Do all musicians feel this way?

Cafe Society
21

Actually, I do have a tuba anecdote - ducks the DCFPVC swing

My S.O. was in the choir for one of them combined symphony/choir performances - She was directly behind one of the tuba players and she and a friend spent a rehearsal tossing M’n’M’s into the bell (you know how those rehearsals can get). She said that when he went for the low notes the candies burbled and popped out the top of the bell like popping corn. She and her companion-in-crime about died trying to keep from laughing out loud (you know how those rehearsals can get). The Tuba player (true to form, IMHE) was extremely cool about it when he figured out why they were giggling behind him.

[sub]In my first post I was actually trying to make some kind of lame connection having to do with Divas and Tubas, but there’s a fine line between clever and stupid - wink[/sub]

22

I have a degree in voice from North Texas (second largest school of music in the world, thank you very much), and we heard that shit all the time. I always thought that it stemmed from the fact that singers tended to need more help than other musicians. If you give any well trained instumentalist a piece of music, they can probably play it to some degree the first time, with no additional input from anyone. A vocalist will probabaly, unless they have perfect pitch, need a starting note. Also, and I know this is a gross oversimplification, on any given instrument, if you push the right button, and apply the right force, you will get the right note. There is no such mechanism for a vocalist. You must learn muscle memory, and develop a good ear to be a good sight reader.
As someone who sings and plays piano, I think it is much harder to sight read unaccompanied vocal music than piano.
This, however, is not recognized by instrumentalists IMHO, so when they see vocalists struggle to sight read an enharmonic melodic line, which they could play easily, they infer from that that vocalists are not as good musicians as they are.

At North Texas, I sang in the A Capella and Chamber Choirs, and we were sight reading mothers fuckers. But we were trained to do it. Some friends and I once sang in a choir comprised of college student from all over the country at an ACDA convention. The piece was Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. All of the NT students sight read the piece over the period of the few days that we had rehearsals at the convention. Many of the students from other schools were struggling to learn it, but for us, it was easy.

So moggy, where did you go to school?

23

that should be country
[sub]sorry[/sub]

24

And Bass. It seems the only real musicians are guitarists. Fuck them, I play bass. Screw you monkeys!

25

I sang in a choir for a while, and we passed jokes back and forth between sections- the sopranos would tell ‘tenor’ jokes, and the tenors would tell ‘soprano’ jokes. I like the joke about tucks up frills, I’m going to have to tell my friends that.

WEW, I went to college at Towson State University in Maryland. Looking back, I can say that their music department left a lot to be desired. My first voice teacher did not really teach me much, she would just give me music to learn, and then say “This is from song cycle such-and-such, you can perform this at your junior recital.” She never asked if I liked the music, and a lot of it, I didn’t. She had an attitude because she was taught by a famous opera singer. My second voice teacher really helped me, but she crushed my dream of becomeing an opera singer, I think because of her own issues. The woman I studied with in high school was VERY supportive of me (the only person in my life who supported my decision to go into opera, in fact), and she told me that she had studied singing in the US, and then gone over to Italy and lived there for a few years and gotten a job with an opera company. She said that there were a lot of small opera houses in Italy, because opera was more popular in Italy, and it would be easy to do what she did. Sure, you wouldn’t become famous like Pavarotti, but you’d be singing opera.

This is what I wanted to do. My second voice teacher had lived abroad for many years, and been with a few opera companies. She had posters all over her walls of the performances she had been in. She told me at one point that she had wanted to be a Wagnerian soprano, but that she didn’t have the voice for it, and ended up doing “second banana” roles like Suzuki to Madame Butterfly. One day, I told her about my dream of going to Italy and joining an opera company. She attacked me verbally, telling me that you needed a lot of money to travel, and that you needed to have an accompanist and money to pay him, and that you can’t always get what you want in life and have to settle with what you have. Did I mention that I thought she had issues? I was crushed. I quit soon after that, because I was having some emotional problems, but it was several months before I could even listen to opera again.

I joined a choir a few years ago, with some wonderful people in it, and I am still friends with some of them. (The choir disbanded eventually) I still dream about singing opera, but I am hesitant about seeking any out. I remember all the fakeness/backstabbing/ass-kissing/favoritism that went on in the music department, and I’m not sure I want to deal with all that crap again. Maybe someday…

26

I could not agree more. I am not in music in any way because of my experience in music school. I watched myself, my wife, and a lot of my friends lose their love of music because of some bitter washed up never-has-been voice teacher crushed them.

