So hard for it, honey
Ambition: our most nuanced performance.
Early in my time at the Vienna State Opera, I was working with a colleague on a spectacularly difficult role. She was slaying it.
“I’m going to love watching you sing this all over the world,” I said.
She smiled. “Maybe, I don’t know. I’m really not that ambitious.”
Say what now?
I mean…we were at that opera house and she had worked on her craft to the point that she could nail that role, so really not that ambitious seemed…
Disingenuous?
Revolutionary?
Welcome to the trickiest performance of them all.
Do you remember the first time a teacher told you some version of the following?
“Only keep going if you can’t imagine doing anything else. Because *insert artistic practice here* will take every bit of energy and focus you have got. If you can imagine doing anything else with your life, do that!”
It’s not a completely wrong-headed thing to say. Building a life as an artist or performer is difficult no matter how you slice it. Competition is fierce, resilience is required, disappointment is guaranteed. And if you’re developing any new, complex physical practice - singing, playing an instrument, dancing, speaking another language - the reality is that you do have to get on it as early as you can, you do have to dedicate hours of repetition every day for many years to build the skills necessary for a long-term professional life. It’s important for mentors to let aspiring artists know that the romance of art, no matter how heady, is barely the beginning. There are years of sloggy work on a twisted path ahead.
Single-minded dedication, then, is one of our most important assets. It’s the addition of patience, tolerance, and love to our early puppyish artistic passions. Dedication will see us through the umpteenth unsuccessful attempt at that leap, that scale, that floaty high note. Dedication gets us up in the morning and back in the practice room in the weeks when nothing is going right, or mid-career when some problem inexplicably crops up, or when we’d rather just binge Succession. Dedication, like love, is hard to talk about without sounding like a jerk, as anyone who’s been on the receiving end of “but how are you going to make a living?” knows.
Dedication exists apart from plans about making that living, from ambition. The two are close friends, though, and it can be hard sometimes to differentiate between them. Because all the things dedication helps us with, ambition helps as well. It’s when we start trying to thread the needle of our first big career-starting opportunities that ambition begins to assert itself. Dedication alone might keep us in the practice room, but once we’re continuously honing the same Firebird excerpt or series of jetées or aria package or monologue or sixteen bars of “Defying Gravity” in order to take yet another audition, ambition begins to assert itself. How can it not? If, at some point, we decide we are trying to open bigger and wider professional doors, it’s because we want the rewards on the other side. That’s ambition. And there’s the origin of the can’t-imagine-anything-else speech. That speech asks, do you want it enough?
Passion, dedication, and ambition: these are different expressions of what we want, and it’s not always easy to tell them apart. However, there’s a lot of pressure on us to do just that.
We’re generally comfortable (even in the current Handmaid’s Tale vibe of the USA) with the idea of personal autonomy, that each individual decides what they care about and how they focus their energy. But once those individuals start making their desires known to the world at large and asking it to respond, the world has a lot to say about how those different individuals may or may not proceed.
Passion and dedication are generally admired. If you have them, their demands rest solely on you, and no one watches how you practice them.
Ambition? That’s public. And so if you have it, you can expect...feedback.
Something I recognized in my Austrian colleague’s claim of not being ambitious was the intricate dance that every woman in our field learns. Now I’m speaking about classical music in particular, since it’s the area of my experience - I wonder how resonant these words are in other areas of artistic practice.
In last week’s piece about opera, I wrote some about the powerful women I admired who were often criticized or mocked for their ambition, something that I never witnessed happening to successful men. Opera is a particularly conservative playing field, but even in the wider and much more diverse culture at large, women who are ambitious about career success face questions and judgements that similarly ambitious men do not. Women face a constant public conversation about “balance” between their personal and work lives, the idea being that career ambition might dampen their effectiveness as providers of free domestic labor mothers and partners. Men, being humans, feel these pressures as well, but they don’t face the same public conversation. And they don’t face as a consequence the same pressure to make their ambition look effortless. A common casual criticism of a woman, used to take down anything from her fashion choices to her boardroom style, is that she’s trying too hard.
Of course this isn’t only a gender issue, it’s a problem that grows exponentially in intensity along racial lines and other lines of social hierarchy. As long as we have a list of who naturally belongs in a space and who needs to bang on the door to get in, we’ll expect the doorbangers to be chill if and when they finally gain access. And that puts the doorbangers in a very wonky position as mentors. Again, I’m writing from my lived experience as a woman, not meaning that any of the following is exclusive to women.
