Yes, I get frustrated with my singing sometimes. Sometimes, it happens a lot. Every day. Constantly. “Why am I doing this? I suck. I hate singing…whine whine whine…”
Then I stop and pay attention. And the proper path opens.
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 Can we do everything related to our career and still manage to sing? I am currently working on wrapping up graduation (papers, orals). It may be a week or so before I can give myself over to a full post. Until then, happy singing! (This is totally paraphrased) “You want to know the secret to having a career? Be a great singer. If you do that, then they (companies) will make sure that you get the experience you need.” I will be away working on all sorts of stuff this week since it’s Spring break, so there will be no posts. There will be a new vocalise though this weekend. Until next week, have a happy start to Spring! We artists are valuable. All of us. The current stimulus proposal moving through the Congress contains money for the National Endowment for the Arts. The idea is that this would stimulate the economy by helping keep artists working and hopefully expand existing arts projects. The NEA supports a wide range of arts initiatives like grants and awards to organizations and individuals. They even have a service that helps artists find health insurance. There are many people who find the NEA very controversial, though, and they have reason (Warning: may be offensive to some). So, there is opposition to this funding from some within our Congress. They and others are arguing that such money would not stimulate the economy at all, and some of this criticism has a particularly dimissive tone to it: Simply borrowing money out of the economy in order to transfer it to some artists doesn’t increase the economy’s productivity rate. Brian Riedl, analyst for the Heritage Foundation (quoted from NPR.org’s story on the stimulus and the NEA) And this. This dismissive tone does not stop with those who are opposed to funding the NEA. Between artists, there can be a sense that their own art I have been browsing Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers due to some excerpts that had been left in the copy room next to my teacher’s studio. These excerpts cite a study where researchers studied music students at a major conservatory. They estimated the number of hours they had practiced since first picking up their instruments, and in general, the star players had practiced much more than their good player fellows and “much, much more” (his emphasis) than those who had decided to be music teachers in public schools. The number of hours for those star players hovered around 10,000. How many hours is 10,000? It’s about 40 hours a week for 5 years. It’s about 3 hours a day for ten years. One year contains 8760 hours. One year with 8 hours/day subtracted for sleep is 5840. The thesis of the book overall is that our perception of “talent” is false. Perhaps there are some innate faculties within individuals that make them slightly better than their peers, but these are not so great than can be overcome with hard work and positive outside influence. He defends this in this case by citing data from this study that had ruled out two extreme |
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