Author: Alexandria Strother

We are all born knowing how to breathe. It’s simple and the moment life begins our nervous system takes over and begins to tell us “inhale, exhale” so quietly that we forget we were ever listening. Even in the moments that take our breathe away we are reminded “inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale”. After a sudden grab of your shoulder or a noise in the darkness “inhale, exhale, inhale”. So how is it that something so natural and so practiced can be so hard?

A singer is only as good as their last breath and lately, the breaths that I have been taking have been shallows gasps desperate for life instead of expansive, “let it all go” breaths that feel like the obvious eventuality, sucking in fresh air without any effort at all. Like most areas of my life, I’m overthinking it. Worried I am not doing enough, I work harder and harder to get a good breath, a counterproductive effort resulting in the tighten up of each and every muscles in my body and pushing through the air rather than allowing it to flow through me.

So why is it so hard? Why can I not simply do less and allow my body to do what it has done for the past 22 years and simply breathe?

Part of it must be mental. The subconscious belief that art is pain, suffering and determination against all odds. That for true artistry to exist one must be on the brink of emotional and physical distress. The misguided belief that Alexandria, just as she is with no frills or fancy footwork, is good enough and strong enough in her technique to simply breathe, engage and sing. The rest then must be a learned habit developed over time. Ingrained in me during hours in the practice room and established as a new normal during performance.

If I am to survive as a singer, as an artist and a human being I must learn to breathe properly. To let it all go so that I can begin anew and to not push when I get to the end, but trust that my technique will support me, is terrifying in all regards but necessary if I wish to move forward. After all, how hard could it be? If I could do it when I was just a few days old why not now?

There are three things that I am exceptionally bad at: conducting, cooking and drawing. I discovered that I could not draw in middle school art class as my peers began drawing portraits while I prided myself on my ability to draw symmetrical stick figures. Conducting was a daily struggle for me this past year as I attempted to keep up with instrumentalists used to reading scores with more than 8 parts while simultaneously transposing a good number for them. Luckily, drawing and conducting are not skills which are typically required on a daily basis, however, the ability to feed yourself is.

My inability to cook delicious (or even passable) meals is not due to a lack of effort, in fact I love to cook and the creative process associated with it, rather my lack of skill or patience. It often begins well – I search the internet for “simple healthy meal” or something similar and look through twenty or so photos until I find something that looks both feasible and tempting. I set out the pans, wash the vegetables and begin following the recipe to a T until I realize I am missing an ingredient. “No worries” I think “I’ll just substitute it with some other herb”. Two minutes later the same thing happens and yet again I substitute without knowing the true accuracy of my substitution. Fast forward to when the food is on my plate and I take the first bite – odds are it did not turn out well.

Perhaps if I was a bit more patient it would turn out better. If instead of cooking everything on high (obviously that is the most efficient way!) I considered lowering the temperature so that the pot did not overflow or if I could stop myself from opening the oven every five minutes to check if it was done, things would cook more evenly and come out less like hard bricks and more like chicken. Although I am acutely aware of my cooking faux pas there is some part of me that refuses to rectify them.

My own lack of success while attempted to cook has fueled my love of cooking TV shows. The chefs that you see on shows like Chopped and Masterchef (my two personal favorites) are true artists and I have been known to play episodes while I cook to help me pretend I am preparing a meal just as impressive. So often we look at food as a means to an end, we eat for nutrition and sustenance not for the beauty of preparation or complexity of flavors, and we forget that food can be about so much more than the number of calories per serving. We forget that the chefs who work behind the scenes are more artists than skilled laborers and that what we create in the kitchen can be, and should be, about more than the number of dirty dishes we leave behind.

Music has been my world since I was a child. My musical upbringing consisted of all the modern clichés of how an opera singer is born: “she sang before she could talk” people would say and naturally the big voice inside a small girl was discovered at church, I began piano lessons at five and was obsessed with the one CD I owned after saving up my allowance for weeks.