I learned very early in my professional life that there was a pretty wide gulf between what powerful women in my industry said in private and what they said in public. They shared a lot of stories, advice, and personal reflections on everything from experiences of harassment to pay inequality to the crack of their own skulls against the glass ceiling. Then they’d laugh at sexist jokes in rehearsal, or, when asked what they were going to wear on the podium, smile and say that really they never thought about such things, it was all about the music.
The message was clear to me. Don’t bring the full story of your ambition out in public, don’t talk about what you’ve had to overcome or fight. Keep bringing it back to the music, because nobody will ever accuse you of trying too hard in your field of study - the space of your personal dedication. But as a mentor, you’ve got to be straight with people about how challenging it all is; your honesty is necessary and inspiring, a point of connection. So a lot of former doorbangers get caught in this impossible equation, trying to tell others how to bang on the door while also acting like being in the room is no big deal. I have sure lived this as a mentor myself, giving one kind of private advice and then saying different words in public, and I suspect many of you reading have been there too.
Back to my colleague in Vienna. There was another aspect to her being not that ambitious, one that startled me, raised in the jungles of America as I was. For many people, ambition isn’t a choice. I don’t know anything about my Austrian friend’s financial circumstances, but I know that she lives in a society with a robust safety net. Even if she lost the great career gamble, or if everything fell apart midway for some reason, she’d have access to health and shelter. She wouldn’t be in immediate danger. Absent family wealth in the USA, hustling is never optional. If we take on the risks of an artistic career, or a freelance career of any kind, we don’t really have the luxury of being not that ambitious.
Here’s where the performance of ambition becomes even costlier to even more people - because we humans tend to fetishize the things that are hardest to come by. Lately, that’s the spare time and income required to rest. We’re inundated with anti-hustle culture messages, and fair enough - we creatures need decompression and regulation. But, like our society prefers its doorbangers to chill out, it also would rather not see people agitating for socialist things like universal health care. Self-care is the toxic lil’ watchword of the day, so again our mental health and safety is relegated to the private space of our personal dedication, where it’s no one else’s responsibility. We’re expected, as part of demonstrating ambition, to show that we also have the time and wherewithal to do that self-care, that we are not trying so hard that we can’t be chill.
Everyone I know in America is dealing with the above stresses. The final element that is special to the arts, certainly to classical music, is the art itself. I’ve heard or read so many versions of “in the end it’s not about *insert major element of human existence here*, it’s about the music,” as though the music is supposed to elevate us above all this worldly talk of status and money and trying not to live in your car. It’s a very in-the-world-but-not-of-it legacy, spirit versus body, denial of the flesh. One of the big problems we face in an era that will see - is seeing - the reimagining of our institutions is that many artists have troubling taking part in that reimagining because they don’t really know how those institutions function. We’ve been encouraged not to know. Wanting to know is unseemly. You should hire someone to do the knowing for you. If you do know, don’t talk about it too much lest you be seen as trying too hard.
I see the coming generation of musicians in my field struggling with the question of ambition, considering it deeply. They have a much higher expectation of balance in their lives at an earlier stage. I find myself wanting to encourage them to embrace imbalance for a while to see where the road might lead, and I wonder if that’s right. In my experience, I’ve seen that gambling can pay off and discomfort can be worth it.
Gambling and discomfort, though, are very subjective words, so what this looks like is different for everyone. Balancing the elements of a life is important and healthy; I wish I would have done it sooner. But I also find myself wondering if our culture’s current emphasis on balance comes chiefly from a desire to live differently, or if it’s more a fetishizing of something increasingly out of reach.
Young musicians working to build their careers still face institutions and individuals that expect a very intense performance of ambition. The more competitive the field, the higher the penalty if you’re seen as not wanting it enough.
Twenty-five years ago, I told my boss at the Met that I couldn’t come for long part-time contracts anymore, it was too much time away from my husband. I wondered if I might come to work on just one show, or if there was a chance at all that I might be hired full-time so that we could relocate to New York.
“I’m glad you said something!” My boss smiled. “We’d love to have you here full-time but we assumed that since your husband works in Seattle that you wouldn’t be interested.”
All I had to do back then to not want it enough was to be someone’s wife in another city. I’m glad I said something too. I had hesitated, though. I cancelled one meeting with my boss and almost didn’t follow though on the second.
I didn’t want them to think I was trying too hard.
Still trying too hard...🌹