Auditioning

Some singers are auditioning for specific roles for various organizations and seem to be hurriedly learning the auditioning piece for that role without paying heed to the character required. There are three key elements that need to be kept in mind - the vocal, the physical appearance and the characterization. Although they, in turn, encompass several distinct compartments, none of them can function without the other if you want to make your best impression.

The vocal requires two important aspects:

1. It must be in a comfortable part of your range.

2. The diction must be perfectly clear, no matter what the language might be. Vowels are not a problem for the average singer, but consonants are. Some consonants are so gutteral that they impede the steady flow of breath and thus the flow of singing tone.

Just think about the truly great singers. By that, I don't mean hooter ********* who has a flow of tone uninterrupted by any consonants at all (If you had to earn ten cents for every word you could write as she sang, you would write for a few years to finally collect the equivalent of one week's wage.) That's precisely what's wrong with singing and it has been sold to the public as great art. You would not go to a play to hear a flow of tone and absolutely no words. Puccini, Mozart and Donizetti did not visit the theatre or write opera to hear no words at all. Diction requires daily exercises in the practice of the Italian Consonants. There's an old saying "If you cannot say it, you cannot sing it." One only has to compare ********* in "Lucia" to Galli-Curci to see how ridiculous the former's lack of diction sounds.

The truly great singers had one thing in common. You did not have to know the language but you could write down every word as they sang (perhaps phonetically, but nevertheless, every word.)

But that is only the mechanical side of the vocal technique.

There must be an emotional side to singing just as there is an emotional side to acting or reciting. Words have to reflect our thoughts or rather the composers' thoughts. They have envisaged a scene, or perhaps a story (ballad) or a picture (art song) or a mood. As words are the foremost expression of human thought, the words we utter must reflect our thoughts. Therefore they cannot be delivered in a monotone. They must be inflected so that they mirror our/the composers' thoughts.

Suppose you were to speak before Congress to ask them not to close the Kennedy Centre. Would you be impassioned or would you speak in a monotone?Suppose you now see a tiny child lost in the subway and you have to comfort it. Wouldn't you modulate your voice so that it was soothing and gentle? Those things are easy to imagine and of course if you experiment with them right now, you will see the effect that such mental stimulation has on your voice and the way you inflect your words. Well, the composition is that child. The composition itself is your mental stimulus.

That is the second thing all the great artist of the past had in common. They conveyed feeling. Their words carried their thoughts convincingly to the ears of their listeners. So they pronounced well and they inflected well without leaving any doubt in the listener's mind

The next thing that must go hand in hand with the vocal is the physical appearance. I am short yet no one ever noticed it while I was on stage. I just knew it as a fact of my life, which I instantly forgot as I entered the body and mind of the character. There are limitations to the roles a tall or short man can play, but there are not many. What are the words being uttered by the character? Is he/she saying "I'm sorry"? If so, certainly the tread must not be light but leaning towards a certain heaviness to reflect a weight upon one's shoulders, a weight that the character is seeking to remove by those magic words, "I'm sorry". Does the face show that the character is sorry? Suppose the character declares "I'm in love!" Surely the tread would now be lighter. There would be a lightness or spring in the step. The posture would reflect a character who had grown taller. Yet most singers' bodies are the physical equivalent of the vocal monotone. The face and body show no change, no matter what words are being uttered.

But the physical is only the outward expression of the character's emotion at that time. The character's emotion will be determined to a great extent by his/her interfacing with the other characters of the period in which the opera is set. a woman who is called a hussy in 1910 will be appalled at the word but laugh it off in 2004. If people you know are dying every week in an epidemic such as aids, you will react in a very definite way to news that your best friend or mother or father or brother or sister has contracted it. But would the reaction be that much different than Rodolfo's as he knows that Mimi is doomed? Tuberculosis/Consumption was the epidemic of that day. wouldn't it be the same mixture of love, sadness, helplessness and despair. Is that not the driving force behind Rudolfo from the third act onwards?

I have provoked your thoughts on the three aspects of auditioning because I don't believe that you are doing yourselves any favors by giving a hurriedly learned superficial rendition of an aria sung by a character in an opera you wish to sing. If you do not have the time to adequately study the character, the emotion of the character, the composers' markings, the passage of the character through the story, you are better off to audition with another piece that you have adequately prepared. Just give an artistic rendering of an aria that does you justice and you are likely to get the role.