Let’s face facts: I am a serious teacher for serious students. I was trained by serious teachers to be a serious singer, and I was a serious student. I sometimes shy away from owning this, wanting to appear fun and lighthearted, easy-going and cool. And I am  fun, lighthearted, and easy-going (cool, unfortunately impossible), but in appropriate amounts at appropriate times.

Why take voice lessons? I get asked this question frequently, especially with regards to the cost. Here are some of the reasons voice lessons are important and potentially life changing. (They certainly did all this for me!)

…we sing now, and always, because we love it: the doing of it, the act of it, the feeling and the sound of it.

Because, let’s face it, we must; we have to sing because it is an essential part of ourselves. As Cornelius also said, our voice IS us. So, virus, or no virus, we sing on.

Our souls are listening, if no one else.

The process of singing: aka. the generally slow, usually painstaking, often beautiful, and sometimes exciting development of our voices so that they sound the way we want them to sound, do what we want them to do.

We must be open and flexible in our visions, with our student’s unique voices and personalities as our guides.

I am a product and an amalgam of all of these teachers. They are with me all the time, whispering in my ear, guiding me, reminding me, warning me… how to be and how not to be as a teacher to myself and others.

Thank you with all my heart.

I have a confession:

In July, I had my first audition in 8 years.

I had a callback in January.

I did not get cast.

How can the loss of something you never had be so devastating?

Julian taught me to sing, to make music, to act, that it was ok to love Opera and Musical Theatre equally. He helped me become a better and stronger person, to take risks on stage and off. And, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, he taught me how to be a voice teacher. He was always professional but so personable. He shared his gifts as an artist and as a human being freely, with love and generosity. He somehow always made me feel like I was his colleague as well as his student; such a gift to a young aspiring singer.

This is a story about the time my voice teacher convinced me to sing something I had no business singing by invoking the name of Leonard Bernstein.

Sopranos get a bad rap in Musical Theatre today. This makes me mad. I confess, I am myself a soprano, but that is not the only reason it irks me. I’m not quite sure how it came to be that we sopranos are so maligned these days, but here are 10 reasons I think sopranos have the right and need to exist!

He said he was very serious about pursing this and wanted to do whatever it took to be a successful singer.  And so we began his vocal training and it took quite a few months for him to be truly comfortable singing. But he fought through the nerves and his voice blossomed. In just a few years, he went from never having sung a note to booking the National Tour of A Chorus Line as the part of Greg!

You and you alone are responsible for the precious gift that is your singing voice. Protect and treasure it.

A voice lesson must be a safe place to put it all out there, the good, the bad, the ugly, the embarrassing. If it isn’t, you are with the wrong teacher. And if you are a Musical Theatre belter, or desire to be one, please find a teacher who understands (and preferably likes) that sound and style and how to teach it.

Opinion is NOT fact.

Facts in singing: correct pitches, lyrics, rests, musical notations, intonation.

But everything else, EVERYTHING ELSE is opinion. Beautiful voice? Opinion. Flawless technique? Opinion. Horrible singer? Opinion. But far too often in the arts, people in positions of power often mistake their opinions for facts and the artist on the receiving end does too. And that can be terribly destructive, both emotionally and psychologically.

I’ve been thinking about my beginnings in Musical Theater and my ten year old self a great deal recently. Even from the very beginning, I was fearless on stage, which is strange because I was, and in many ways still am, a very shy and fearful person. There were nerves to audition, certainly, but for some reason I wasn’t nervous on stage, not while singing.  There was something about performing, creating a character, inhabiting an imaginary world, that helped me transcend my fears and find only joy in the experience.

On September 9, 1998, I got on a plane in Portland, Oregon headed to New York City, New York. I had a purse, a carry-on, and two large suitcases. I had a temporary place to stay in a women’s dorm on 34th Street. I had the possibility of two jobs. And a voice teacher.

I moved to New York City to study with a voice teacher. But not just any voice teacher, THE voice teacher: Cornelius L. Reid

The importance of a great collaborator, a musical scene partner, if you will, cannot be overstated. As a singer, your pianist can make or break a performance, or can at least make your job easier or harder

After watching the film, I had a renewed understanding that devotion to people, ideas, and activities that you love is what life is all about.

Please keep in mind that I am proudly one of those “crazy” singers. We ALL are, no matter how normal one may appear on the outside.  It’s an occupational hazard. So let us begin.

To me singing and acting have always been inseparable. This philosophy has both saved me and gotten me into trouble. Acting a song well got me through times when my voice was less than ideal and people noticed less because I was entertaining and emotional if nothing else. It is also one of the great joys of singing for me- expressing emotions that I cannot put into words, trying on different characters and feelings= fun!