After that, the momentum of one opportunity brought me to next, an opportunity which I could not possibly say no to, until I ended up here. Where exactly is here? Here is my (victory lap) senior year as a Vocal Performance major at the University of Michigan. Here is having performed in over 25 productions in the past 4 years and more recitals than I kept track of. Here is having gone from uncontrollably crying in a high school counselor’s office because I was waitlisted at the one music school I applied to (a truly ill advised move looking back) to performing as a preliminary winner of SMTD’s Concerto Competition. Here is sitting on a panel this morning answering questions about my experiences as a music major to scared perspective students on the day of their audition. Here is defined. Here is expected. I’m very comfortable and very good at Here. While I may not know exactly what will come next week, I can guess with remarkable accuracy – class, practice, homework, work, recital, coaching, more homework, more practicing and an audition I may or may not go to depending on my mood. What hit me this morning is that in three months that will never again be my hectic but very predictable routine.

I can admit that I live a charmed life – part of that is my uncanny ability to always find free parking within five minutes of looking (even in Kerrytown during the middle of the day) and another part is that things just tend to work out for me. One opportunity grows into the next, somehow turning the little girl who auditioned for the church choir by singing Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid into a music major at a top university. A major benefit of this is that since I was little my life has been planned out for me, guided by the opportunities which I fell into. However, graduation is impending and my predictable musical life will soon be part of my past.

Obviously I have some semblance of a five year plan – it would be foolish to graduate from college and not – but this plan consists of large, vague brush strokes rather than neatly sketched outlines (just waiting for the details to be filled in) that I have become accustomed to. Freshman year of high school I could have guessed the majority of important details about my life in 2015, but right now I can’t even tell you where I will be living six months from now.

Sitting on the Q & A panel this morning for perspective voice majors made graduation real. It is no longer that far off, mythical event that you have heard of but cannot picture yourself being there, rather graduation is coming and it will change everything. Opportunities will be less common and more competitive. Voice lessons will cost real money and a good pianist will be hard to find. Yet the one thing that will not change with graduation is my devotion to the art form that colors my world and brightens my days.

Before I was accepted to University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre and Dance I spent six months on the waitlist. I auditioned in January (unaware that U of M was not simply good for music, rather, that it was and is one of the top music schools in the country), placed on the waitlist in March, and told in May that there absolutely was no room for me – there simply were too many sopranos. However, my name was kept on the waitlist for the summer in the unlikely event that some soprano got cold feet and gave up their spot. Two weeks before my freshman year I received a call and suddenly I was a music major.

I began freshman year knowing that I was the worst one in my class and to some extent I have carried that shadow of doubt with me throughout my entire time here at the University of Michigan. Yet this doubt has fueled my desire to prove myself to the faculty who saw potential, if not promise, in the performance of a 17 year old that could not sing below G4. It motivated me to audition for every show possible and resulted in me performing in over 25 operas, musicals and plays in 4 years. It convinced me not to change my degree to a Bachelor of Musical Arts from Bachelor of Music even though a BMA is more dual degree friendly and it hung it the back of my mind reminding me that I needed to work harder than everyone else to earn the opportunity which I had been given.

On December 21st, the voice that has hung in the back of my mind finally disappeared because on that day I sang in the preliminary competition of the University of Michigan’s Concerto Competition and won. After years of doubt and determination, the same professors that placed me on the waitlist decided that was fit to represent the voice department at the Concerto Competition Finals where I would compete with 6 instrumentalists and another vocalist for the opportunity to perform my piece with symphony orchestra.

While I did not win the Concerto Competition Finals, the opportunity to sing at Hill Auditorium with a real audience was the culmination of everything that I have been working for these past four years. Granted, 17 of the audience members were faculty members sitting with pen and paper (some even following along with the music) actively judging the quality of my instrument and preparation, however, in the twenty minutes where I stood center stage at Hill Auditorium I felt the deepest sense of accomplishment. Here I was a twenty-two year old soprano singing on the same stage that Rachmaninoff, Joan Sutherland, Elton John, Leonard Bernstein, Audra McDonald, Yo-Yo Ma and so many others have rehearsed and performed on. It was a bit overwhelming! In those twenty minutes that I sang Previn’s Honey and Rue, the chip on my shoulder vanished. Part of me will always be the little girl from waitlist worrying that she is not doing enough and that she is falling behind her peers, but the little voice constantly casting a shadow of doubt has vanished, all because I refused to listen in the first place.

There is a certain point during each and every semester when I essentially disappear. Normally, rehearsals are the culprit –
my involvement in way too many shows catches up with me and eats up weeknights and weekends leaving me little to no time for myself, friends or family. However, this semester I have been hiding on the 4th floor of the EECS building for different, yet still very musical, reasons.

