Why was I born? Why am I living? What do I get? What am I giving? Why do I want a thing I daren’t hope for? What should I hope for? I wish I knew…
—Why Was I Born, Jerome Kern
“Well, there are studies that suggest that many who go into the performing arts suffer from an external locus of identity.”1 One of the challenges of being a freelancer is in learning how to utilize the periods I am not working constructively and restfully. Can I enjoy my free time for what it is? Or will I exhaust myself using busyness as a distraction from the anxiety of temporary unemployment? I am getting better at this, though admittedly I come only about halfway, in that I have to attach a productive task to most leisurely activities. The opening statement is a line from the show The Big Bang Theory. It is a scene where Penny’s introduction to her neighbor’s psychiatrist mother becomes an analysis of her decision to become an actress. The psychiatrist suggests to Penny that her motivation for pursuing an acting career stems from unmet childhood emotional needs… I think by now you can see where I am going with this, in terms of subject matter for this essay. It might seem a bit “unsophisticated” for an opera singer to use a pop culture reference from the entertainment industry as a means of delving into the telos of choosing an artistic path. To this I can only say that thoughts and inspirations come while I am living my life, however profound or mundane the context.2 In this case, knitting (productive task) while watching television (leisurely activity) was where the seed was planted.
With any vocation that provides a person with a sense of purpose or drive, it is understandable that such a calling is likely motivated by early childhood experiences. It is difficult to address the opening statement without going too deeply into details about my own childhood. Broadly speaking, I will say that the cultural norms, religious conditioning, and generational baggage I was exposed to, did not make for an ideal environment in developing the emotional intelligence of a highly sensitive child. More specifically, I am referring to the harmony-at-all-costs posturing of “Minnesota Nice”, the promise of divine love conditional on certain behaviors within the religious community, and an ancestry overwhelmed by trauma from immigration, poverty and war. Now, as an adult, I have a deeper understanding of these social dynamics— that for previous generations, survival was dependent on belonging, and in an effort to avoid conflict or exclusion, an image was projected to a social group that reinforced sameness at the cost of authenticity and transparency.
Music, as a representation of human emotion, is partly what had enchanted me about opera, if only just by its form. Far more time in opera is committed to emotion and introspection than to storyline. In standard repertoire, for example, recitatives are short and exist to help the plot move forward, whereas arias, duets and ensemble numbers serve as reflections of how the characters feel about what they want or what they are experiencing. As the expression of emotion is inherently more deeply felt through music as a medium, singers have the great privilege of exploring all of humanity’s mistakes without the real life consequences. This is not so simple— music as theater does require some degree of spiritual compartmentalization in order to preserve one’s mental health, if only because it necessitates empathy for the absolute best and worst of humanity. The fact that we can only know others as well as we know ourselves, is to suggest that a singer’s creative potential, when it comes to performing other characters, is to a large extent limited by their own self-awareness and depth of character. Living this path is all the more enriching, inasmuch as opera provides a controlled environment that allows me to swim around in my own subconscious, in order to explore the entire spectrum of the human experience.
Along with the circumstances of an individual’s upbringing, other environmental influences that affect calling are those related to social perception, or how an opera career is seen from the outside. The most obvious example of this is occupational prestige, as opera and classical music are considered to be elite arts. Attention, and the social reinforcement of applause and accolades, is also attractive from an outside perspective. Even if choosing this field as a social service, one can easily fall into the ego trappings of self-righteousness and pontification.
What about the innate influences of calling? To start, there is the argument that telos is simply a distraction from the ego’s anxiety towards mortality, though I had purposely referenced Jerome Kern lyrics and not Jean-Peal Sartre in order to keep this light, so I will leave it at that! The inborn gift of a child prodigy is a highly romanticized example of the innate influence on calling, as well as any genetic inheritance or predisposition passed on from a talented parent. But is there something else? Are we otherwise born empty? Might the inclination of calling be synonymous with the inevitability of destiny?
