I've posted a few times about the nature of opportunity. If you happen to be what a house is looking for, when they are looking for it, and you're available, then there's an opportunity. If you're not what they're looking for, or they aren't looking for you right now, or you're not available, *poof* goes opportunity. This is no one's fault, and it's nigh on impossible to control. If you're not very good at giving up control [in the film in my mind, there would be a giant flashing arrow pointing to me right now] this makes you nuts.
Let's talk about what is in your control.
1. Are you prepared? Have you gone through your arias with coaches who will push you to do more than your everyday best? Do you have a well-formed and imaginative perspective on the characters you're singing, the kind of perspective that will show on your face and in your body? The kind of perspective that shows you being a character, rather than simply putting on their clothes? Does your musical interpretation go beyond what's on the page - does the coloratura say/show something other than that you're really good at 16th notes? If you're not saying something, no one cares.
2. Have you done your best to disaster-proof your audition? Do you have rehearsals in which you ask the pianist to try to lead you astray? Play a blatantly wrong tempo? Do you know how to lead a pianist into the tempo you want, or will you allow yourself to be thrown under the bus by someone else's force of will and/or lack of familiarity with the piece? This is something that can and should be practiced by anyone walking into an audition where you don't know the pianist. There will come a time when a pianist poops all over what should be standard repertoire. It may or may not be at a big house, it may or may not be an audition in someone's home studio. But if you poop all over yourself because of it, that's on you. There will be no disclaimer at the end of the audition [again, in the film in my mind] that drops down from the fly space, flashing "the pianist had never seen that before and didn't catch all the meter changes - it's not my fault, please hire me anyway," and even if it did, they wouldn't.
3. Do you know how much prep time you need before an audition? I'm a person who doesn't like to get anywhere too early. The airport, the train station, the theatre before a show. Just ask my husband - I'm puttering around the house, finding every excuse not to leave until the ABSOLUTE last minute because I hate waiting. Sitting around makes me stir crazy. For German auditions, where you have to show up early to get into the order of singing, 90 minutes is about all I can stand. Show up, sign in, warm up, meet with the pianist, and then do my damnedest to distract myself from the waiting. The other day, I was bookended by two other sopranos auditioning. The rooms were NOT soundproofed. I wanted to fling myself from the window, just to escape the truly perverse call and response of "Spiel ich die Unschuld vom Lande" and the "Gioir! Gioir!" that leads into 'Sempre libera.' OVER AND OVER. Moral of the story? Know thyself. If you can handle sitting around without getting squirrelly [film in my mind - Snow White-like animated chipmunk comes and perches on my shoulder] then good for you. If you can't, bring headphones and Beyonce.
4. Have you sung in these shoes before? This may seem like a silly thing, but it's NOT. I have two pair of audition shoes. I have been singing in those shoes since grad school. They are always comfy (enough), they always make my legs look good, and I know I can walk across the stage in them without tripping or having them slip off or anything like that. This week, I had to improvise. Having a sprained ankle means no heels for at least another few weeks, so I had to go with the tall boots. Was I going to wear them to my audition without having given them a test run? No. So I wore them to my coaching last week, along with the skirt I intended to wear to the audition, and asked my coach to look me over. We agreed I needed a fancier top, but he liked the boots & skirts combo. I trust his fashion sense, and I trust that he'll tell me if something doesn't flatter, and I trust that if I can sing through more than half of my audition arias in these boots successfully, they won't interfere with my audition singing, when the stakes are higher and I'm not just singing for one person. MEN - this applies to you too. No one wants to watch you shift your weight from foot to foot. If you start to sway during your audition, the panel will get vertigo, or they'll worry that you will.
[Sidebar - I subscribe to Bulletproof Musician. This week's update just popped into my inbox, and it's called "Is it helpful to listen to music right before your audition?" If you don't subscribe but want to read it, here's the article.]
And now, we talk about the unpleasant stuff. The stuff that's out of your control. Even thinking about this shit gives me vertigo. Oy.
1. When they're not looking for you and/or your voice type, right now or otherwise. This sucks. Sometimes houses will hear you just because you inquire - this is called an 'informative' audition. The downside is that you may not get a job from these auditions. The upside is that you may get a job down the line. If you audition well, and you make a good impression, people keep track of what you're up to. Never a bad thing.
