I had the privilege when I was 20 years old of learning from the stupendous Dame Joan Sutherland. She was a vocal titan, but in person remarkably grounded in an earthy, no nonsense Australian diva kind of way.

I would start to sing a phrase and she would interject with probably the most valuable piece of advice I have ever received -

“Stop. Think of the note before you sing it.”

So, before I even started to make a sound, I would focus silently on the quality of the sound I wanted to make, the way I wanted the vowel to be shaped in my mouth, and the intention behind the words I was about to sing.

The difference this advice made to me as an artist and as a person was profound. When I followed her advice,  I felt strong. More in control, of my voice and my craft. It was not about me so much anymore, but about the music and the responsibility I had been blessed with – to do it justice, to make it sing, to move people.

Can you sense why that’s a BIG shift?

Because intention shifts the focus away from the outcome – “Oh please let her like my voice!” to the process – “How do I want this note to sound?”

And when we shift from outcome to process, we dislodge ourselves from the fear and unpredictability of the future.

We plant ourselves firmly in the here and now.

Think of the note before you sing it. How can you use this?

If you are feeling a little out of control, or that your day is always at the mercy of other people’s whims – just take a quiet moment to ask yourself, “What is it, at this very moment, that I want?”

If you’re about to make a phone call, don’t just lunge at the phone and dial blindly while thinking of a hundred other things you have to do afterwards. Pause, and quietly decide why you are calling and what the best outcome for you would be. Then go into the call with this intention in mind.

Or if you are writing an email to someone, pay attention to why you are writing. Don’t just dash off a three syllable one liner. (Unless that’s consciously what you want!)

If your partner is winding you up and you start to hear yourself saying things you don’t mean in the kind of sarcastic voice you secretly loathe, leave the room. Breathe. What are you really trying to say? How can you just get there - now – without all of the shouting and periphery ego-wrangling that isn’t what you want at all?

It’s about making an effort to do everything – from brushing your teeth to reading your child a bedtime story to buying a loaf of bread – with an awareness of exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it.

You will gain so much clarity from this exercise – because when you ask yourself for an intention, what you are really asking is “How can I live this moment fully? With the attention it deserves?”

And you are giving youself a measure of success – by asking “What do I want?” you can decide more readily if you actually succeeded in getting it. There’s a great deal of power in creating your own benchmarks. When your rules for success are fuzzy and undefined, how will you know if you ever get it right?

This is living.

Your life is a collection of nows, not a list of things to do tomorrow or a journal stuffed with reminicences. It is NOW. This moment. That is all there is.

So savour your now by being as aware as you can be of every tiny, little second of it. Intend to feel good. Intend to be generous. Intend to be attentive to everything around you, with all of your senses.

Think before you plunge yourself into the myriad actions and reactions that make up the magic of your life. Decide what you want, so you’ll know if you get it. And start living at the centre of each and every remarkable moment that you have.

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So. For the very first time on this blog, I am finally posting a video of me singing!

(Whatever happened to breaking myself in gently by posting a vid or two of me just speaking first??!!?)

Part of me totally wants to share this with you. My blog is, after all, called The Tiny Soprano for a reason.

And yet, the other side of me – the horrible fear monster side of me – says “Oh God NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”

Please forgive the background noise and the occasional camera swerviness – my husband was trying to hold our son at the same time. It was an outdoor fundraiser at my daughter’s school for Mothers’ Day, and we were blessed with gorgeous weather (and some delicious food too, thanks girls!) I can also promise that no microphones were harmed during the filming of this song – only the piano was amplified.

The aria is “Quando me’n vo’” from the opera “La Boheme” by Puccini.  It is a sexy, flirty waltz – the character of Musetta stands up to sing in a bustling cafe about how much she is stared at and admired by men as she walks down the street. It’s a blatant attempt by her to win back her ex, who is sitting with his friends nearby – and needless to say, she’s very persuasive…

If this makes you smile, please  share, retweet, embed and otherwise show as much love as you can! Thanks for listening.

xxx Nat

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OK. You heard it here first, baby.

