Countdown

In my room I have a white board hanging on my wall. It stares at me during the night and it is the first thing I see when I wake up. Today it reads 98. Tomorrow morning I will wake up to the sounds of Nessun Dorma (for some reason my iPod always defaults to that song) and I will lie in bed looking, but not comprehending, the 98 that is still sprawled across the board. The moment will come (typically around the third or fourth repeat of Nessun Dorma) where the warmth of my bed overpowers the knowledge that I must get up, update the countdown to 97 and begin my day.

Deadlines are a constant consideration of an artist. Memorize Songs my Mother Taught Me by Friday, perfect the triplets in Si suoni la tromba for Sunday’s rehearsal, prepare word for word translation of your audition materials by Monday – the list goes on and on. This is no different than any other career, every productive member of society has a list of things that they must accomplish by set dates, but as an artist I have found that deadlines are a lot more fun because the stakes are so much higher.

In my engineering class my deadlines are for 10 page homeworks, projects, exams and the odd paper or two, but as singer my deadlines are performances. This also makes my artistic deadlines a lot scarier. If I am feeling particularly lazy I will fantasize about not completing a homework set or even not turning it in at all. Worst case scenario in that situation is that I get a 0 on one of ten or so homework sets for the entire semester which all together make up about 10% of my final grade. No one other than me, my professor and my GSI needs to know and the deadline can pass without the world coming to a halt.

As a musician it is a completely different story. I cannot memorize half of a piece and call it “good enough” because I am tired, lazy or just not in the mood. My deadlines do not pass uneventfully; rather, they culminate in me walking up to the front of the classroom or out on stage, hearing the piano play the first few measures, seeing the blank stares of those in the audience, and opening my mouth to sing. I cannot sing only half a piece since I did not have time to memorize the rest, because our deadlines are final, public and set a nonnegotiable minimum amount of work required.

While all of this makes a musician’s life a little stressful it still ends with the chance to share our preparation and craft with those around us. At the end of the day, sharing my music is a lot more rewarding than scanning my written homework and uploading it to Ctools so while deadlines can be daunting, I will keep updating my whiteboard counting down to the next big performance.