On becoming a singer
In the first section of her upcoming book On Freedom, Maggie Nelson writes of creating art, “Even when one assumes a posture of not caring (about audience, money, the future, decorum, proficiency, or reception), the work itself typically requires tremendous care, which is why art is no place to take cover.” (1) The piece (“Art Song”) is, in essence, an undogmatic look at the blurry line between artistic freedom and harm, censorship and care, but I relentlessly tied passages back to myself, not as an audience or even an artist, but as a person. The work of being the person I want to send out into the world - or more importantly, the person that I want received by the world - is one that requires my tremendous care, one that I have always seen as doing for others as much as for myself. This has not necessarily served me well, or best, and I’ve been increasingly collapsing into the vacuum of what my “self” can be without outside parameters or validation.
I’m hardly singular in this: thus is the task of growing up, after all. We spend some portion of time starting in childhood - I’m beginning to grudgingly come to the conclusion that it may be all our lives - creating and asserting who and what we are, perhaps through the prism of our family unit, and typically against it, then via the various affiliations that call or repulse us. A year and a half of largely undesired isolation and fragmentation has not made many things less complicated, least of all complexes. Certainly not for me.
One thing that has become bizarrely less complicated is my relationship to myself as a singer. When asked how and why I started singing, I always tell some version of the same streamlined backstory: “Well, really by accident, in a way. My mother wanted me to speak well, mostly. And she was a heavy smoker at the time, so her voice was quite low, and she was afraid I would try to imitate her. Because I was always singing along to things, you know. And when I was a child, the only part of my piano lessons I really liked was solfège. She wanted me to have a voice that was bien placée. So anyway, she also didn’t want me to train to be a teenage pop star. She figured a good classical education could do me no harm.
“I started without much conviction, then I got the chance to be in an opera when I was fourteen. [My audience’s face usually lights up at the perceived conclusion of my story.] I was in a lead role meant for a boy soprano, and it was horrible: I didn’t know how to practice, how to memorize, how to take criticism, how to take direction or how to sing in character, truthfully. [Face crestfallen.] There was a very real threat of my being pulled from the production until the Sitzprobe. (2) Then the dress rehearsal came, and I was actually quite good. Then the performances, after which my mother alleges I declared, ‘Je vais faire ça toute ma vie.’ (3) I don’t remember saying this, but it sounds good. [Aha! The turning point.]
“So I began to practice and to think seriously about conservatory. I had little inside knowledge or concrete plan, but it was decided I would go to school in the United States, where I could far more easily move to a traditional university if it turned out I wasn’t good enough for the unknown world of music. I applied to ten or so of the best conservatories in the country, with little regard to culture or fit, and figured if I was accepted somewhere, it meant I wasn’t bad. I’ve been not failing ever since.”
At this point I chuckle, with some embarrassment. This is not nearly as inspiring a tale as I’d like it to be, I tell my audience. I’m laying on the chaos and deer in the headlights a bit too thick, partially in defense. Don’t fault me for my missteps! I didn’t know what I was doing! You see, I didn’t care that much.
But of course I cared. A few days ago, in a round of introductions during the first session of a performer-composer new music lab, one of my colleagues noted that we were probably all sensitive children who grew up caring a great deal about a great number of things. Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, a very dear confidante admonished me for calling myself a dilettante. They were both right. I have always cared deeply. I have always wanted to do things properly and well, to receive admiration and love, and as a show of respect.
However, I’ve also always cared about a lot in my life, without feeling a more specifically strong pull towards music and singing. It is a somewhat simplistic, and perhaps coy, way to put it, but I do feel that I’ve mainly sought to avoid failing as a singer, landing just enough programs and gigs to remain properly in the game. Had I not had tremendous cultural, financial and familial privileges supporting me, I would have easily fallen out.
I started reaching a crisis point about a year before the pandemic spread across North America. I was miserable. After every supposedly successful performance, I felt hollow, spent and alienated. I fretted only over the inevitable mistakes I’d made, finding little joy in the successes. In summer 2019, I decided I’d reached a breaking point and would have to start finding some joy and fulfilment in singing, or I’d have to quit. I became disarmingly candid with strangers about my artistic struggles and, over the course of a few months, got comfort and inspiration from people who found me interesting and worth believing in. Performing became easier. I had a glimmer of “being myself” on stage.
Well, well, ma petite Sophie, let me tell you about a breaking point. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic shattered what we all thought our 2019-20 seasons would be, then our 2020-2021 seasons… At first, I continued to practice out of a sense of obligation and habit, and some amount of that confined mania that spurred people to start baking and doing pushups. Concerning this, too, I developed a well-rehearsed expository monologue: “Since no one was paying me to sing anything, I decided to work on pieces I’ve always wanted to tackle but never had the opportunity to learn because I had to prioritize things I was being hired for.”
