Learning to Love Your Voice
Picture this.
You are an avid music lover and musician armed with your voice as your instrument. You are tunnel-vision on the sheet music resting on the music stand in front of you, in the middle of a stuffy sound-proofed practice room in a high school building. You’ve been working on this music for months now, preparing for the most challenging and cutthroat competition you’ve ever participated in. You’re in the middle of a particularly difficult piece, climbing up the note ladder one quarter note at a time…
And your voice stops.
It cracks, it fizzles, you feel like you just climbed all the way up to a dead end. You try repeatedly until your head is light and your throat is sore, to absolutely no avail.
It was one of the hardest moments in my singing life, in that little practice room. It felt like I was repeatedly hitting my head on a ceiling that had never been there before. “I’m a Soprano 1,” I thought, “This has never happened before… Why now?” The pitch was in my head, I could hear it so vividly but my vocal folds physically couldn’t produce the sound needed.
I remember feeling absolutely defeated as I explained to my vocal teacher what was happening at the time. Why could I not do something that I had been able to do for what seemed like my entire life? It left me entirely unmotivated to keep going through with this competition process.
My vocal teacher explained that everyone’s voice changes as they grow older. While people are developing, their voices develop too. The timing was absolutely awful, sure, but it’s completely normal.
She suggested I take myself down to a Soprano 2 level instead, to be more in my comfort zone as a singer now and for the rest of the competition. Because who knows what the later pieces were going to be like? And it absolutely hurt my pride. I mean, my voice was betraying me. What came to me so naturally was suddenly something I lost the ability to do. But she told me something I’ll never forget.
“Vocal placements aren’t a pyramid. No voice is better than another, no Soprano is better than an Alto because we are a team. A choir works together, as a collective. Because we all need each other to sound the best.”
She compared it to an outfit, “Sopranos are the shiny accessories that are pretty and sparkly. But the Altos and the Baritones are the shirt and the jacket and the shoes. Sure we can all shine on our own, but the support is what truly makes a choir special.”
And although I really hated not being AS shiny of an accessory anymore, I learned an extremely important lesson that day. That my vocal ability and what I can or can’t do doesn’t make me any more or less important as a singer. Especially in the collective, every individual singer contributes to the whole.
Did it take me a while to learn to love my voice again? Yes. Especially after swallowing my pride and being taken down a notch in my hypothetical pyramid. But the days that followed were significantly easier. No longer did I feel as though I was forcing my throat to push out the notes I was barely capable of. No longer did I feel anxiety when I pulled out the piece, or dread all the way up until that cursed high note. And after a while, I was enjoying singing and performing the songs with my peers like before.
I walked into the room filled with judges feeling confident in my abilities as a singer. I was following a voice part that I could perform with ease, and focus on my musicianship rather than if I could hit the notes of my former voice part. I was following a voice part that complimented the voice parts around me. I wasn’t the main attraction; but the supporting voice that emphasized the other Soprano voices around me. Hearing the chords that were being built with each part were enough to give me chills. Standing in a group surrounded by dedicated singers is a euphoria that is so hard to describe and magical to experience.
Learning to accept when our voices will change and grow with us will make us stronger as singers overall. We as musicians are capable of amazing feats, but please realize that your health as a singer is EONS more important than that shiny high note.
Kailey Zapata
