mental health awareness month

mental health through the lens of a singer

I could address this topic from many angles but, for this post, I'm going to stick to one very specific issue: voice teachers projecting their shit onto their students.

often the words that end up being the most impactful are the ones that we should dismiss the quickest.

I didn't start taking private voice lessons until my sophomore year of high school. Much of technical side of singing didn't really come naturally to me and I was pretty insecure about it for a long time. Despite that, my timbre was pleasant and rich and I was strong enough that I got solos and lead roles pretty quickly. It was nerve wracking though, because I had NO CLUE what I was doing... so I started taking private lessons.

Early on in our lessons my first teacher, who has since passed, made a comment that would stick with me to this day. During a warm-up I was struggling to sing in my upper passagio and he got so frustrated with me that he finally just said,

"you can't sing high notes. You can't even sing above a C."

As you could imagine this did not set me up well for success in our future lessons. A few weeks later he would tell me that I should focus on acting because I was, "A better actor than I was a singer." He quite soon after that and his lovely replacement would end up being my first teacher in undergrad. She was wonderful (shout out to Amy Prickett if you happen to see this).

Now, in retrospect, I understand that this person didn't know what they were doing and probably shouldn't have been teaching. A couple years later I sang a concert with him. During the dress rehearsal he came out to sing his aria and I remember feeling nervous- it was the first time I heard him sing. He sang through most of the aria, visibly nervous. He got to the penultimate phrase, cracked on his high note and left the stage before the orchestra has finished. They had to bring in another tenor for the actual performance.

In that moment I realized. Oh, HE has an issue with high notes, not me. Still, despite the fact that I understood that he had been projecting I carried the doubt and weight of his comments for years.

I was a junior in college when I sang my first professional solo concert with orchestra. I sang Carmen, among other things. After our first rehearsal the conductor pulled me aside and told me that he had just finished a run of Carmen with Agnes Baltsa and that he thought he preferred my voice and interpretation. A few years later in grad school Marilyn Horne also told me I'd be a great Carmen. These are the comments that my brain should have latched onto right? My brain should have highlighted the, "you can't sing high notes" comment- clicked delete and pasted in these new encouraging words. Instead, what was my first reaction when each of these artists complimented me? Doubt. All from this baggage projected onto me in my formative years.

In the beginning of this post I said that my former teacher's words stuck with me till this day and it's true but they resonate very differently now. Now they ring in the back of my mind when I'm teaching or mentoring. They ring in my core when I regularly sing high B's in my rep and vocalize up to high F's or G's. I'm so grateful for his careless words because I'm sure it has prevented me from projecting on to my students, at least in such an egregious way and if I do catch myself using words that are, not harmful, but not as helpful as they could be - we talk about it and learn from it. I'm a more mindful teacher because of my previous teacher's thoughtlessness.

Teachers, especially of young singers, PLEASE know your words have meaning. teachers of more advanced singers, let's normalize talking about the traumatic things your students have, no doubt, been told at some point in their life.

We all know this kind of mind-fuckery is all over the place in our industry. Mental health as a singer really means taking all comments with a grain of salt. Talking about the harmful comments helps us realize it's not "just us" and together we can help each other heal much faster than if we all go through the bullshit silently and alone.