Becoming Myself, Part II or, How I got where I am.

I must preface the second part of my life story (which will be shorter, I promise!) by saying that I do not resent my father in the least for saying what he said to me. No matter how squelching it may have been, I understand that he said it out of genuine concern, not as a desire to put me down.


I knew I had to find a way out, and I knew that remaining in my country as not an option for me for several different reasons, chief among them the fact that I simply wouldn't be able to get the education I wanted for my voice. Financially, I couldn't afford any of the prestigious universities in the united states, and although Europe was a wellspring of culture I felt pulled towards the United States.  Eventually, through the help of a good friend, I managed to secure a scholarship for a small private liberal arts college in North Carolina. It wasn't the North Carolina School of the arts, which had been where I wanted to go in the first place, but unfortunately we aliens don't qualify for scholarships in public universities.  Despite the protestations of my mother (who was firmly opposed to anything related to the US), I went to North Carolina and spent  four years at a college in the swannanoa valley. There I essentially had to make my own music major, as the school only had a music minor, but since I already had had six years of conservatory back home, I had to cover only a minimal surface.

Unfortunately my voice instruction was not the best. I felt my teacher there didn't understand my voice (or was very knowledgeable at all) and for four years I was very frustrated, as I was not allowed to switch to another voice teacher, and dropping out would have meant being sent back to a country I in which I did not want to be. Transferring was a little difficult, too, because of the scholarship issue I mentioned earlier.  So I stuck through it, determined that after college I would find the right voice teacher. I have many pleasant memories from my time in Asheville, including being helped in many ways by a wonderful person called Lenora Thom, a one-woman dynamo who is the conductor of the Asheville Choral Society, among many other things (and I mean many others, she has boundless energy), and of course my friend Pete to whom I owe my being able to come to this country. I loved Asheville, and someday I would like to go back there and sing for them... a sort of "look, it's me!" thing, I guess, and a bit of a homecoming.

After I graduated I went to Colorado where I had a rather negative experience with one of the voice teachers from one of the universities. This person was simply vicious with me, and after a month of studying with them I felt so depressed about the whole thing that I stopped singing altogether for four months, firmly entrenched in the idea that I simply wouldn't be able to sing correctly at all. This is perhaps the only abusive voice teacher I've ever had, and I never thought someone in that position could have the power to crush you so utterly--- but the kind of personality they had was one where every dart was disguised under a mask of affability and good intentions. You wouldn't really feel the poison until after it had taken effect.

Once more, as you can see, I let someone else's voice affect me in ways I shouldn't have. Then it came to pass that I met a wonderful woman with a very warm heart. Her specialty was musical theater, not opera, but nevertheless she took me on and worked on slowly building back my confidence. After two years with her,  I went on to another teacher at her behest (she said she didn't really know how to teach a tenor) and spent two years with the other teacher.

 During this time I finally had my first main role in a production - previously I had done only chorus work. At the end of the two years (and two more productions) I realized that there were still deficits in my voice, many,  and that I had to find a way to address them. Also, it seemed to be that everybody had been wrong about what kind of voice I was: Up until now everybody thought I was a tenore leggiero,whereas in fact I was a lyric tenor...

I stumbled into this revelation when I attended the Colorado Vocal Arts Symposium where a few lessons with James Allbritten changed my entire perspective and, indeed, my entire life from that moment on.  I had been singing leggiero repertoire for all of my life, and imitating the leggiero sound as best I could. Finding out you're a lyric tenor after that is akin to realizing you have a whole mansion to live in, and that you've only been living in a corner of the kitchen.  Eventually after singing in a production, my teacher and I came to a friendly parting of the ways and we remain on good terms to this day.

Since then, I have been incredibly fortunate to be studying with Martile Rowland,  a woman with enormous experience, incredible ears and an amazing knowledge of technique. I've been studying three months with her (plus another Vocal Arts Symposium) and there are many changes going on in my voice. A lot of frustration, too, because I must overcome many many habits that are ingrained into my muscular memory. It is in this strange stage of change that I find myself in right now.

Where will it lead? Will I be able to become the tenor I know I can be? Well, stick around and we'll find that out together.

If you are puzzled  as to the name of the blog, I named the blog after Alphonse Nourrit. Nourrit was an unfortunate tenor known for good musical taste, the first to sing songs by Schubert in France. He was unfortunate because he happened to live during a time of transition in the tenor voice, where the old method of singing the upper register in falsetto was being phased out for the full-voiced upper register, including the popular tenor high C, which was popularized by Duprez in France.  So frustrated not to be able to hit that high C was poor Alphonse, that he threw himself out of a window and died. One might say poor Alphonse (who was greatly lamented) died of high tessitura. It's a reminder to me that being a tenor is an incredibly frustrating, at times exasperating thing, but that getting too exasperated or too frustrated might end up in you losing your head if you're not careful.