He can trust his teachers and they can help a lot but your son also needs to decide what path or paths he wants to pursue. It sounds like he wants a BM…
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Audition is key but my mezzo says in the audition it is all about whether the teacher feel like you can take direction and potential. IMO he is a male voice not a tenor and all programs want that so putting together solid audition pieces will get him some offers
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That…and the strength of others at each school are also auditioning in his vocal range. This is not predictable. But yes…male voices are certainly more needed than…sopranos!
Thanks all. I appreciate the feedback. He is a sponge when it comes to music. Our house overflows with scores. I only hope he can take in what he’s taught in trial lessons and be humble and teachable, rather than let him ambitions get the best of him.
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I would not counsel him on acting humble! I mean, I have no idea, but projecting confidence, strength and so on might be desired too. I remember Juilliard’s interview that seemed to test for those qualities! Music is a hard field with many rejections and hurdles and takes perseverance. Of course taking in instruction is a great quality for growth.
Better to be authentic than to try to act a certain way.
As a parent, just let his teachers prepare him. People ask me what talents i have and my reply is “driving”! It sounds like he will do fine. He can apply to a variety of options and levels and see where he lands.
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All you can do is support them and have faith in them. You seem to support him with the various programs he has done, a voice consultant, and I agree with tsbna, the people he is working with should be able to assess him, what his strengths are , what his weaknesses are. One thing you can do if you want an outside assessment, if it really bothers you, is to contact a high level teacher at a good music school for voice and ask him if he/she would be willing to do an assessment on him. It would cost you some money, but if it gives you and him piece of mind, it is worth it.
My son is not voice (violinist), but when he was in high school and even in conservatory he worked with other teachers, got their feedback. He worked with a kind of violion guru in high school (who sadly passed away), who helped him realize that his teacher in high school’s criticisms of him wasn’t his playing, it was her musical ideas versus his (don’t get me started on that…)
My wife and I didn’t know anything about music at all, it really for us was wandering in the dark. This place can help, but what really helped was being around the music world, being with other students, through programs he did he got to know everyone from gig musicians (who were often quite high level) to teachers and working musicians and chamber musicians, and it gave him insight into things. But don’t feel alone, we know music parents who are trained musicians themselves and sometimes they feel overwhelmed:).
One thing, leaving out professional feedback, one thing I will tell you not to do is listen to what other parents or people say is good and then feel like your kid isn’t good enough. I can tell you looking back that very few of those kids ever did anything in music despite them being hyped. Often it was based on the kid winning some local competition that in the scheme of things doesn’t mean much. This included more than a few kids I saw at Juilliard pre college, the young prodigy kids, kids winning competitions including in the program, and then they tried going into music and disappeared.
There is so much that goes into being good, attitude has a lot to do with it, willing to take opportunities and run with them, networking with other musical people, having the strength to grind through it after losing a competition or not getting admitted to that elite summer program and yes it takes passion.
There are a couple of famous high level summer programs in chamber music that my son and several members of his group got rejected from over the years, these programs tended to take students the program directors thought were soloist level quality and neither program since they went upscale has turned out any notable chamber musicians (my thought? People with the soloist bent tend to think of chamber as ‘slumming it’, and treat it as such).
Just a note about competitions, I realize how important they can be, and while I don’t know voice, I can tell you that as their musical agent rep told them, what makes for competition wins often doesn’t translate into building an audience. Competitions have more than a bit of politics around them, and they are highly subjective, you can go into a high level competition and no do well, then go to another one and the panel loves you. There is nothing objective about them and the panel is what it is all about. Get a bunch of teachers on there and performance quality goes out the window and all they care about is technique. Have a panel that comes from one school of music, and the competitor is from another, and they can be rough even though the person is really, really talented.
Have faith in the kid, support him, and as someone else said, let nature decide the rest, it is all you can do I think:)
being respectful and teachable is important and so is being able to work with other people as well as being resilient. In music your reputation means a lot and there is a difference between been confident and being an arrogant jerk. My son was at a music event not long ago where there were a number of high level teachers from one of the top music schools, and the teachers were talking about some of the students being arrogant and full of themselves because they were at the school, and their name for them was little snot nose b’s (the b being a word I would not use on here). Music is really a small world and compmom is right, a student has to have confidence and have a healthy ego, but it is also important not to come off as arrogant or full of themself because reputation means something, that i am sure of, no matter how talented someone is if they get the reputation of being difficult to work with the talent won’t matter.
My point wasn’t really to have confidence and a healthy ego. I was balancing the point about acting humble. The main thing I was saying was simply that a parent needn’t tell their kid how to act, or coach behavior and attitude. The kid can just be him or herself.
Thank you so much for this. He tends to be arrogant with peers - pretending he’s done more than he has, esp around the Juilliard pre/college kids, who kind of all seem like a**es. He didn’t apply there but got into MSM precollege but turned it down, due to social/perfmancr anxiety. Works with a kid of adult teachers 1 on 1 and the seems to like respect him. Fingers crossed.
I posted in another thread that was just closed. If you are anxious, talk to his teacher. It probably doesn’t help your son if you are anxious so talking to the teacher might help with that. Things really do tend to work out. I say that from personal experience (with kids with many challenges) and from here on CC.
Oh, I agree totally, I would be the last person to say don’t be yourself. My point is that in music, it is a small world, and there is a balance the kid will have to figure out in what to do and they need to do it themselves as you point out, and coaching them to be something they aren’t is not a good thing to do, that can kill a music career before it even starts. Being humble implies kowtowing to others or not asserting their ideas or whatever, and that definitely isn’t what I meant. Sadly lot of kids get this attitude from their teachers, they go to a top level program with some ‘great’ teacher, and they ingest from them the idea that going to this school makes you elite or whatever, it is very similar to what they used to call the Ivy league disease.
It is hard as a parent with all this, it is difficult because we want them to do well, but also don’t want them to get hurt, it is natural as parents. Anxiety is part of it, you should have seen my wife and I when our son had recitals, when he was auditioning for things, was in a competition with his group, it was nail biting time.
I agree with compmom in the end you have to let him be himself, there isn’t much we can do except support them. Someone gave me a piece of advice, they said that once they reach a certain age (usually mid to late teens), what kids want is a parent who they know has their back, but let’s them lead their lives and do things their way. If they ask for advice, give it, if they have an oopsy, be there for them emotionally to support them, but don’t tell them what to do unless they ask for advice.
Know that the path is not clear, but the nice part is that likely whatever path you choose will work out in the end, even though you don’t know the end. It is why conventional wisdom is bupkus, there are plenty of examples where my son went against conventional wisdom and looking back it turned out to be the right choice, not conventional wisdom. It is why beware of “your son has to do this, my kid did and they have done great” kind of statements, it is them projecting one event (their son doing well) onto another “He went to program X”, rather than saying “my son had a great experience at X, you may want to check it out”. Doesn’t mean not ask for advice from people, of course, experience is valuable, as obviously is the teachers or coaches views, but in the end it should be your son throwing it all in the blender and see what comes out;)
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Thank you for this. I am working so hard to be present for him while not giving direction or advice, even when I can that he is going down a dead end alley that he thinks is a street.