Love What You Love

I have always felt removed from the opera world. My idea of fun is not coming home to listen to opera or lieder while drinking wine and contemplating life. Yes I enjoy a good pinot grigio and I'll gladly reflect on my existence, but I prefer to do it while listening to what I call "regular" music. I also enjoy watching TV, which, I know doesn't seem like a very intellectual thing to do. But we forget that movies and TV shows are an art form because the number of bad ones outweighs the number of good ones. What I like is to be affected and to be touched by music, by writing, by acting. In the end it doesn't matter which art form I'm enjoying as long as I'm enjoying it.

For many years now I have been training to be an opera singer. I thought that this meant that I'd have to remove any other music from my vocabulary. I thought I wasn't allowed to sing pop music or jazz. The trouble is, those are the types of music that got me into singing in the first place. How can I forget my roots? While I believe that it's important to keep each genre separate from each other in terms of style, I know that listening to pop and jazz have made me into the musician I am today. I know how to make a beautiful phrase because I grew up listening to Sarah Vaughn and Joni Mitchell. My standard for great singing was high even at a young age and it's not because I was listening to opera. I didn't realise how much I was being influenced by the raw, honest, singing and writing of Alanis Morissette or k.d. lang. Yes Maria Callas can teach you how to sing Puccini, but that's pretty much it. In order to adapt to different styles of music (and, within the world of classical music, there are many) you need to sing other things.

Take my dad for instance. He has been playing legit trombone for a long long time. He's always played in orchestras. But he listens to EVERY kind of music. He also can blow an AWESOME jazz trombone solo whenever and wherever flawlessly whether it's for a gig or just at home messing around. He knows music and he always plays what he wants. It's very inspiring.

If classical music is your jam then you don't need to listen to me. All I know is that I've felt so incomplete the last few years and I think it's partly due to my suppressing the kinds of music I really liked singing. I was trying to force myself to love a kind of music with my whole heart when I really only liked it as a friend. Now that I've embraced "regular" music and re-integrated it back into my life I actually find that I'm enjoying singing opera. Who knew? Perhaps because I've allowed myself the freedom to love what I love.