Dear Singer Friends,
Please allow me to call you my friends. It is from that perspective I hope you will consider talking to me about your singing.
I will be responding very soon to those of you who have already contacted me, but I want to get this “everyone included” message out as soon as possible.
You will have to weigh the possible benefits against the possible discomfort of discussing the positive and the negative aspects of the singing you did in my hearing. I would be thankful for the opportunity to tell you about your singing and what I found to be good, great and excellent as well as those components that could be better. Since I spent my entire singing life knowing that there was nothing I did on the stage that I couldn’t have improved, I generally burst with ideas for improving even the excellent parts. It is a bit late, now, for me to use those ideas that pop into my mind as I listen to recordings of myself, but you all have time to use good ideas to push the quality of your singing to an extremely high level. The more time you have and the more time you invest, the higher you can reach. I hope I can help.
Please feel free to contact me. I know that I was never very happy after an audition that resulted in a failure to produce a positive result. I did get used to it. I hope you haven’t yet grown as thick a skin as mine yet, and that you would want to get at least something from this contest. I know I can’t make you care about my opinions, and I’m happy to be without leverage. A true believer in liberty, I really want to leave it up to you.
Congratulations to you all for your work to date and the gifts that you have developed on your quest toward artistic excellence. The road to excellence is long and not all that smooth. Each of you has attained a different position on that road. None of you has broken through the tape on that road that bears Garcia’s label: “Distinguished Artist”.
Garcia lists the various qualities he believed to be requirements for a student of the Operatic Art and then adds:
Thus should every individual be organized who wishes to rise to the rank of distinguished artist, but let one make no mistake about it, the combination of all these natural gifts, however rare they may be, would not suffice by themselves to constitute true talent. The most favorable aptitudes need to be cultivated and directed in their application by a sustained and orderly labor. The singer who ignores the sources of the effects and the secrets of the art is only an incomplete talent, a slave of routine.
This is in his first book on pages 1 and 2.
I hope you will keep fighting for improvement no matter how successful you become. The Art is bigger than the artist, but the better the artist becomes the healthier the Art will be. I want Opera to become as healthy as it was before I was born. Maybe I will live so long.
With this Email I believe I fulfill the responsibility that every judge in every serous talent competition should require of him/her self.
As I hear from you, I will celebrate the opportunity to fulfill a responsibility I feel I have to the Art of Singing.
Rockwell Blake