This worked relatively well, and I was comparatively more diligent than many of my peers who found themselves unable to practice in the face of a completely emptied calendar. Then, as the months stretched, the futility of the exercise became more marked: I was slow to learn new pieces, uninspired to perform for my iPhone and an external microphone with a pre-recorded accompaniment in my ear. The autumn audition season was a charade, and I sent in my CV, headshot and recordings with less conviction than ever before.
My best outlet for performance throughout this time was teaching French - what started as a side hustle to guarantee some degree of financial stability became my main gig, one of my only means of interacting with people and, increasingly, my preferred stage. I realized I enjoyed the performance of making grammar understandable as much as singing, certainly as much as any singing I’d been doing recently. I had an audience that I felt I could actually reach. And, more than anything, I felt I could do so being myself. I began to seriously consider an exit strategy. Once again, I would let fate (well, a panel of experts) decide if I would remain an active singer: I applied to two PhD programs in musicology and one DMA (4) in performance, more ambivalent than ever about which road I actually wanted access to, and whether I wanted access to either.
I considered this a sort of test run at artistic autonomy: It does not escape my consideration that even in my supposed attempt to remake my life into a more holistic and fulfilling reflection of myself, I still defaulted to seeking approval from hyper-selective establishments. Once again, I assumed I would either be “good enough” to continue down one path, or be forced to truly grapple with my desires and next steps in the very possible event of my being left out in the cold. But I would have to focus on those if and when the time came.
I’m not sure what shifted at some point in late December. Factors: I was more wretched than ever in my personal life, depressive and alienated from my loved ones. Even though I had purchased a ticket to France, I opted to stay in New York over the “winter break.” I had pre-recorded my Christmas gigs, and my French school was closed for vacation. I was alone and desperately lonely and devoid of almost any tasks to accomplish. I slept. I cried. And then I started to practice. A lot. I sat at the piano most of the day, chewing through repertoire to distract myself from my sadness, and I finally started doing what I’d told myself I was doing six months earlier: singing for myself.
I’ve never truly felt like a singer. I was a talented adolescent, then a conservatory student, who wanted to become a singer. I was a graduate, who wanted to become a professional. I was a professional, because technically I was earning money by singing. I was a singer only by technicality, too, because I happened to sing. In the absence of doing, I was nothing (and I often felt like nothing even when I was doing). Then, last winter, gradually and suddenly, in those hours in my library-cum-practice room - the room where I had taught dozens of French classes and slept on the ground during a summer of nightly panic attacks - I became a singer.
By the time I took my final entrance exams and did my applicant interviews and met other impressive doctoral candidates in that room, I was no longer ambivalent about wanting to keep singing. I got into the only program that really interested me by February, the DMA at the CUNY Graduate Center, which further solidified my identity. Finally, a much more satisfying and inspirational origin story.
This story is not without its own crutches and elisions. After a week of elation, I began to fret that I was choosing an unserious path, that my doctorate would not be as respectable as a recognizably academic PhD would, that I would never actually prove my intelligence. And I have no idea how self-sufficient I might feel now without the external validation and significant ego boost of being “chosen.” It’s helped that I sing technically better than ever (hey, did you know that working your ass off makes you better at something?), and that I’ve gotten to choose repertoire that inspires me. And, loath as I am to admit it, filming myself for over a year has also made me both more attuned to my habits and more comfortable with watching myself. I can now say that I enjoy the sound of my voice, that I can watch myself without cringingly hoping for as painless an experience as possible, that I can be cognizant of mistakes or weak spots and still proud of the product. Or, more importantly, of the person. For the first time in my life, I love to sing, not as a means of obtaining the heady drug of audience attention, but for itself, for myself.
As September begins, I’m still personally miserable and alienated and depressed. Sometimes more than ever, and with less hope that I’ll ever understand how to exist in the world without an audience to love me. In the face of this exercise’s apparent futility, I’ve been trying to hold onto the progression of my relationship to singing as the shred of hope of what’s possible. I never thought I would consider myself a valid artist, despite and including my imperfections, would respect myself (maybe even love myself sometimes), would walk away without the need to wonder if I had tricked people into thinking of me as a Real Life Singer and when my house of cards would come tumbling down. Yet somehow, this seems to have occurred, imperfectly, confoundingly, with effort and also naturally. So, surely I can do this as Sophie Delphis: Human Being, no?
Notes:
Nelson, Maggie. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2021.
An orchestral rehearsal without staging, shortly before final dress rehearsals, which allows singers to concentrate once again on the music before taking a piece to the stage.
“I’m going to do this all my life.”
Doctor of Musical Arts: typically a more practicum-based doctorate for performers.