Dear Lisa M, I envy you your 4 years at college or university doing all that preparatory work, but I really wonder what the _motivation_ was, while all this was happening.
If you were not developing a technique of singing during this time, how could you be sure that you were not wasting all your effort if it later turned out that your voice and technique was not exceptional.
When I was learning singing at that age, I assume twenty-ish, the idea of gambling my future on the forlorn hope that one day it may all come together, was standing on a slippery slope indeed.
I've no doubt you benefited enormously from your earnest application to those subjects, but did you consider having a fallback position? As to private teachers, that's all I've had. Two of them. One way back then: in retrospect a total failure: the other for the last 18 mths the total opposite. Now how's this. I go for a 30 minute lesson 9.15am Tuesdays, pay my A$25 and leave there between 11am and 11.30am. TWO Hours. She likes teaching me she says because when she corrects something or suggests something, I give her feedback, apply it and it's still there next week. I practise my technique and try and include the changes in the previous work. Many don't. Not many institutions could have this flexibility or involvement I think.
The crux of my concern is that if all your work did NOT result in a clear vocal technique, then the reason for doing it at all, is missing, unless it just seemed like a good idea at the time!!!
Perhaps your initial expectation was that you would indeed achieve an appropriate technique, but your lecturers dismantled it as being an unreasonable one?
Now I'm not sure who said this:.....
>>But conservatory costs exorbitant amounts of >>money, and gives singers the wrong tools at the wrong >>time (not enough technical training, and too much >>polishing before they are vocally equipped to use it).
.......: so it would seem that while the lavish cost of such conservatory education serves the same purpose as with other subjects: timing IS the problem. In the rush to harvest the parental dollar, they have missed the main target completely, for no other reason, than that the desirable age for student enrollment, does not match vocal maturity. The inflexibility of educational institutions, seen in this light, define quite clearly the role of private teachers and associated student requirements, ..... to match vocal maturation, something that doesn't fit the conservatory model apparently . I also suspect that the tendency of some academics to view singers as lesser musicians, stems from this biological inconvenience, that in the minds of some, delayed vocal maturity: mid twenties, or God forbid even later, indicates backward musical development, placing the singer unjustly on the defensive.
> I would warn against railing against the "conservatory system".
I can see why. It's a powerful lobby indeed and any dismantling of it would be at enormous artistic cost to a community, but that does not justify protecting it from criticism.
Reg.
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