Posts Tagged: performance enhancement

“To the man who only has a hammer in the toolkit, every problem looks like a nail.” Abraham Maslow Remember yesterday’s brick wall? You do owe it to yourself to get back up again after you’ve been knocked down. But there’s nothing that says you have to keep going back for the exact same punishment.

“When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” Franklin D. Roosevelt If all of this worked like a charm, everyone would do it. If all we had to do is prepare honestly and then perform with grace and flexibility, it would be hard but not crushing. But for

“Chance favors the prepared mind.” Louis Pasteur We started the week by acknowledging the existence of chance; by considering what it means to make friends with unpredictability and welcome its gifts.  But here’s the back story: those gifts come to us more easily if we’re ready. We have to stay loose and let go of

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.” Leonard Bernstein We know we need a plan. A method in the middle of the madness. Both on the micro level (how to get to that 10am audition on time), and from the global perspective (how to cobble together enough

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams We’ve been trafficking in some pretty heavy thinkers so far, and I’m sure that Scott Adams (the creator of “Dilbert”) would be bemused to share space with Proust and Eliot.  But he has more than earned his place by

(No, not wasabi. Wabi-sabi.) “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen Wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection; of accepting transience. It reveres authenticity and is simple, slow, and uncluttered. It loves those little cracks in our lives that allow the light to

“Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux.” (The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.) Marcel Proust One of the true bonuses of getting off the merry-go-round for a few minutes a day is that

“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.” Winnie the Pooh via A.A. Milne You thought this was going to be about tackling the audition to-do list, didn’t you? Notice I didn’t say “Getting Ready,” but rather

“And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.” T.S. Eliot It’s tough to remember where we started, and sometimes it’s essential that we let it go. Nostalgia is overrated and is mostly revisionist history anyway. But there had to be some unavoidable truth embedded in the decision to make music

I know that my readership in conservatories and other singer training hotbeds spikes in the fall, and I’m keenly aware that many of you are looking here for some sort of clarity as you claw your way through this peculiar thing that is auditioning.  Last fall, I decided to take all of the random audition