Introduction

Several years ago, I decided to quit singing.  I had been pursuing an opera career with all my might, through a Bachelor's Degree, a Master's Degree, and a couple years of auditions out of school.  I lived and breathed opera.  I listened to great singers of the past for fun.  I stalked young professionals' websites for fun.  I went to the library and read through opera scores for fun.
The one thing I didn't find fun was singing.
You see, it wasn't the rejection, or the financial realities of a performing career, or even the requisite nomadic lifestyle that made me decide to quit.  It was when I realized that I did not enjoy singing.  In fact, it made me utterly miserable.  This had not always been the case - indeed, I went into music because for all of my young life, I loved to sing.  I had no desire for fame or delusions of grandeur, I just loved to sing.  And then after a hasty transition from baritone to tenor and a number of years singing wide open at the top with a manufactured bright sound that I thought a tenor should have, I ended up with my voice all tied in knots.  It's not that I was awful - my friends and teachers at the time loved to tell me that it was all in my head, and that I sounded "fine" - but I could feel on the inside that what I was doing was not right.  I felt that my artistic choices were being squashed by the limitations of my technique.  I felt that my tone was either indirect and muted, or spread and pressed.  Above all, my voice didn't feel like my voice.
At the time, I was prepared to defer to my teachers - I told myself that I shouldn't worry about what I think, because I shouldn't be listening to myself, and it sounds different in my head than it does to anyone else.  I told myself that it would just take time and practice and then somehow my voice would magically get better.  I told myself that if I gained weight, or stopped eating acidic foods, or fixed my posture, my voice would be mine again.
But I gave it time, and time didn't fix me.  So I went on a year-long search for a new teacher, and after deciding that no teacher could help me, I thought I would quit.  I had been so profoundly unhappy - more unhappy, I think, than any other time in my life (and that includes my bout with anorexia in High School).  It was an odd sort of unhappiness, and perhaps many of my friends didn't know I was unhappy, because my unhappiness was all to do with my professional life.  On the personal front, I couldn't have been happier.  I was finally living with the love of my life, and we were supporting each other financially - all the long-distance and waiting were over.  That joy in my personal life was part of why it occurred to me to quit singing.  With so much to be joyful about, how could I waste any time making myself miserable about something so arbitrary as singing.  I looked at people who didn't have to perform, people who lived quiet lives that they could really dedicate to the people they loved instead of slaving for their art.
So I took a Summer off - and by off, I mean I still had a gig as a comprimario in The Merry Widow with a small opera company, and I still made some recordings for projects that a friend of mine hired me for, and I still had a concert in which I performed a scene from Manon...   But it was more time off from singing than I had ever had, having done two YAPs back-to-back the previous Summer, and I tried to use the down-time to get singing out of my head and just enjoy life.  I had my first Almaviva coming up in the Fall with a tiny local company, and I thought I would just do what I needed to get through that, and then I'd stop.  And I'd look for a new job, a new career, a new field.  What that would be, I never did know.
Anyways long-story-short - or I suppose long-story-long because I've been going on for a while - I couldn't do it.  My sense of self was to dependent on singing.  It was too much in my blood to let it go.  Even when I tried, even when I didn't have to sing, it was still on my mind like an unhealthy obsession, and the only way out was for me to indulge it.  I did find a teacher that Fall, and she was the first one who started to turn me around.  I had hit rock bottom with my voice, and then I had a lesson with my now current teacher, and for the first time in years, I walked out feeling good.  No, I wasn't magically transformed, but finally I felt like my voice was on the track to where it wanted to be.
Though she was an integral part of mt journey, that is just where it started.  I realized from that point, that my gut was often right, and that though it is important to go to a teacher and turn off my own preconceptions and my own ego, I also have to be my own teacher in a way.  My voice knows where it wants to be, and my journey since then has been uncovering that voice within, layer by layer.
I probably think about vocal technique more than anyone.  Seriously.  I can't imagine anyone else on Earth spending so much mental energy on this niche topic.  My thoughts and the images that help me move past roadblocks are often odd, and might not really make sense to someone outside my head, but I thought I would start recording them here, as much for my own sake as for any poor soul who stumbles upon and reads this blog.