Opera Singing in Germany and other adventures....

Like many of you, I went to the movie theaters a few months ago to see the movie "La La Land" because of all the rave reviews it was receiving from critics. As you can imagine if you've also seen the film and are a working Performing Artist, I was pretty angry at the predictability of the movie's plot, and their insensitive and narrow-minded presentation of an Artist's life and options they have. And, then coincidentally, my issues with La La Land were summed up, in a masterful blog post that I happened to stumble upon last week written by Linda Essig, who is the Director of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Programs at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, and if you're curious to read her thoughtful words, you can click here to see her post . Basically, what she says is what I was feeling right after seeing the film. Why does life's trajectory always get over simplified to two distinct and different choices for an

So I was lucky enough to recently have had vocal troubles. I know, I know- sounds not so lucky. But, behold! It was. Because my vocal troubles were really minimal, actually. It started rather slowly and then got worse; I was often a bit hoarse after singing (either after an hour-long coaching of Opera Arias, or after 2 hours of private practice at home) and I knew that that wasn't normal. So off to the ENT Doctor (Ear, Nose and Throat, or in Germany they are called HNO which stands for Hals, Nasen, Ohren- the same as in English, just "auf Deutsch") I went. And luckily for me, here in Munich there is a ENT that works in the Klinikum Rechts der Isar, which is run by the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (for those non-German speakers- the Hospital on the right side of the Isar [River], which is run by the Technical University of Munich) who works in a department of the hospital which was specifically designed to treat Musicians' injuries. Cool, right? They often deal wi