Overcoming The Singer’s Handicap
If you asked me today who I am, I would tell you I am Doctor Kathryn Parsley, and I have a DMA in Vocal Performance in Opera. However, looking at where my musical life began might have given you a very different projection of my future.
I was a high school student who loved to sing and auditioned for choir and the musicals every year. I wanted to be in the top choir with all my friends, but no matter how hard I practiced, I never seemed to make the cut and was stuck in what we absolutely knew was “the bottom choir.”
At the time I was struggling with having to audition against my Mormon friends whose families had been teaching them to sing and play an instrument their whole lives. They had a decade of experience over me before they even walked into the room. That meant I had a lot of catching up to do if I ever wanted to audition against them and be successful.
Standing in the audition room, I felt sick to my stomach and so stupid. How could all these kids be so good at singing and sight-reading and know so much about it already? It didn’t seem fair that I was born into such a non-musical family.
At the end of my junior year, I auditioned for the last time to be placed in what would be my choir for senior year. The choir directors liked me, I had been taking voice lessons from a favorite local teacher, I thought for sure they were going to place me in the top choir with my friends. It was my last year, after all. When the audition results went up, my heart sank to find that I was in the “bottom choir” yet again. I felt like giving up. Then, as if a prayer was being answered, something amazing happened…
One day, one of my friends told me about a secret locker in the practice rooms that held all the sight-reading exercises and tapes from past Regional and All-State Auditions. I had no idea what she was talking about, so she showed me. Sheet music and recordings that you can sing against… to practice… sight reading music?! Suddenly, everything changed. Simply having a direction, something to practice besides my songs, something technique related changed the entire way I related to my voice and my musicianship. I soon began spending my lunch time every day in the practice rooms, working on those sight-reading exercises over and over.
When Regional Auditions came around my senior year, I signed up again, having never placed and never really getting my hopes up. I had worked really hard and I knew my songs and my Italian “aria” like the back of my hand, so I went out there and gave it everything I had. When it came time for the sight-singing evaluation, my knees were knocking but I read and sang as confidently as I could… and completely BOMBED the last exercise! I went home feeling sad and defeated for making such stupid, stupid mistakes!
About a week went by and the Regional Choir audition results were released. And for the first time in years, someone from the “bottom choir” had qualified for Regionals!
IT WAS ME!
Seeing the shocked look on my director’s face was amazing. And the support and love I felt from all of my fellow choir members was beyond words. Best of all, I finally got to rehearse and sing some really challenging music with other talented musicians for three days, and then put on such a thrilling choral concert!
At that point I became almost addicted to figuring out how to practice singing. So I decided to make a study of all the best practice techniques so I could keep working with more amazing artists and musicians!
But there was still a problem…
All the best musicians who were the most prolific in writing about and recording how to practice were all instrumentalists! The problem was that there was a clear divide between what instrumental students are taught and what vocal students are taught about practicing at home. It seemed I’d hit ANOTHER wall! Hitting the wall in this case meant I was stuck researching and trying to piece together instrumental wisdom but make it work for me. And in this case hitting the wall actually led me to change the nature of my search from finding what already works to looking at other disciplines and philosophies for direction and meaning.
Then one not so special day, I was scrolling through recorded practice sessions on YouTube when I stumbled upon the solution. This video compared a singer… to an athlete. That’s when it became crystal clear to me that the secret was to break down song like an athletic coach breaks down the mechanics of the sport, and create my own system.
As I watched this video over and over, it felt like a fireworks show in my brain every time. It was made clear to me how serious singers should think about their own deliberate artistic plan. This discovery meant I was able to start sight-singing like an instrumentalist, learn my music faster than I ever had before, spend almost no time having to correct wrong pitches, rhythms, and words with my teachers, and move onto the fun of being a musical artist instead of just a music student.
The more I shared my system with my friends and colleagues, the more it became clear to me that one single thing was the biggest source of what I have come to call The Singer’s Handicap. And that correcting that one thing could turn the ‘average singer’ into a music eating, practice loving super musician.
I thought it was almost too good to be true, I could now learn my music so freaking fast! As a result of all this I was able to learn and memorize entire recitals or whole opera roles nearly each semester for years. Being able to do this has allowed me to quickly step into roles that other singers vacate. It was really amazing to not have to struggle through correcting careless mistakes anymore. And it has been really incredible to pass parts of my system on to the students who have come through my studio and seen their successes.
And in the end, all of this means that singers ARE smart! We are not dumb just by virtue of being vocalists. It means that the Singer’s Handicap is real and completely overcomable.