Though one can just as easily label it intuition or creative genius, the romantic in me is attracted to the idea of the daemon— that inspiration and impulses are motivated by an inner voice or guiding spirit. There have been many times during flow states of performance where I have had the sense, that while I am always the one driving, there might be someone else giving me directions from the back seat of the car. A spontaneous push to improvise a nuance of staging, or to increase the intensity of a phrase so that my singing partner’s reaction is more authentic. Within the context of calling, the guidance of daemon is felt particularly when confronted with adversity and the impracticalities of the profession. I like to think they are encouraging whispers from a future self: “Give it another year”, “You would be experiencing similar challenges and behaviors in any other field”, “What would 10-year old Alison think of what she was doing now?”.
To whatever degree calling is influenced by nature or nurture, the question that follows is whether our why might interfere with the what. If you see a musician as a vessel through which a composer’s creative work is carried out, then the responsibility we have is to empty ourselves in order to implement another artist’s creation mindfully and respectfully. And yet, if that is all there is to performance, does that not reduce singing to mere puppetry and imitation? Aren’t our own essence and subjective life experiences the very tools with which we have the capacity to empathize with other characters? My personal belief has been that a musical score is a creative entity independent of its performance, and that the integration of cast and creative team transforms it into “something else”. That is to say, I see performance as interpretation, and not simulation. And yet, there is also the danger when this way of thinking goes too far, that self-expression becomes self-indulgence, out of a misunderstanding or an exaggeration of “making a piece your own”. Having an intimate understanding of our relationship to music should give us the objectivity to tell the difference, or at least the discernment needed to find some middle ground.
What I have also wondered, is whether a musician’s calling has an effect on stage presence, and is observable from an audience, either directly or indirectly. It does not necessarily take a critical eye to see when a performance is sterile, overly zealous, or attention seeking. Is this a result of how a performer is connected to what they are doing? A sterile performance might indicate a lack of consciousness in a virtuoso or prodigy who takes their talent for granted. One could attribute overly zealous performances to an obsession with social perception. And an attention seeking performance would likely come from a musician who is living out on stage some of those unmet childhood emotional needs the psychiatrist referenced in the episode of The Big Bang Theory! Perhaps then, this is to suggest that a musician’s calling influences performance, regardless of whether they make any effort to understand it themselves.
Simply the logistics and technical mastery required in order to be in this field are enough to occupy all of one’s time and effort. To be doing this at all, and with your mental health in tact, is to be an exception, which makes the consideration of ethics and other wholistic aspects of artistry seem like a luxury. And yet, I am not one of those singers who assumes that metrics or talent imply creativity and pure intent as given. I feel a responsibility to nurture craft and consciousness. While I acknowledge that the ability to read or write articulately on the subject does not necessarily indicate that I am living that out for myself, I believe that cultivating and questioning one’s relationship to music is a lifelong and necessary process.
Or perhaps I am just glorifying my tendency to overthink.
As I have stated before, I have been using Substack as a creative exercise between gigs, to refine my critical thinking skills, and to engage in the mystery of what it is to participate in this complex art form. That being said, though I am unburdened by taking sides one way or the other, I have to say it does make constructing closing paragraphs slightly difficult. Therefore, in lieu of a conclusion, I will cite one of my favorite music anecdotes by Quincy Jones, for those readers who have made it all this way, and yet are still in need of resolution:
“Nadia Boulanger used to tell me all the time, ‘Quincy, your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being.’ It's okay to play fast and all that other stuff, but unless you have a life experience, and have something to say that you've lived, you have nothing to contribute at all.”
I just don’t seem to have a compass to tell me what I’m destined for. And yet, in looking back, everything seems to fit so well that it’s as if a guiding spirit has been showing me the way.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Scene from Episode 15 of Season 2 of The Big Bang Theory. It was a guilty pleasure, as I am a sucker for witty dialogue and performers who work well together.