Singers, in my experience, tend to be the most shallow, back stabbing group of all of the musicians I know.
My theory is that instrumentalists have something to hide behind. If you sing, it is YOU, not some piece of metal or wood that is making the music. It is your body. This leads to a lot of insecurity, because if you don’t like my voice, you don’t like me. It takes a lot of balls to stand up in front of anyone and sing, but singing in front of other singers is the worst. How many singers does it take to change a light bulb? 20, 1 to do it, and 19 to say. “I could have done it better”

Sounds like your school and mine were alot alike, I think it’s just the nature of the beast. The sad part is, the few actual stars I have met were the nicest people ever. It just seems like those who feel like they have something to prove are the idiots who make people like us hate people like them.

27

Ah, stereotypes. (Guitar player here…)

Every rock band has a singer with an ego the size of North America who rarely if ever practices, a guitarist who thinks they’re approximately 170 times the musician they actually are and gets angry if they don’t have a 10-minute solo, a drummer with the intelligence of an educated brick, a bass player who really wants to play some other instrument and was forced at gunpoint to learn bass…

There are little kernels of truth in all of these, but they’re just tendencies.

YMMV…

The best ‘musicians’ I have run into in my chosen genre are rhythm-section folks, drummmers and bassists. I played with a really good bass player the other night, in fact. Guitarists and vocalists, much more popular vocations, have a narrower bell-curve. Both are easier to start at but remain hard to master. Everyone sings in the car and can strum a few chords. I know I have glared at singers for mucking up timing that I consider instinctive and basic. The one I work with now gets really frustrated that she can’t easily translate what she hears in her head to music - which could be alleivated if she knew an fixed-note instrument. Then again, I can’t sing worth a damn, so I have little ground to stand on there.

28

Ouch. I had a similar experience to you Moggy but it was with the head of a music department from a school I was thinking of transferring to. I had called up the music department to make sure I had the proper requirements, a little about their programs offered, talk a little about what would transfer over, and also possibly find out about scheduling some auditions with one of their three guitar instructors. Well, the head of the music department said flat out, “transfer students typically flunk out after their first semester.” Real nice. I had a 3.95 GPA at that time. But it didn’t matter. I would never go to that school (UTSA) because the head of the music department was so bad. I wrote a letter to their dean of fine arts but never heard back from them or received an apology. For what it is worth, some people are just not nice.

Anyway, I got into a smaller music school and feel that I received a much better education there than was really available anywhere near me where I could have gone (I couldn’t travel far at that time). There was friendly competition there but generally everyone was supportive of everyone else’s abilities. I guess I got lucky in that respect. The only in-fighting that I saw was typically between people playing the same instrument. (Coincidently most notably within the flutists and singers.)

Some people just talk crap. Singers are musicians. I have a friend named Noel who is probably the best singer I know and ranks at the top of best musicians I know. She is musical in her renditions. She is appropriately dramatic for the given piece. And, she just has a voice that just kicks ass. If I were the evil mermaid her voice would be mine. (She has a very rich mezzo voice. Absolutely gorgeous.)

That said, there is a large range of varied talent (from completely sucks to totally bad ass, a la Beavis and Butthead) in all instruments. Untrained singers typically rely solely on vocal quality and some innate talent and don’t necessarily seek to further improve their skills because vocal practice is very physically exhausting. Untrained instrumentalists on the other hand seek to improve their skills (not necessarily succeeding) and thus creating an illusion of practice. (Not sure if I made my point… doesn’t matter.:))

HUGS!
Sqrl

PS. As a guitarist who can site read, when I was in my cocky youth, I used to get stupid rock boys to shut up by putting some really easy classical music in front of them. It is the easiest way to get them to shut up and start playing single notes. >8D mwuhahaha. It was more fun watching them try to pluck through it in vane.

29

moggy wrote:

“In order to be a successful opera singer, you must be a glorious voiced, independently wealthy, sexy, backstabbing bitch!”

– Anna Russel

30

I hear ya. I used to consider myself a good sightreader until I joined my current choir. The first rehearsal I attended, the entire choir sightread a piece (in Russian) at a level other choirs I’d been in performed at. Once you struggle up the steep learning curve, however, you can pretty much master anything in a few rehearsals (even "£&^!*! Tippett).

The real bonus is getting an audience that recognizes when you’ve done a good performance. The orchestra will only ever give you grudging applause at best, but there’s nothing like a crowd that lets you know you kicked ass (when you did, of course; a crowd of friends and relations will clap at anything).

[sub]“Symphony of Psalms” – good piece. The hard part is getting the rhythms right on the fast Laudate Dominums…[/sub]

31

Just 2 words:

The Persuasions