I can offically announce that opera is now the new rock and roll.

I’m sure it all started when I had a tweet from the lovely Reese (web designer extraordinare) in January, who confessed that she had almost gone into singing (I hope she won’t mind me sharing):

reese  January 22, 2010

@thetinysoprano hey natalie…I nearly went into being a voice major or minor. I envy your career choice

Then Emma Alvarez-Gibson shared her passion for Les Misérables (which I know isn’t technically opera in its purest form, but I shall embrace it for the sake of this post and also because it’s got Frenchy literary overtones so it must be highbrow) with a very entertaining YouTube clip of Doogie Howser MD and Jason Segel singing the Confrontation Scene on the Megan Mullally show. Hilarious. (More chat shows like this, please.)

When Megan M and I started riffing on how being an opera singer had given me super duper creative ninja mojo powers and that she wanted to unleash my secret weapon for the good of the blogsphere, I had a strong feeling that opera’s time was nigh…

And then Chris Guillebeau goes and bases a whole post on Pavarotti. (Talk about stealing my thunder, Chris. )

So evidently, opera is sexy, ergo so am I. Yay for logic!

However, I should confess I have a rather complicated relationship with opera. It’s like a “can’t live with, can’t live without” kind of thing. We were on a break. I started seeing other ways of living, opera just kind of pottered on without me. Now we’re kind of back together and seeing how things go. 

But you know what was really interesting about my time spent apart from the stage?

Occasionally during a conversation I would let slip that I “used to be an opera singer.” And the reaction to this was always laughably predictable.

First would be an incredulous stare. Then the question “Why did you stop?” with a tone of pity blended with surprise. Finally, “Oh, don’t you miss it?”

I would get this reaction from people who had never even been to the opera before, often because they imagined it was somehow more glamorous, more creative, more rewarding than whatever it was I was now doing (you know, that terribly uncreative job called motherhood.) They just imagined that it would be painful to let it go and that somehow I was left artistically and creatively bereft by the break up.

Ha!

I’m here to tell you, with totally certainty – that this idea of a creative, inherently artistic profession is a MYTH.

Just because opera has singing and dancing and costumes and makeup and the occasional violent death doesn’t make it any more creative than any other line of work. This just buys into the craptastic idea that creative equals performing, or music, or writing. Or paint, even.

But wasn’t Einstein creative? Edison?

Maradona? Gandhi?

How many people have described their accountant as creative? (Hands up all over the place.)

Creativity is not a profession. It’s a rebellious, muscular way of thinking that just gets beefier the more you use it. It gets fat on possibilities and tightly hugs the alternative perspective. It’s gentle too, diplomatically shining light on the darker corners you almost missed.

No matter how mundane you perceive a task to be (because nothing is inherently mundane either, but thinking makes it so) – if you inject it with super duper creative ninjarific divatastic mojo – it becomes mind-blowing, heart-expandingly brilliant.

When you create a fantastic meal from a few meagre ingredients in your cupboard. When you pretend you are sick to stay home from work. When you invent a reality that protects the innocence of your child. You are creating, creative, compiling a magical something out of a seeming nothing.

This is where your job becomes your work, and your work becomes your art.

So I insist you stop saying to yourself “I wish I could do something that was more creative!”  right now, and get sparky over here.

(Diva-disclosure: I am one of the stars of the Creative Spark Plug Lecture Series, so that is indeed an affiliate link. However, you can call me crazy, but just being in this program is awesome enough for me – and I basically love everything that Megan pulls together. ‘Nuff said. )

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Ah the wonders of the interwebs…

Two days ago I chatted for almost three hours (!!) with my new Twitter friend and future musical muskateer @HelenKim. (We have some very exciting plans in store for our readers over the coming months…) Being a former whizz with a cello, Helen and I have a lot in common – and one thing we share is a passion for bringing the music we love to the people who just don’t know they love it yet. (Watch this TED talk by Benjamin Zander to see how an audience can be transformed into lovers of classical music in barely 15 minutes…)

And today Helen “twintroduced” me to Greg Sandow (@gsandow), a music critic, educator and writer whose blog I have been digging into this morning.
This particular passage struck me as being worthy of sharing;

Ecosystem. The classical music world, I think, sometimes forgets that it needs one. Instead, we substitute a kind of entitlement. “This is our art. It has to exist.” When funding is plentiful, it might be safe to think that way. But today?

