4. A particularly silent killer of potential careers in singing is the economic pressure that weeds out aspiring singers who don’t have independent financial means through a “war of attrition” by saddling them with massive amounts of academic debt and then imposing an early-career gauntlet of “pay-to-play” paths of advancement through unpaid or low-paying internships, audition fees, etc. Those who persist in outlasting their peers long enough to establish careers are often those who are able to remain purposefully underemployed for long periods of time in order to pursue training, auditions, and gigs as they come up. These folks who are able to simply hang in there and maintain some breathing room economically end up outcompeting their less affluent peers who need to hustle at working jobs that leave them with precious little time, energy, and money to devote to pursuing their craft, as well as the lack of flexibility in their schedules or finances needed to pursue singing opportunities.

5. Back to the singing itself: The post-recording, post-amplification age has had a distorting effect on the ideal operatic sound—encouraging a “warmer,” more covered sound that inherently carries less well in large, unamplified spaces and often ends up being pushed harder in order to overcome an increasingly powerful orchestra of modern instruments playing at a higher tuning (resulting in the dry brittleness, pressured tremolo, and slackening vibratos common in modern singers). I’d also add to this the influence of more modern musical styles of vocalism (including straight tone, breathy/unsupported sound, and scooping) on our subconscious ideals of operatic singing. These evolving sound ideals have tripped up many a young singer struggling to master basic operatic technique, since these ways of singing are not generally conducive to the development of acoustically favorable phonation, which is the foundation upon which all other elements of artistry need to be built.

6. Because of the above aesthetic shifts and the general entropy of the art form itself (aided and abetted by the lack of a continuous rejuvenating tradition of new operatic composition and the consequent reliance on conserving and recreating the established canon as quasi-“museum pieces”), there is now a lack of the sort of broad and objective pedagogical consensus that used to exist about the basic technical foundations of what constitutes competent or accomplished singing. As a result, aspiring singers emulate commercially successful artists and their various idiosyncrasies and flaws, thinking that these are models of what success sounds like—whereas those qualities might be ones that those artists succeeded in spite of rather than because of. This continued positive feedback loop of entropy and further erosion of objective standards of vocal technical accomplishment is evident in the declining quality and increasing fragmentation of vocal pedagogy that is promulgated in training programs, as well as singers’ waning understanding of how to apply deliberate effort toward meeting and overcoming specific technical hurdles that used to be de rigueur for any nominally “trained” singer. Combine this growing population of half-baked technicians with the vast imbalance of supply and demand for classical singers, and it’s no surprise that a lot of the outcomes around who ends up having a career and who doesn’t have devolved into a discouraging “crap shoot.”