This semester I am taking EECS 452 as my engineering Major Design Experience (MDE). As an upper level EECS course there is a certain amount of work which is expected and required, but in addition to that normal coursework 452 ends with a 6-week group project culminating in you and your group creating a working prototype of some product that uses DSP.

Early in the semester we formed teams of 4-5 students. My team consisted of three Computer Engineering/Science majors and two Electrical Engineering majors. In addition to their engineering backgrounds, each member of the team comes from a musical background bringing the experience of sound engineering, choral, orchestral and electronic music to the team. This resulted in an easy decision about the topic of project – we were going to create an Audio Effects Processor.

Modern music would not exist without audio effects processors as it has made the application of thousands of musical effects to an input signal as simple as the flick of a switch. Audio effect processors allow both novice and advanced users the ability to apply effects to their input audio without purchasing numerous expensive analog devices.

The processor which we created is an inexpensive, high quality audio effects processor. The processor takes in line, microphone or instrument level audio signal as an input, feeds the input through a pre-amplification circuit as needed, processes the signal using DSP techniques, and outputs a line level signal to be sent either to recording equipment, speakers, or additional signal processing units.

While this project has been tiring at times (Wednesday night/Thursday morning we were in the lab until 5 am making sure that our processor was working for Thursday’s Design Expo), it has been an exciting experience to create music via wires, circuitry and software rather than with a lot of breath support.

Do you remember that guy who in seventh grade you had the biggest crush on? He was older and way out your league. He was friends with your brother, so you’d seen him at your house a couple of times. Each time you were terrified that he might notice you and you would have to talk to him, yet, in those casual glances where his eyes accidentally met yours, the butterflies in your stomach made you feel things that you were ill equipped to understand or describe. Each fleeting glance you shared made you long to grow older and into a woman who could hold her own against such an unfathomable force. And you did. You caught his attention and for a brief moment you held it, but before it ever truly began it was over. The world seemed to play out in front of you in shades of gray, dull and dreary in comparison to the world of color that he alone could show you. You were devastated because for a moment, you had the man of your dreams, but were left with nothing.

For me, that man was André Previn.

At this point, I expect everyone that is reading this blog to be thoroughly confused. For those who know who André Previn is, you have correctly assumed that he was not friends with my brother, we did not go to middle school together and that I have never met him. For everyone else: André Previn is an eighty-six year old German-American composer that I quickly became enamored with four years ago during my freshman year of college. After hearing Ariel Halt win the Concerto Competition by singing Previn’s Honey and Rue, I was obsessed. I downloaded every CD of his music and sat for hours in the music library pouring over scores, feeling and loving the music he created because it touched me in a way that no other composer had. I flipped through the pages of the scores, never daring to check one out of the library, because I knew that I was not ready to sing his music – I was not a mature enough artist or technically skilled musician to turn the notes on the page into the music he desired – and so I waited.

Finally, I was ready. I learned every piece, except for one, that he wrote for soprano – knowing full well I would not have the opportunity to perform them. I reveled in the time I spent learning the strange intervals and negotiating the tuneful melodies barraged by an accompaniment determined to corrupt them. Yet I saved one, my favorite, for my final performance on the Hill Auditorium stage and my final shot at the Concerto Competition: The Magic Number.

Two months ago I dared to begin learning the notes which filled the twenty some pages of the piano-vocal score. I began to memorize, section by section, the 17 minute long piece. With no recording to prepare me for the sounds that the piano would make or how desperately it would try to pull me off pitch, I entered each coaching terrified and left with stars and circles covering my music but with a lightness and joy in my head and heart. For the first time in my life I had fallen in love with a piece of music.

Monday this world was shattered. I discovered that Previn had pulled all copies of the published orchestral score and so that performing The Magic Number with orchestra would be impossible. I was devastated. It was more than the stress of having to find, memorize and perfect another twenty minute piece with less than a month before the concerto competition, it was losing a piece of music that had become such a part of my life that I couldn’t imagine carrying on without it.

I am aware of how incredibly melodramatic I am being. Yet, there is a part of me that cannot help but long to hear the colors and textures of an orchestra playing The Magic Number, summoning up feelings that I do not know how to express other than by singing. But it’s over – the piece has been pulled from publishing and I have no choice but to move on. Previn broke up with me, so it’s time to start a new love affair.