Added later: What I’m saying here isn’t simply about funding, management, or the cultural position of classical music in our wider world. It’s a human thing. If you’ve written a modernist piece — or any piece; or if you run an orchestra  — don’t you want to look out at your audience and see people you care about, people whose thoughts and feelings and needs and loves and hates are a central part of everything you do?

And if not, why do you want to work — and, maybe, live — in such cold artistic isolation?

Isn’t this just a lesson in basic marketing? If you want to create a product, you can do one of two things -

1. Create a product that you love, something you just know people will want to buy, because hey, YOU love it, right?
2. Ask your audience what THEY want -  and then go get it and give it to ‘em.

There’s no prizes for guessing that number 2 is where the dosh is, is there? (There can be exceptions to this – like the guy who invented pet rocks.)

Classical music may be art, but art needs to be shipped. And to do this effectively you must find a way to connect with your audience (and understand the ecosystem.) And it seems to me that most serious practitioners in classical music view their art as being quite a rarified niche that should command a certain level of respect and even reverence (when you go even further down the long tail, you find opera and modernist music whose audiences are even more nichetastic).

So go find an audience that is cool with that. It’s probably going to be a tiny one, but at least you get artistic autonomy.

But it’s worth pointing out that in reality the classical music market is a HUGE. Just look at Susan Boyle or The Three Tenors. Millions of people buy into this stuff. ClassicFM has the largest audience of any commercial radio station in the UK.

But the woman who buys an expensive ticket to see Il Divo strut their way through a cheesy operatic arrangement of “Unbreak My Heart” by Toni Braxton would shirk at paying £5 to sit in the gods and watch Philip Glass’s Satyagraha. And sadly, she’s going to walk right on by that virtuoso violinist guy playing in the subway for a laugh.

And that’s ok. Because there’s a place for everything, in my opinion, and I don’t buy into the whole highbrow thing that many of my peers do. I buy what I like, so why shouldn’t someone else?

But as Greg Sandow writes – why work in cold artistic isolation? You need to care about your audience – not patronise them, or brow beat them into submission because “this is serious art and it’s good for you!”

Surely the world of classical music needs to embrace where their audience is – and inspire them, encourage them, educate and lead them. Ben Zander does this just by sheer enthusiasm alone.

The answer is in drawing them closer to you. We don’t get more fans by shouting at people. Why not try a passionate, intimate whisper full of anticipation and commitment and respect?

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In any endeavour, how you start is crucial.

But I would go even further and say it is not the start itself but the quality of the intention that precedes it.

For example, when I start to sing, the performance doesn’t begin with the first note. It begins with the intention, and it is the intention that inspires the breath. Not just a taking in of air, but a breath that has a definite meaning – why am I about to say what I am about to say?

I find myself more viscerally engaged with a performer (and I believe this applies in any field, but I feel it keenly in music) when they are completely in control of the silence between the notes. The gaps between the phrases. The thoughts between the words…opera singers especially are very adept at acting when they are singing, but sometimes they forget that they can also act with the breath. When a singer breathes with intent, with meaning, it connects the entire performance and raises it to a much higher level.

Inspiring public speakers understand this very well. An effective leader can sometimes fill the pauses in a speech with more power and meaning than the speech itself. When we have a conversation with a friend who is inspired by a brilliant idea, there are no gaps, just fizzing energy and excitment all over.

Play with this a little – focus on the way you breathe automatically between thoughts as you speak. Notice how it is inseparable from the heart of what you mean to say.

A start is just a beginning until it is breathed into life - with focus, passion, meaning and authority ( and even, conversely, humility).

