Atelier Log Content warning: Vague mentions of emotional abuse of a child/teenager by a teacher.
Maybe I should actually talk about my experience learning to sing. I don’t know if it’ll help me get over my nervousness, but hey. I’ve barely even talked about this with my own husband, which I don’t think is great. I imagine it just feels like I was leaving out something important.
My actual musical journey began with learning to play the piano when I was about 6 years old. Opa and Oma had just gotten me away from my abusive/neglectful mother after she had abducted me for about two years, and I think as a coping mechanism I took to listening to Opa’s records of classical music. He was a music collector so he had almost every record (and 8-track) you could think of. Classical music was the most calming to me. The social worker I was seeing thus figured that learning to play the piano would be therapeutic for me, and I was excited that I could learn to make those beautiful sounds I heard on Opa’s records. Piano is pretty easy for young children to start learning anyway.
Opa promptly signed me up for lessons at the Columbia Arts Academy in Columbia South Carolina and bought me my own piano.
I can’t really remember the name of my piano teacher, I think it started with a C? She was a fairly young woman as far as I recall, and very gentle and encouraging. She apparently worked with a few kids who were coming from difficult situations, so she was always so kind. I wish my memory was better for this because I really liked my piano teacher a lot. 🙁
The first piece I “mastered” on piano was Für Elise, and to this day I think I could play that with my eyes closed. (Probably not really, but you know.)
I learned piano for a while, but eventually became enamored with acoustic guitar. Opa, encouraging as always, immediately also started me in guitar lessons at the same academy and bought me a guitar. My guitar teacher was a man who supposedly used to play in a band, but he didn’t like to talk about himself much.
(As a side note, I really loved playing piano and guitar. For obvious reasons my piano could not come with me when I eventually moved in with my husband, but I deeply regret that I did not take my guitar. RIP guitar.)
I also took ballet for a bit, but I didn’t stick with it super long because it was exhausting.
Eventually I learned about opera. I don’t really remember what age I was but I believe the first opera I learned the story of, and thus became obsessed with because I am above all a lover of stories, was Bizet’s Carmen. I was like, wow, something can have beautiful music and an interesting dramatic story! Amazing!
So, I told Opa I wanted to learn to sing. I already sang along with all my Disney casettes anyway, so clearly it was something I loved doing. I even occasionally put on little performances for Opa and Oma with my Giant 90s Casette Player/Recorder as my orchestra, and I made my own tapes with that same recorder by singing into some cheap children’s microphone. I even recorded some songs in German so Oma could understand what I was singing.
My love of singing was intense enough that I took my silly performances very seriously. I dressed up as different characters, or sometimes just repurposed my ballet outfit, and had Opa and Oma sit and be my supposedly-rapt audience, complete with a clunky flashlight propped up on something to act as a spotlight. I made programmes on construction paper and illustrated them with Crayola supplies.
I kind of cringe thinking back on it, especially with how insistent I was that they watch and enjoy my performance. But I try to remind myself that it’s actually very wholesome. I was a kid who was passionate about something, and I was lucky to have loving and supportive grandparents who believed in my talent.
Apparently deciding that he wasn’t already wasting enough money on my passion-collecting, Opa signed me up for singing lessons too. Since I was still quite young, I didn’t start with opera, but instead musical theater and pop (it is generally discouraged for someone to start singing opera before a certain age). I also joined my school choir.
I think I was around 11 when I finally switched to learning opera. I needed to have a different teacher for that, and that was when I was given to Nancy. I don’t want to fully name-and-shame her, because she is now deceased, and that just feels disrespectful.
Nancy was a former opera singer, and from my recollection she was probably around 50-60, but I’m not 100% sure because your perception of someone’s age when you’re young is Weird. She performed at The Palmetto Opera for a number of years as a primadonna mezzo-soprano, but she had some sort of falling out that I don’t recall the details of, left the opera house, and then struggled to get her career going again. She transitioned to teaching because, in her words, she “wanted to see someone succeed in a dying art”.
At first she only seemed very stringent to me. She would coach me on something, then have me try singing, and harshly interrupt me and have me try again without correction from her. I often did not know what I was doing wrong until several tries later, when I was already starting to feel embarrassed. I was always a sensitive person (autism etc), so when I would get upset over this, she would say I need to grow a thicker skin, that she’s only trying to help me get better, and that the “real world of opera” was much worse. I would be a failure if I couldn’t steel myself and take her awfully-presented criticism.
I did get better. She did actually teach me how to sing and perform. But every time I was in her lessons I just felt like I was being pressured to be perfect. When I got a bit older I realized that she was living vicariously through me, and only allowing me to do things exactly how she wanted.
Nancy would yell things at me like
“are you hearing yourself right now? Here, listen to this recording, do you think you sound good?”
“Imagine getting on stage and singing like this. Your audience will think you’re ruining their music.”
etc
When I struggled with finding my chest voice, Nancy took to almost punching me in the chest, yelling at me to open my diaphragm but not explaining what that meant or how to do it. And then I had a hard time taking proper breaths because, yknow, she just hit me, and she’d get mad about that too. When I finally did find my chest voice, rather than praising me or congratulating me or anything like that, she just said “well you definitely could not ever sing alto”.
That was always baffling to me because, yeah duh. I have and always have had a high pitch. No crap I can’t sing alto.
Once my singing got to a level she was seemingly pleased with, she started fully recording me. I don’t know what she actually did with those recordings, she just apparently took them home with her and I never got to see them. She would tell me to sing full pieces and record it like this, and I started feeling like I was some sort of mouthpiece for her rather than her student. She eventually told me that my singing was good now, but it was doubtful that I would ever be able to make a career out of it.
I remember at one point Opa wanted to hear me sing again, like when I put on performances as a kid. I tried, I stood there and prepared to sing Ave Maria for him, but I started shaking and when my voice wouldn’t come out I just cried.
Nancy had quite effectively ruined my confidence and dulled my passion for singing. When I was 18 or 19 I got braces, which made my mouth very painful and gave me a bit of a lisp for the time I had them… so I figured this was my opportunity to quit. I ghosted Nancy and never saw her again, and for a long time just did not talk about all this.
I’m not here to defend her, especially not after my husband kind of helped me realize/admit she was abusive (and creepy). But as I said, she did teach me things.
She helped me find my fach (light lyric soprano at the time but now I qualify more for lyric coloratura), and helped me learn breath techniques. Her methods of doing so were bad, but I did eventually learn operatic technique and proper body posture for singing, and I eventually found my chest voice too. Then she taught me how to use my different voices (chest, head, falsetto, etc) to properly expand my range. She taught me how to easily do overtones, which I think is important for opera. She had me practice arias, and did tell me (eventually, again) that I achieved singing them.
Since I started singing young, my fundamentals (such as note and key recognition, music theory, and reading music) are in musical theater, but I don’t want to say I didn’t learn from Nancy. Especially since I wanted to focus on opera.