On Making a Career as a Singer

Nearly every time I am asked "what I do", my reply is met with the question "How did you know you wanted to make a career as an opera singer?" Excellent question, I say. I usually spout some inane answer along the lines of, "Well, I've been singing in choirs since I was a child, and then I sang in musicals when I was in high school, and one day one of my teachers said 'Emily, you should go to college and study classical voice' and I said 'Ok'." As a 17 year old who loved singing and being on stage and didn't so much excel at science or math, the thought of going to college and avoiding all things science and math sounded pretty good. Nobody in my family is a musician, nor did I really know any professional musicians at the time. Sure, I had some lofty dreams of Broadway, fame, glamour, and big cities, but mostly I couldn't think of anything I liked better and thought "Why not?" So my parents hired me the best voice teacher we could find in Fort Wayne, and several months later I found myself with a scholarship to study music at a small liberal arts college in Indiana.
When I got to school I realized that I didn't know a whole lot about the classical music world. But I was a quick study, a "big fish in a small pond", and was basically handed opera roles and solos with the symphony on a silver platter. It wasn't that I didn't work hard (ok so sometimes I didn't), but it seems in retrospect that I was extremely lucky.
The thing they don't tell you when you are an 18 year old freshman embarking on a career in classical singing, is that most people with Bachelors degrees in music don't end up making a career in music. Hell, many people with Masters degrees in music don't up making a career in music. Because it's just plain hard as hell. It doesn't pay the bills right away (if ever), which means day jobs, which means precious little time for anything else, let alone voice lessons, auditions, or making time for loved ones. It means eating canned tuna so you can afford an accompanist for your audition or a coaching. It means selling your body on the street so you can get headshots.
I wish someone had mentioned this to me at 18. At 24, I've developed an affinity for nice bedding and furniture, fancy food, good wine, expensive clothing, and travel (I blame this primarily on my paternal grandmother, who has shown me a life of luxury since birth. Also to the fancy private college I attended, where I was surrouded by young coeds from affluent backgrounds). Unfortunately for me, I've chosen a career that requires the same amount of years (and dollars) of training as a medical doctor, but rarely (if ever) provides the payoff of being a medical doctor. I wish someone had told me this when I was 18. I may have run screaming to the Economics department. Then again, maybe not, it's hard to say. As mentioned before, I've always been pretty bad at math.
Often I liken my chosen career to that game where people are given the opportunity to win a car by placing their hands on said car, and the last person with their hand left on the car (usually many, many hours later) wins the car. That's how it is to forge a career in classical voice. If you can hang on long enough, endure the canned tuna, cramped apartments, spending your dispoable income on audition fees instead of shoes and booze, you win. You win a career that requires 100% travel, little to no stability, and is perched on the fragility of two pieces of cartilige in your throat. On the other hand, you win the opportunity for artistic fulfillment, avoidance of cublicles and 9 to 5 jobs, opening night parties, and schmoozing.
I realize this post has been a little negative toward my profession, and I will try to devote some later posts to the benefits of making a career as a musician (because they DO exist, they really do). I'm just trying to be honest here and give you a good idea of what it's like. And the next time you meet a musician who has become a teacher or church choir director or gave it up altogether to become a pharmaceutical salesperson (my preferred alternate career at the moment), you can think about the car-winning metaphor...

They didn't fail at life. Their arms and legs just got tired, and they wanted to take a nap in some Egyptian cotton 1000 thread count sheets.