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Chris Brogan posted the fifth video in his Overnight Success series yesterday, and it really got me thinking about the idea of belief systems and how people get sucked in to the story of their own hyped-up greatness.

You see, coming from the opera biz, I know a lot of people who appear to be huge believers in their own awesome press.

(I remember hosting a dinner party where one up-and-coming baritone spent the entire evening flicking through all my opera mags and reading aloud all the great reviews of his performances . The rest of us just rolled our eyes and kept drinking.)

And of course, opera has this great stereotype of the “prima donna” who symbolises this very idea – strutting and pouting her way across the stage demanding the world love her the way she deserves to be loved, and having a catty tantrum when the world fails to deliver the adoration she expects.

But there is something I have always noticed about people who feel the need to loudly broadcast their apparent greatness to the world. It’s not that they believe the hype…it’s that they don’t believe the hype.

The most outwardly arrogant and vain individuals I know always seem to be the most deeply insecure. And the louder they shout about their awesomeness, the less they truly believe it.

When we are young children growing up, we hear our parents  say “well done, you were brilliant today”. In a loving home, we actually believe it. In a vulnerable and unsafe family environment, we know there is a contradiction between what we hear and what we know to be true.

As we get older though, we start to get really good at deciding what we know to be true regardless of what anyone else says, and those contradictions just get bigger and more frequent. How many times have you received a compliment only to immediately hear that voice inside your head sneer “yeah, sure, right“…?

Accepting a compliment is an art in itself. Truly believing that compliment to be true…another thing altogether.

I believe that the closer our own self-image is to the hype that surrounds us, the more at ease we are with it and the more we can function normally without losing our humanity. (This is polite for saying “without become an asshole.”)

But the bigger this gap gets, the louder you have to shout to get your voice heard over all that internal “I’m a crap no-talent ugly fat fraud!” screaming going on. And you keep shouting because that way, hopefully, no will get around to discovering that you really aren’t all that anyway…how long can you keep ‘em fooled?

Challenging our own internal belief systems is a big job…but it’s got to be done, and only you can do it. Because you only ever believe what you tell yourself anyway.

Stop listening to the crowd. Stop thinking about the gap between what they say you are and what you think you know is right about you.

Start by just trying to concentrate on the good stuff you are already doing that makes you awesome. Focus on the process. Zoom out from yourself to see the bigger picture. Keep your eye on the intention to do great work, serve and add value.

And start by feeling grateful for where you are…now.

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Have you ever watched a politician make a speech that sounded like it should have moved you, but it just left you cold? Or a sports player who is technically brilliant but really doesn’t “do” it for you?

I see this all the time in opera – excellent singers who are great at hitting all the right notes, just not so great at making me care whether or not they die at the end of the show. (Which in opera, let’s face it, happens all the time.)

My very first singing teacher once said, “I don’t want to watch a safe singer. I want to see a singer on the edge, being vunerable, like walking a tightrope. That is what really moves me. ”

It’s thrilling when we see someone take a risk and push themselves beyond what we assume is possible. When we hold our breath and bite our lip because there is no way…ever…that they can pull that off!

The thrill is in the risk – it’s the stretch that comes from pushing yourself beyond what you think you’re capable of. When you take a chance and stick two fingers up at what everyone else assumes you can do. This is leading. This is what moves us.

There’s no risk involved when we watch someone who is practised in a cosy kind of “just turn it on” perfection. We can admire it, even aspire to it, but it’s hard to passionately love it when it seems so damn easy. So safe.

There’s nothing wrong with being carefully excellent at what you do. But if you really want to move people, stop playing it safe.

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“What mankind wants is not talent; it is purpose.” ~ Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton.

There is a general consensus that talent alone does not make you a success. You also need application and the right kind of hard work. You need the skills to analyse the results you get, and the perseverence to continue where others give up. And luck, of course.

But is it really as simple as that?

I was moved to write this article in response to a Triiibes discussion I have been taking part in. One of my friends on this excellent forum was discussing the book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else and the thoughtful, intelligent responses were very much in line with the consensus I described earlier.

