What’s This All About?

If you want to have a vocal career in classical music, here are the rules you must follow:

• You can be an acclaimed professional musican, but only on the industry’s terms.
• Work hard, and exclude all non-music related involvements, obligations or opportunities.
• Get a job, apply for loans, and get as many grants and awards as you can, because you’re going to be really broke.
• Do what you’re told — and don’t piss anybody off.

For me, making music was always about what not to do. Don’t put audio clips on your website. Don’t crack geeky jokes in your blog. Tread carefully in auditions, and learn to love authority. Until you Make It, someone will always be telling you what to do — how to dress, how to talk, how to move (and how to sing, of course).

You won’t be surprised that I gravitated away from music, way back when. I ran out of money for college when my family hit a rough spot — even with the loans and grants that were available, it wasn’t enough. It was time to focus on working for money, instead of mostly just grades. That was 2002.

Once I was no longer in classes, my otherwise frequent opportunity to perform started to taper off. I was still offered the same work — special events, featured soloist gigs, private concerts, ecclesiastical music, weddings, funerals. But something big had changed. My time was always at odds with my income. Fifty bucks for an evening concert or a wedding set wasn’t enough. I had a choice — I could make my music into a business in a town that could barely support the rest of its economy, and I could stringently follow all the rules that I honestly thought were a little bit dumb. Or… I could start learning to do work that wasn’t dependent on the local cashflow.

Considering the situation my parents and I were in, I chose the latter and learned how to build businesses.

But it was funny… I always came back around to music.

Most of my time since then has been spent learning how to help people on my own terms. My music work has dogged my steps the entire time, never quite able to let go. I continued to pick up the odd concert gig when I could prepare for it without sabotaging my cashflow. I sang for the Niles Gymanfa Ganu Association and the Druid Club and many other Welsh cultural organizations in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I helped to raise money for the Pendyrus Male Choir to make a stop near us on their overseas North American tour — and joined them when someone I knew suggested to them that I would fill their featured female soloist spot perfectly. I competed in Orlando in 2005 and overseas in Swansea in 2006, then Pittsburgh and Ebbw Vale in 2009-2010, to much excitement and planning for the future — but you know those stories. All these snippets are piecemeal, brief interludes in a long-term uphill climb that was not about music at all, at least overtly. First it was about contributing to my family. Then it was about financial stability. Somewhere along the way, it became about making a difference in people’s lives, enacting positive change for the world around me, and learning how to build something bigger. Lately… it’s been about filling a gap in my life for a very personal sort of emotional expression that I’m only beginning to explore through writing my own music.

So why did I ignore the music for so long?

I know the answer: Because I thought making music had to be on someone else’s terms, and those terms were incompatible with the challenges that were facing me. So I did something else that I loved, something else that supported me, and tried to make music fit into the little gaps along the edges — because the “right” way wasn’t an option, which meant there was no way to do it without first making a big ol’ pot of money.

I should have known much sooner that my ability to make music had nothing to do with some pre-established set of rules. I should have known that for all the trusted counsel I received about pursing a vocal career, none of it was worth a damn because none of it was ever about me. It was always about them, their system, and their limits.

The crazy part of all of this is that those steadfast rules of theirs aren’t even working anymore. You’ve heard all about the tragedy of the popular music industry, but you probably haven’t heard about the comparable problems in classical music. Opera audiences are getting older, and no one is crowding in to replace them. The original way to perform is changing and growing as technology connects and inspires the creative spark in millions of individual music-lovers, urges them to make something of their own rather than sink more money into the existing industry. Why? Because that industry wants to sell them a restricted service, rented music, rather than offering them real organic culture that they can grow and learn from and create with.

It’s not about the record labels or the big name conductors anymore. It’s not about the opera houses of an artistically-wealthier age. It’s not even about the divas.

It’s about the audience.

It’s about you, sitting in front of your computer. It’s about your son or daughter or niece or nephew or Aunt Helen who can create and share music made at the kitchen table, in the back bedroom, sitting with a guitar on the front porch. It’s about depth of feeling and sharing of culture. It’s about the music. Not Sony’s — not the Met’s — not music that belongs to somebody else. Your music. The music I can share with you, and the music you can share with me. Because it feels good, not because it makes somebody a buck.

They think they’re protecting something sacred, and I can understand that. But the translation is horrific. Underneath any ideas of tradition or values, they appear to think that imposing these limits will keep them important, make them money, and push their industry through into a new age.

It won’t. Industries die over little things like this — old, overprotected limits.

I’ve been living with those limits too long. In other parts of my life I’ve been breaking barriers in triplicate and proving to myself that I can do what moves me — that I make my rules, and that’s that. It’s time to take the limits off of music, too, because while the limits are there, we won’t make any music at all. While the limits are there, I will regret the near-absense of music in my life until I die, and I will always wonder what on earth I could have done to be content choosing one calling when I had two.

I know now, for certain, that I don’t have to choose. That I’m not limited by “professional wisdom” — wisdom that contains and operates out of a single system, now petrified and immobile with age. I know now that no matter how well-meaning the advice is, it can’t help me and it can’t help you — except to make it even more clear that we must set it aside and determine to help ourselves.

I know they said we couldn’t do it this way, but I’m tired of people setting limits on me that aren’t real. You should be, too. I know I’m not supposed to find success in classical music by my own means — I know I’m not supposed to find a real, functional way to pursue all the genres and musical perceptions I love, I know I’m not supposed to tell them to go to hell and seek my own path, and live a full and varied and integrated life all at the same time.

But I can, and you can, and now we know it. Not just classical tunes, either — with any musical expression we feel moved to engage in. And maybe no one else will know it, too, unless we show them that it’s possible.

I think you’re starting to understand how I feel when nay-sayers insist that it’s not, or that I shouldn’t, or that I can’t.

Just watch me.