(A little bit of regret for the neglect...)

The End of Another Era Part I


Now that I am 'done' with school now, or at least for the time being, reality is setting in: I will be joining the 'real world' soon, although my July is so packed that I at least won't have to face it until August.

I attended my commencement last May 15th, but honestly, I wasn't all that excited to walk. I told my mom this and she said, "OK. Whatever you want to do." Then I called my grandmother and told her that the reason I hadn't bought my cap and gown was because I didn't want to do commencement. She then proceeded to call up my mother and ask her why I wasn't attending the ceremony. So then my mom asks me, "If I fly out there, will you walk?" "Well, off course I will." So I went and paid the $30 late fee to get my cap, gown, mortarboard and master's hood and left it in the plastic until the day before.

It wasn't until I got to school on commencement morning, seeing my friends in their caps and gowns, when I started getting into the moment. And I ended up having a great time. After my mom left, I started thinking about this 'real world' that I'll rejoining. It's not like I've never been in it - I worked 30 hrs/week and had 15 units/semester for my first six years of college and I still managed a decent GPA. I even worked full-time for two years before coming back to school.

I still remember that one day, sometime in 2003. I was working at Great Earth Vitamins in Hillsdale Mall. I had just opened the store and had yet to have one customer. As people walked by (mostly elderly mallwalkers) I thought to myself, "Is this all there is to my life? This can't be it. It can't be." Through a weird twist of fate, my application for the Grad Asian American Studies degree was denied (I turned it in late and was hoping for a waiver) so, thanks to my good friend Steven H's advice, I decided to audition for the music program at SF State so I could be a choral conductor.

That summer was a wild one. My uncle, himself a classical voice alum of Indiana U, gave me two songs to learn: "Where E'er You Walk" and "Vittoria, vittoria." I coached with him once on the pieces, and didn't even bother to learn the translation of the Italian. Two weeks before the audition I went to Hawaii for my uncle's wedding and partied hard: I knew that if I got in then I'd have to treat my voice better. In fact, I think I smoked almost a pack a day that week because I knew that I would need to quit if I was going to get lessons. So I showed up to my audition and sang "Where E'er You Walk" fine and then screwed up pretty badly on the words for "Vittoria." I think that if the faculty had not known me I probably wouldn't have made it in. But I had paid my dues singing in the choirs there at school so I think they let me slide. As soon as Dr. Habermann told me I was accepted, I made the vow to quit smoking (Up to that point I was a smoker, averaging about 5 a day, sometimes more if the traffic was bad). I figured that it would be a waste of everyone's time if I was taking lessons but undermining the teaching/teachers by smoking.

Speaking of lessons, I was pretty bummed that as a Music Ed student I did not have the option to take jazz vocal lessons, because I surely felt more at home singing that style. Instead, I had to join the classical singers and their stuffy, snooty, stuck-up world. Luckily, I adapt/mimic/copy quickly. You could almost say that my first voice lessons were trying to copy the sound of this fabulous tenor in my chamber choir (his name is M Miller). I rarely practiced my rep (except for maybe the day of) and didn't take the lessons all that seriously. I liked my teacher and thought he had great stuff to say, but in all honesty, I was going to school to be a choral conductor, so yeah, it's nice to have a great voice, but I was failing to see the connection of the voice with conducting (though I'd yet to actually have one conducting class/lesson).

Because I didn't take the lessons seriously I was still trying to memorize on the day of my first jury. I think I sang "I'll Sail Upon the Dog Star" (which is still one of my bread and butter pieces - I will use that as an audition piece in a heartbeat) and then "Im wunderschonen Monat Mai". As I walked by the steps at Burke Hall I can remember dry heaving - I was that nervous. But it all went well in the end. The next semester was more of the same - practice an hour before my lesson, do everything my teacher told me to do as I was in my lesson (I started noticing that he was correcting the same stuff every week), and then not think about all my vocal rep until an hour before my next lesson. The choir went to Germany and Prague, and then I sang my spring jury - "If Ever I Saw" and something else. After the jury was done, Dr. Deeter asked me, "So tell me again why you don't audition for opera scenes?" I promptly answered, "Because I'm not a performance major." (This was my auto-response regarding anything to do with solo vocal performance).

However, I figured I had nothing to lose by auditioning, so next semester I showed up for the audition and sang "Le Violette," another of the Italian greatest hits that I learned (without learning the translation.) She even let me stand behind the always wonderful Steve Damonte just so I could finish the song (I was majorly screwing it up). So far, I'd been 0 for 2 in auditions at this school. And yet, probably because I'm a tenor, and I'm not stupid, and also because I'm good looking (a stretch?) I was cast as Remendado in the Carmen quintet.

And all of a sudden, my schooling world turned down a new, previously unknown and unforeseen path...

Part II next time

Makin' Mine Music

~No Tations~