When I approached Boston Conservatory’s chair of voice & opera, Patty Thom at the 2010 Classical Singer Convention, she had a vision for how our business of singing seminar might help reinforce her curriculum. While at the convention, she awarded a generous $10,000 annual scholarship to a very lucky high school student with the vision of adding to her talent pool at Boston Conservatory. The convention also serves as a networking opportunity to help her stay connected with her colleagues.

I am delighted that Boston Conservatory was able to find the perfect fit for our seminar as part of our fall east coast swing! The fall can be a busy time of the year with auditions and operas to learn, but the students truly benefit from the receiving the right information at the right time.

The seminar was comprised of a wide range of singers from undergraduate freshman to master’s students with professional performing experience. This was clear from the moment that singers began sharing their scores from our first exercise: the Self-Management Questionnaire. The highest score reported was 41 activities that a singer regularly does, yet there were a group of scores in the teens and lower twenties.

I immediately encouraged those on the lower end, that unlike most of music school, this competition has only winners. The victory comes through identifying where you are in your unique process and also from opening up a dialogue with your peers. If the seminar had no other purpose, this would be enough to justify their time and energy.

The undergraduates seemed to really rise to the challenge of thinking about how to mirror some of these concepts to their current academic pursuits. When talking about auditions, we can just as well be talking about school juries and master classes. Rather than a gig, we spoke about school productions. Rather than focusing on the intricacies of tax accounting practices for freelance musicians, we fielded questions about resumes, cover letters, internships, thriving in competition and networking.

The purpose of the first half of the seminar is to wet the appetite and explore each singer’s unique entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses as well as organization and outlook paradigms; the master’s students added a great deal to this part of the session. Peer-to-peer discussion can be a very powerful learning method, so we keep the seminar flexible to allow this to happen naturally.

It was the visualization exercise that seemed to resonate profoundly with undergraduates and master’s students alike. Stephen Covey’s foundational book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People encourages us to “begin with the end in mind.” In creating (and taking time to savor) a vision of the ideal, we can begin to identify a path to get there. Rather than hoping and dreaming for the fame and fortune of an international opera career, the Velvet Singer workbook visualization exercise challenges singers to create a very active and practical vision along seven categories:

• At Coachings
• At Voice Lessons
• Relating to My Colleagues
• During Auditions
• At My Next Production
• When I Relate to Friends / Family
• About My Career in General

Boston Conservatory also graciously opened up the session to some of my customers and contacts from other Boston-area schools. Some Velvet Singer customers first get to know us through the seminar experience before they dive into the software. It was a real treat for me to watch the process in reverse: to have seminar participants that already regularly use Velvet Singer Software. This was a glimpse into how Velvet Singer Software can truly transform a singers’ outlook and toolkit. It was like reviewing “before” and “after” side-by-side and I like the results!