Since I started on this topic last week, I’ve had more time to reflect on these shame narratives in my singing life. One of the most persistent shame stories is that my voice was not “big enough”. In case those who might read this are not versed in the rules of the opera world, indeed, “size matters”. There is a whole class of opera fanatic for whom the larger the voice, the better the singing (at least in their view). When it’s loud and high, it’s good. Shattering glass (though a trope) is an imagined goal. It becomes more about decibels than beauty, communication, story, intelligence, sensitivity, musicianship, emotion or anything else. I have always felt my instrument to be lacking in this capacity, although I know it is perfectly adequate for the job, and that I made up for a lack of sheer volume in myriad other ways.
Naturally, because singing classically is an acoustic art, the carrying power and resonance of your instrument is important. If your voice cannot be heard in a larger space, it’s hard to receive its emotional or artistic impact. And when a voice vibrates in our bodies in an overwhelmingly visceral way due to its sheer volume intensity, it is pretty exciting: I fully admit that. I’ve been wowed by it myself on many an occasion. But I also know that in times when I have felt that artistic administrators, directors or conductors made me feel that my sound was inadequate, I had a trauma response that resulted in my clamping down on my instrument. The more I tried to be bigger, the more my voice shrank. The harder I worked to project and resonate my voice, the more it went into hiding. So I tried harder, and all of this resulted in what’s known in our business as MTD, or Muscle Tension Dysphonia. At one point (quite terrifyingly, just months before I was to make my much-anticipated Paris Opera debut), my vocal folds were under such pressure that they had begun to “bow”. That means that when I tried to sing, my vocal folds were not meeting in the middle, and looked actually like a bow-legged cowboy. So air was escaping, creating a breathy sound, which I was (of course) sensitive to, and thus I applied more pressure to get the sound out. This resulted in less resonance and vibrancy, more pressure on the folds, chronic hoarseness and even dysphonia (every now and then, my voice would “miss” or just cut out). It was absolutely devastating.
One of the big problems here is that singers don’t talk about these things. To speak of it is to feel flawed, inferior, technically derelict. How can someone who has done so many years of training, has had so many successes, worked with the best teachers and coaches, be so woefully unskilled? So we keep things a secret. We speak of it to no one because it is so shameful. I know of singers who have had major surgeries that no one knows about, because to be public about it would mean they would be labelled as damaged goods.
Just throwing this out there is my tiny little attempt at breaking this silence. I guess I feel able to do it now that I am pretty much finished my singing career; at nearly 65, I have nothing I need to prove any more (though I spent so many years trying to prove things). But seriously: why do we think that opera singers are immune to injury just because they have done so much high-level training? Athletes get injured all the time and recover from their injuries, and no one thinks they are losers because of it. And we are singing athletes. So let’s stop the shame spirals already, talk about the fragility of our instruments and the pressures of our profession, and offer one another support rather than blame.