where anne completely reveals her dorky musical side

Most of you who know me know that I spent a substantial portion of my young adulthood pursuing a career as a professional opera singer. Sort of, anyway. I made it about as far as grad school, and realized that the idea of having a career largely dependent on other peoples' opinions of me was my personal idea of hell. Entertaining a crowd and singing my heart out was one thing, but all those music critics and judgmental professors and opera fanatics who tear apart every single performance? Nuh-uh. So that was sort of a discouraging factor in the process. I was so insecure about myself, my voice, my potential... there was no way I'd survive the first bad review or harsh comment, I thought.

Then there was the question of the Fach. No, it's not a dirty word, I promise: your Fach is your vocal classification, like "coloratura soprano" or "dramatic tenor". All through my vocal training, everyone I knew seemed to fall so easily into a vocal category, repertoire was easy to pick, roles assigned easily. Me? Not so much. I've been called many different things: lyric mezzo, dramatic soprano still needing to fully mature into my voice, lyric soprano with a stunted high range, and "I don't know what you are." Soprano arias scared the bejeezus out of me because I always had High-Note-Itis: attempting anything higher than a high B-flat made my throat inexplicably choke up and tighten, frustrating my teachers and leaving me in tears. Mezzo arias... well, they were considerably less scary as they contained way fewer high notes, but I always sounded like a soprano singing mezzo arias because I had no high notes, which may have been true. I didn't have that rich coloring and weight in my voice I always thought was necessary to really sing mezzo roles, even the higher, lighter ones. So I was stuck.

And then there were a bunch of other little things: running out of money to pay for my lessons and coachings, seeing friends in the business struggle and live from paycheck to paycheck (which I was already doing, really, but I didn't want to anymore), thinking about my future and seeing nothing but dark fog and a huge question mark, and also feeling like EVERYONE was more talented than I was. (Yeah, I know. I had issues.)

So I stopped the pursuit, mourned the loss of a huge dream, and tried to move on with my life. I abandoned the thought of ever singing before an audience at any opera house, major or obscure, and concentrated on taking a completely different career path. Eventually, I dropped out of the local Bach choir, left the weekend church choir where I was a (meagerly) paid soloist, didn't reaudition for the local opera chorus, and stopped thumbing through music books looking for pieces to sing and learn. Even as I type this now, I can look to my left and see a huge load of classical vocal CDs, filled with the voices of my mentors and idols, that have collected dust and gone mostly unlistened to over the past 7-8 years. I've tried to listen to them and not have my heart filled to overflowing with longing and the realization of a very broken dream, but it usually doesn't happen that way. Even the purely instrumental and orchestral pieces make me fervently wish I'd stuck with the violin or piano lessons.

I still sing. Not like I used to, though. The style of singing I find myself doing on Sunday mornings is leagues away from the world of Mozart, Brahms, and Strauss. I am singing the sort of music I know many of my classical-singing friends would have turned stomachs over, and even now, I still feel like I'm searching for my voice, still trying to figure out the instrument inside of me. I still don't know what the heck kind of voice I have, and I've nearly given up trying to figure it out. Our worship team leader said to me once, "I don't know what to do with your voice." And I don't remember what I said to him at the time, but I probably just shrugged my shoulders and sighed, because I've heard that so, so many times in my life and I *still* don't know what to say to it. Sorry I'm so difficult. Sorry I do not have an easily-categorized, compartmentalized voice, people.

Today, I've been hanging out with Aidan. I've turned off the TV, pulled up my laptop with all my music on it, plugged it into our nice speakers, and just started singing along. Aidan was completely mesmerized - turns out I'm more of a hit than those two blond chicks from Baby Einstein. I started out singing some pop stuff to him, and then I switched over to a snippet from Brahms' German Requiem - here's a video of one of my vocal heroes, Barbara Bonney, singing what I sung to Aidan:



Aidan loved it. I sang it to him a few times. It felt so good to be singing like that again. And suddenly, I was back there again, back in that old dream, and that longing to finally have a voice that does things right resurfaced. And I wished that, just once, I could sing that very piece, in front of an audience with an orchestra behind me, no High Note-Itis, all the required breath control (and that song needs three lungs). And it was too difficult not to cry a little and wish for the things that might have been.

I don't know if I'll ever see that dream realized this side of heaven. And I don't have a deep, profound resolution to this story... yet. I'm still working on that. In the meantime, though, I think I'll try and see how it feels to reconnect with a lost part of myself, and maybe even discover the joy in a voice that isn't so easily categorized and has a unique sound all its own.

"And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you." John 16:22 (English translation of part of the lyrics of the above piece)