozen singers of the many hundreds we hear take the time to write us (some with pen and paper and a stamp!!) to thank us for the audition. Pretty standard procedure in the job interview world, but not as common in our world because of the sheer number of auditions that most singers do. (Singers please note: I am not advocating that you should all be writing to the panel after every audition. I probably speak for most of my colleagues when I say that although it is lovely to get the occasional appreciative note, we by no means expect it, and we would rather you spend your time practicing and studying:))

Receiving a small number of thank-you notes is not unusual. What is remarkable is that most of the singers don’t just thank us for hearing them; they thank us for being nice.

What?

OK, so here’s the thing. We’re not all that nice. We’re pleasant enough, I suppose. We say “Good afternoon. What would you like to sing?” And I don’t really believe that most of our colleagues aren’t at least that civil.

My first theory: Most of these comments come from singers who are just starting the audition grind, and the expectations they’ve developed of the process are something akin to torture. And that’s wrong. Advice? While auditioning will probably never be high on your list of things to do with your day, it really should not be dreaded. There are far worse things.

Second (not mutually exclusive) possibility: Singers are too empathetic to the types of energy they sense in the audition room, and they unwittingly incorporate that energy into their audition experience. The takeaway? Artists have to be sensitive and empathetic to a degree, but the audition room is a great place to learn that a performer allows the atmosphere in any space to seriously affect his performance at his peril. We love it when a receptive room adds electricity to a performance. But at the same time, if the aura is negative or even apathetic, you can’t let it get under your skin.

OK, back to my spreadsheets.

The blog comes to you today courtesy of my colleague and audition tour partner in crime Lee Anne Myslewski.

OK. For all of you who sing, or tune into the blog and say “I think that the tour sounds like so much fun!” I will agree with you – it is fun – but here’s the unvarnished truth… It’s not totally a walk in the park.

Exhibit A. I’m in my hotel room, fully pajama-ed and close to horizontal at 8:30pm on a Saturday night. A Saturday night in Chicago, no less, where there are endless numbers of interesting things to do and see and hear, and a good number of people that I could rouse to accompany me to do/see/hear one of the aforementioned interesting things.

Exhibit B. While I sit here in my hotel room? I am sitting in silence. No TV. No iTunes. No Pandora or Spotify or YouTube or Netflix or Hulu.

Exhibit C. I phoned my husband, and then turned the phone off. Because?

Because my ears are full.

We talk often about society being visual – that we get our information and entertainment from our eyes moreso than our ears. But, over the last several weeks the ratio of eye to ear has shifted considerably so that my ears are doing the heavy lifting.

Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist at Brown, wrote a piece for the New York Times about listening. He discriminates between hearing – which is passive – and listening, which requires attention and focus. He writes:

But when you actually pay attention to something you’re listening to, whether it is your favorite song or the cat meowing at dinnertime, a separate “top-down pathway comes into play. Here, the signals are conveyed through a dorsal pathway in your cortex, part of the brain that does more computation, which lets you actively focus on what you’re hearing and tune out sights and sounds that aren’t as immediately important.

In some ways it makes perfect sense that, at this point in the audition tour, I barely have two brain cells to rub together. We’ve been concentrating so hard: to really listen to the voice, to take into account the positives and negatives of each audition space and weigh them against what we know of our own house, to comb past our own personal likes and biases to find the best singers, rather than just the ones that hit our own sweet spots. And we’re doing most of it with our ears.

Of the panel, I tend to be the one that gets sucked into a strong dramatic presentation most easily. (If you’re a good actor, I will immediately gravitate to your performance.) So those particular performers I can’t afford to watch as much – I have to really listen to make sure that the vocalism is on an equal par with the dramatic skills, and that the overall package is competitive with singers from previous cities. (Conversely, if your acting isn’t as strong I have to kick my ears up even more, to make sure I’m not penalizing your glorious voice because you’ve never figured out that dramatic piece.)

According to Dr. Horowitz’s article, we’re actually solving cognitive puzzles on two different levels: the first is in the act of actively listening for 7+ hours a day, trying to parse out the vocal color/size/competitiveness. The second is in figuring out which people rise to the top, and then juggling the repertoire to see how we might be able to use them and in what combinations.

We have two days left on the tour, and then decisions will need to be made… but this evening I’ll be giving my ears a break, listening to the heating vent and the hum of the EL several floors below.

(If you need me, probably best to email or text.)

(P.S. The image above at left? Just kidding, of course:))