But my perspective on this is quite a different one, and I’ll do my best to not make it too lengthy.

As a teenager I was considered Gifted and Talented. I attended a school based on academic selection, and very soon I discovered that I also had an unusually beautiful singing voice with operatic potential.

As I followed the operatic path, my talent opened many doors. I won huge national competitions, dozens of prizes, received a great deal of financial patronage and was snapped up for my professional debut before I had even finished my formal musical training.

But no matter how much talent I had been blessed with, it really didn’t matter in the end because how I felt about the “business” of singing impinged too much on my love of the “craft” of singing.

You see, to me it is not a question of talent vs hard work. It is a question of preserving the love for what you do.

The business of opera means travel (oh, for a major opera house in every city!) for long periods of time (a new production takes at least 6 weeks to rehearse) for the least amount of money the house can afford (= one broke singer).

I was fortunate to have been signed by the largest and most powerful agent in Europe before I’d even made my professional debut. And yet the first contract I secured after 6 years of formal training was as Principal Soprano in a leading house for the grand annual salary of 14,000 pounds a year. I still laugh at that figure….can you imagine a trained medical student emerging after 6 years of education earning this kind of money? Certainly not. Opera may appear glamorous, but at its heart (especially in the UK) is a system where the companies depend on government handouts and not private sponsorship. The coffers are almost always empty, and the cupboards bare.

And it isn’t just about the money. It’s about the logistics of pursuing a glittering operatic career at the expense of everything else. If you have children, do you bring them with you? What if they are at school? Who stays home if your partner is also a performer? How do you even get to meet non-performers when every one of your colleagues are either singers themselves or intimately connected to the business? Male opera singers at the highest level sometimes endure weeks without their families. High level female opera singers either pay for the nanny to come along, or they exchange the cuddles of their kids for the proverbial roses strewn along the footlights.

Personally, I chose family over career, because my audience could never have loved me back in the same way as my daughters. I chose personal growth and variety over the continued pursuit of an artistic legacy that I believe is really a mirage.

Many of my friends and colleagues see this as a “waste”. We can’t help believing someone has been gifted with a talent for some divine reason and that they are obligated to selflessly share it with the world. But surely it is just as much a waste to continue plugging away at something that does not nourish us anymore?

Persistence is a tool. It serves us in the pursuit of something we are passionate about. But all the persistence in the world will not enable a person in any field – talented or otherwise – who’s heart is not in it.

If there is anything we can teach our children, it is about learning to know themselves in such a way that they discover their passions and learn to follow them, whereever they may lead. For what good is talent without joy? What good is hard work without passion? Persistence is merely a means to an end – and many can pursue failure with the same persistence as those who pursue success.

I just want my daughters to know – intimately and with conviction – their own values, follow their passions with purpose, strive to contribute to those around them, and always do what they love. And I am learning to do the same.

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You Don’t Get Paid When…

You cancel a performance because you’re sick.
Your students don’t show up for their lessons.
You’re on holiday (I know, like you ever take one.)
Your agent is on holiday (like, all the time.)
You are between contracts. For what seems forever.
You just don’t feel like singing and want to lie down somewhere for a few weeks. (Okay, make that a few years.)

Basically, no matter how glamorous you think your life is, the truth is if you are self-employed and you’re not showing up, then you’re not getting paid.

This is obvious but pretty damn important…surely you didn’t spend all that money on training, on music, on tickets to performances, on material for your business, on that website, on paying for your agent to have lovely long lunches with other people, all that investment (as Gordon Brown likes to call spending) to be sitting at home, waiting for the phone to ring, and not earning anything more for all that hard work you’ve put in to your career?

Don’t you fancy getting paid…wait for it… even when you’re not performing? (shock gasp horror!)

Because one fine, sunny day, you wake up and discover that you’ve lost your voice. Or decide you can’t be bothered any more. Or you have kids, or an accident, or you just simply run out of time and energy. And did I mention running out of money?

The big question is – are you prepared?

What are you doing right now to make sure you can support yourself when the music stops?

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