“Singing with joy regardless of mistakes.”

By Allison Rozsa Evans

I have different types of voice students come to me all the time. Some young & inexperienced, some older & experienced, but the one thing that is the same across the board is that they all seem to apologize when they make a mistake or don't sound "good enough". To each of them I usually say..."so what". Let me explain...

This past weekend I had the privilege of driving to St. Louis to participate in the National Association of Teachers of Singing Artists Award competition, also known as NATSAA. If you don't know what that is, it is a biannual national recital competition that culminates to the final round at the NATS conference taking place in Boston this year. Competitors are required to prepare 12 pieces including opera arias, oratorio arias and art songs in 4+ languages. For all participants we begin preparing this music months in advance, focusing on technical stability, musicality & interpretation, and character development all in hopes of giving the best performances of our lives and (hopefully) winning the competition. So, that is just what I did.

Upon walking onto stage for my turn, I was as mentally and musically as prepared as I could be, having worked for the last several months on this music. But guess what happened...I messed up. I was nervous, it was late in the day, and I was a little more tired that I would have liked to be. So in the first piece my technique was not perfect & missed an entrance, but I kept going. The second piece was something I've known for years and should have been perfect, but there was a moment I completely forgot where I was and accidentally sang the beginning section again. In each of these errors (or the others I made) I could have shut down, stopped singing, or completely turned into a pool of tears destroying my chances at advancing in the competition, but I didn't.

I realized that my mistakes didn't matter in that moment. Yes, they were probably one of the reasons I did not advance, but all in all it didn't matter. All I could do in that moment was to do my best and just have fun with what I was singing. In that moment I chose to communicate the beauty and joy of each piece hoping that the audience (or judges) would enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed singing. In that moment, I decided that I wanted to have fun singing, not hate myself for my errors, but work to fix them later.

To my students who make mistakes, I continue to say "so what". Learn from your mistake, work hard and try to do better in the future, but the mistake itself doesn't matter and is no reflection on your self worth. Instead, in each moment do your best to communicate the beauty, excitement, and joy that your music has to offer.