Capstone Project

For this project I picked the growth and performance path. Singing solos and duets alongside tracking my growth, failures and what I needed to work on for the next performance. 

When looking for music to sing I always consider the following: What type of performance is this?  What genres would go best with the concert theme? How has my voice changed and what can sit strongly in my range? A good example would be “Lovefool by the cardigans but covered by Postmodern Jukebox” ; this selection is a jazz adaptation to the original song. I picked this song because it sat in my range beautifully while being able to hide the fact that I was under the weather. For the concert theme we picked “blossoming of the season” so for my music selection I picked something more jazzy and a different pace then the winter selection to blossom into new genres since this was the concert before our next one, being “Popular music”. 

When I first started singing for Taylor I was extremely nervous. I had dreamed about being in her choir for a very long time. So naturally when it came to singing for her it was exciting and yet scary because I had doubted myself for so long thinking I wasn't good enough but since I've started working with her I've achieved things I never knew I could. From working with her one on one to strengthen my song or practicing by myself to take her notes and go over them by myself to fix my mistakes. 

For each performance I had to plan the following, staging and choreo, technical needs, and programming. For my performance of “Don't you Worry ‘Bout a thing” covered by Tori Kelly, one of my biggest struggles with this performance was matching my energy to the genera of the song, This song was more of a pop jazz, so feeling the song was at first a huge struggle for me because in the back of my mind it always feels like i'm going to mess something up or that something is gonna go wrong. Having the notes down and pitches correct is lovely, but if you don't feel passion in your song it will still feel like a low performance. So after practice and practice I tried putting more movement into performing it, from moving a little to swaying on beat while practicing with my fake microphone, but to no avail it still felt wrong. I remember the moment it clicked for me was during dress rehearsal when I was doing my run through in front of my peers. During the performance one thing I told myself was that “oh i'll have the mic stand as a security blanket, i'll be ok” but in the midst of the performance I realized that I couldn't feel the music properly with the stand so i took the mic off and actually connected with the piece that was giving me so much anxiety and with the validation of the crowd from removing the mic from the stand I knew that i had found the passion for the piece I was so desperately craving and with that i was able to perform strong and confidently. Reflecting on the piece now I had some major takeaways, like not being so scared of the crowd. “Don't you worry ‘bout a thing” really opened up my eyes and it really did make me not worry about a thing or get in my head. As long as I'm performing and I'm satisfied with the work I put into the song along with feeling the passion for the song, I believe it was an amazing performance. Another big takeaway was not being scared to do the solos or have more defining parts in the repertoire. This year was the year I had the most solos and with each one I feel like I got more and more confident. I was growing with each performance and working on things from breath control to tone quality or whatever it was I felt could have been better ultimately strengthened my abilities with every new song I worked on.