Competitive Singing – Not just on American Idol…
Big week. On Friday comes the collegiate NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) competition where many students from a variety of colleges will be competing against each other in the category of classical voice. Intense, it will be. In pretty excited, I must say, to display my collegiate year’s work in an audition setting for a panel of judges, eager to give valuable feedback.
To be honest, I used to be terrified about this kind of thing – getting dressed up and giving a formalized singing program. Though I love singing, I would get so nervous about my presence on stage, if I was communicating effectively and my musicianship. I feel like I have grown a great deal since I have been at Vanderbilt. The twice-weekly performance classes and countless other daily performance opportunities at Blair make me feel like formal performing is a routine. I now feel very comfortable stepping on stage and performing for the judges what I have worked on for the past semester and a half. We will see how it goes…my biggest goal for this weekend is to just really get focused when I sing and really have a good time while musically communicating with the panel.
Before this weekend, I was really stressing out about the words to a song from my program. I have been practicing the music daily to make sure I have the notes and rhythms completely down because that’s the last thing I want to be thinking about while trying to perform a song…”oh shoot what comes next?” I want to be able to have the freedom to make conscious, deliberate choices in acting out the song.
While this may seem like a drawn out blog about me, I was really trying to convey that each and every Blair class has been preparing me to have a comfortable and successful audition. In Blair, not only do we learn principles of musicianship and technique, but we also do in-depth analysis of what context composers wrote and performed songs in. I feel very confident that I have all the tools that I need to succeed this weekend.