2. When you're not available. I used to stretch myself like Elastigirl to make every possible gig work. Less sleep, more travel, skipping meals, skipping days across time zones. It's not worth it. If you can't show up and do your best work from day 1, you can't do it. Emergencies happen, extenuating circumstances happen. But if you intentionally schedule exhaustion and overbooking, you're playing Russian Roulette with your own health and, thereby, your professional well-being.
3. When you don't check the box. And now we've come to the real point of this post.
It's my opinion that there are two kinds of auditions: the kind where someone takes an interest in you as an artist, and the kind where they're looking for you to check a box. In Germany, this can get chalked up to the 'fach box.' In your contract, you have to list a fach, and you have to be specific. If you just list 'soprano,' that covers everything from Sieglinde to Mimi to Semiramide. Do you want to sing Mimi and the Queen of the Night and Lady Macbeth and Lucia and Tosca? (Don't we all?) But I'd really like to keep singing, thank you. If you check the box, then there's an opportunity. If you don't check the box, there's no opportunity. It's slightly pessimistic on my part, but I tend to assess this point on how quickly the audition panel pivots from my first aria (Cleopatra's Piangerò from Giulio Cesare: secco recit, slow A, lightning-fast B with cadenza, da capo slow A with ornaments) to the Vengeance Aria. If it's the first and only thing they ask for, I'm reasonably certain they're box-checkers. They want to know if I can do what I say I can do, which is fair, but once they've heard it, they don't want to know anything else about my artistry. I have checked the box. If they say, "we'd like to hear one of the Queen arias, your choice, and we'd also like to hear Konstanze," this tells me they're looking for a Mozart coloratura, not just a Queen. If they ask to hear Musetta or Cunegonde, I'm practically leaping with joy, because it means they want to see if I can act/be funny/be charming/be sexy.
I can.
Auditioning is a process. It's a skill. You get better at it with time. Sometimes you wake up and everything goes your way and you'd swear there was a drop of Felix Felicis in your coffee. The weather is beautiful. The trains are on time. You sing amazingly. The pianist is great. You are ROCKING that outfit and you even have good hair, all at the same time. And you don't get hired. On the other side, there are days when it's raining sideways, your train is delayed, you do your makeup on the subway in much closer proximity to your fellow passengers than you'd ever get on a third date with someone you really liked, you manage to yodel a few notes in the elevator on the way up, arriving just 5 minutes early, only to find out that they had a cancellation and can you sing right NOW. You do what you can, but you feel it's not your best. And you get hired. There is very little rhyme or reason involved. There is a lot of faith, a lot of shrugging, a lot of 'I get knocked down but I get up again' (great - I'm gonna have Chumbawumba in my head ALL DAY), a fair amount of disappointment, and maybe, just maybe, some success.
Here's what matters - what you do between auditions. Do you make time to see friends when you're in their city? Do you reach out to family members and meet them for dinner when you're done? Do you pack a mask and comfy slippers so you can sit in your jammies and watch TV with your friend who's letting you crash on their sofa? Do you help other singers who are figuring it out? Taking care of yourself becomes really serious business as you get deeper into this business, but keeping an open heart is even more serious. My first real opera big sister is a gorgeous, flame-haired vixen of a soprano - she was singing Pamina to my Queen in my first professional production of Flute. She told it to me like it was, and I've never forgotten that. We would wake up early and go walk her dog and get a coffee at the Dunkin Donuts and talk about everything - marriage, work, agents, traveling, taxes. Lindy is the best. I still remember her telling me - "Half the people you go to school with will be out of this business within 2 years of graduation. By the time you get to 30, another half will have fallen away - they couldn't get it started, the lifestyle isn't for them, or they decided it wasn't worth it and chose another profession. When you get to 35, that number will decrease again, and again, and again."
Well, I'm gonna be 34 in a few weeks, and I'm still here.
Singing for a living is hard, but you don't have to do it alone. Work hard, yes, work really fucking hard. But be a person - be the kind of person people want to work with, the kind of person people want to help and the kind of person people look to for assistance. Check THOSE boxes.
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