The Aria Ready blog contains over two decades of monthly posts aimed at teaching emerging professional singers how to become a fully-formed artistic professional in today's world of Opera.
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of your colleagues and friends tell you how busy they are. Sure it’s hard to deal with the pressures of having a job, all the while worrying about the added time, energy and money needed to continue your […]
Whenever we take a chance and enter unfamiliar territory or put ourselves into the world in a new way, we often experience fear. Very often this fear keeps us from moving ahead with our lives or trying new things. The trick is, as the title of a really great book by Susan Jeffers says, “FEEL […]
Renunciation – rejection – repudiation – abandonment – denial; these are very powerful words that often accompany how we feel inside after an audition that might not have gone as well as expected. Or perhaps you presented an amazing audition but still didn’t get the job or win the competition and start questioning what happened; […]
What is your attitude after a performance? Are you in it for the accolades, the audiences immediate response, and then the good things people say to you after a performance starting with your colleagues, conductor, stage director, stage manager, fans, to family and critics, etc? Does this help give you your identity that totally depends […]
How often do you get all caught up in some emotion without even noticing that it is happening or what that particular emotion is? We all do this because we as humans, experience life through our senses, which in turn evoke and are attached to our feelings, our emotions. That is the beauty of being […]
How heavy is a glass of water? If you hold it in your hand with your arm outstretched for a minute, that’s doable. However, if you had to hold it in that exact position for an hour or a whole day, that would be a whole different animal. I personally couldn’t do it. It’s not […]
Holiday time without the added pressure of being a performer can be a trial all by itself; having to deal with the gift giving thing and family dynamics can put one over the edge for sure. We often look forward to going home for the holidays and have some idealized vision of what it will […]
Often times a singer just getting their feet wet within the industry of performing still believes that the life of an artist is romantic, filled with a particular kind of sweet suffering and struggle. It’s the La Boheme syndrome; it’s our quixotic fantasy of the mid 1800’s way of life with all its passion, intrigue […]
We say it in despair, in desperation, in denial and it even becomes a punch line, an excuse. Hey, I’m stuck in my emotions. It's not what happens around us that determines what we feel. It is what we say to ourselves that does. Now, of course, I am talking about emotional feelings we […]