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The Diva, that's me, started singing at her mother's knee and performing in school musicals as a moppet. I took a Bachelor of Music degree at Indiana University and a Masters Degree in voice at New England Conservatory. I started singing professionally in the Boston area, both in opera oratorio and recitals, and at Emmanuel Church, famous for its weekly Bach Cantatas and chamber music series. I started teaching about this time also.
I got some nice gigs with the Boston Symphony, the St. Louis Bach Festival, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Basl City Theater, and elsewhere. I did early and contemporary music, cabaret and musical comedy at the American Repertory Theater. I won an award for Best Actress in a Musical for my work in ART's "The Boys from Syracuse." With my friends in the Liederkreis Ensemble, a vocal quartet plus piano, and I won the Naumberg Award for Chamber music in 1980.
In the eighties and into the nineties I worked with the Peter Sellars ensemble, doing his productions in New York, Chicago, Boston, Barcelona, Stuttgart, Paris, Berlin and Vienna. I went to Moscow and sang at the Bolshoi with Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston. The Sellars productions were made into movies, which aired on American TV and are still to be had on DVD. The roles I performed on TV were Cherubino in "Figaro," Fiordiligi in"Cosi fan Tutte," and Cleopatra in "Giulio Cesare in Egitto." The videos are available through your local library system.
In 1994 I stopped singing professionally for health reasons. My allergies and asthma gave me grief, but they had one benefit; they made me an expert on vocal health and fitness. I learned to compensate for my respiratory weaknesses as well as possible, and I learned plenty, sometimes the hard way, about how and when to sing when I was under the weather, and how and when to say those awful words "Sorry I have to cancel." I didn't say that very often, though. I'd rise from my deathbed to sing if I could get away with it.
Leave them while you're lookin' good, I decided. I had had a pretty good run as a performer, and although I still sing for recreation, my health is no longer reliable enough to hold up under the stresses of professional life. I worked for six years as a music writer for the Boston Globe and elsewhere, and taught for four years at the University of New Hampshire, also giving masterclasses and seminars around New England, and maintaining my home studio.
Quitting the professional whirl made me concentrate my busy little mind on voice teaching. I continue to read scads of current literature on vocal health and the physics and physiology of voice. I have become, in fact, a Voice Geek. I too, am also still learning more about voice, about music and about good supportive teaching. As one of my favorite mentors says, "there is no teaching, there is only learning."