“Women don’t sing that way.” Liana arrived at college – a small, private college in Texas – and immediately, began to receive messages about gender. Sometimes, the delivery was overt and intended to be personal.
I remember in undergrad, I was there for my jury, I was super stressed out, like you do, and I sing my pieces and I'm super memorized, they ask me questions about the composers and history and blah, blah, blah – all the crap that I was terrible at. I go on, I do the thing…and the first thing out of the male panelist mouth was, "How much do you weigh?"
What? I say how much I weigh and he's like, "That's a really good weight. You are a great shape for your vocal fach. Don't gain any more weight." I'm
standing there thinking, "[expletive], how was my singing? Do you have any comments? What are we talking about? How is this relevant?"
Sometimes, the delivery was covert, or framed in terms of what might be appropriate for a cis-woman in the context of musical performance:
My undergrad teacher was this adorable feminine woman person, and while it was never [her actively saying], this is what you do, this is how you are, but there were expectations on how you dress, how you act, and how you
present yourself in musical settings.
I could easily say, "Well, no, this is just how anyone would present
themselves." For some of it, [sure], but a lot of micromanaging things were on how a soprano is supposed to look, and a soprano is supposed to dress, and a soprano is supposed to act. I was told never to wear pants, sopranos wear dresses. "You're not a mezzo, you're not a guy, you don't get to wear pants to performances."
Open toe shoes are unacceptable. No prints, no print dresses. Tread softly… [Then, I was thinking], "Surely, dudes don't have to put up with this."
Literally, it's just "Show up, don't wear wrinkled shit, have on shoes, and you're fine. [laughs]
There were other expectations, meant to be, and thusly, internalized about what appropriate femininity sounded like – not just vocally, but in terms of
repertoire, too. The impressions they took away, they tell me, were
Women are supposed to have sweet voices. They're supposed to be beautiful. I like singing beautifully, and I think beautiful healthy singing is not a female thing, that's an everybody thing, [but] it definitely limited my choices in repertoire.
There's just certain things that I remember trying to pick repertoire. Bringing things I love and things I enjoy that I'm an activist about Intersectionality, and race and gender politics, and just all sorts of things together has always been my schtick. I have a group that does that now, but even when I was a baby singer, that was the thing I was interested in. I was working on recital music, and [I wanted an LBGTQ recital, where I wanted to sing things from a male perspective. I wanted to sing music where the poetry was not from a woman's perspective.
I remember being told that I couldn't sing this rep because I wasn't a man, and I was like,
"Why not? It's written for a tenor, it works well with my fach, I like the poetry, I'm connected with the music making. I don't understand why this isn't something–"
"Well, that's just not something that women do."
“But men do that shit. Like, Winterreise. That’s something people straight up do. Why not?"
I remember being told [by a male colleague], "That's not something women do.' [Men’s music] about the love of women." I'm like, "First off, you presume my ass is straight. Second, there's a lot of assumptions being made here. Mind your business."
I had teachers say that same crap, but not quite as pointedly. There's certain levels of bombastitude, is that word? that I wasn't able to do.
I wanted to sing heroically [laughs]. I like being beautiful, but I want to give a powerful message that isn't about being wronged by the one you love or raped, or something. I want to sing about war. I want to sing about anger. I want to be angry, not mad sing angry, but justified anger. I feel like in shows anytime you get to be angry as a soprano, it's because you're having some sort of mad scene.
The messages they received about appropriateness in singing also extended to how a woman is supposed to sing.
Not talking like a strictly mechanical way because yes, people's voices work differently, but we were talking about earlier bringing a lower voice
mechanism up. I was like, "Why do dudes get away with doing this higher?" I like mixing as much as anybody else. I understand that they're mixing too, but why do I have to mix high voice in earlier? We're singing the same [kind of] rep.
I get it. There's some things I have to do just as a soprano, but what's so funny is that the same criteria just don’t necessarily translate outside of classical stuff. These are the rules I was told for being a classical singer, [and sopranos are always understood to be a woman]. The rules just really don't translate outside of academia. I sing however the fuck I want to, when I sing pop music or gospel rock.
They go on to clarify further about the use of chest voice for female-bodied singers in classical music, noting that the interplay of gendered expectation got tangled up from legitimate technique. Specifically, in
navigating my chest voice. I've definitely had statements among the line like, "Don't sing like a man, you need to sing like woman like women don't sing that way." [What was meant was that] I was bringing way too much weight up from the bottom and in hindsight, yes, I feel like that wasn't conveyed well, because I [took it to mean] I'm not singing in appropriate way. Further, the intersectionality of culture, identity and vocal training made unfortunate messages being conveyed to them about their racial background and life experiences in singing:
Which was also problematic because [having a lot of weight in the bottom voice] was a cultural way of singing I was used to. Singing with a lot of roundness and gospel feel. That made me think I was alto for the longest time, so I only sang in the basement. Having teachers be like, "No that's not what we do,” made me feel personally traumatized because I was like, "But that's what I do, that's something I value in myself and you're saying that I am wrong because I'm doing that?" And now, I’ve internalized that I am wrong at doing the things that I thought I was good at.
“I can’t be the representative of all blackness.” If confusion and
expectations around femininity and voice weren’t enough, being a person of color in a traditionally white-associated field came with its own set of complications. In their undergraduate study – a small, religious private college – they were very much on their own. Literally,
I was the one, I was the diversity. It's so funny. Recently I went back to my undergrad. I started looking through the music department pamphlet and I'm like, "I know some of these people. Why the hell is David on the piano? He plays the guitar. Why is Adrian over there on the– She plays flute. Why is she holding a– What is happening?" Then I'm realized, "They picked all the black and brown people that they had in any capacity in the department and one of them to be in this picture."
They’re pretending they have racial diversity, but they’re literally just throwing people to the picture. They're like, "You’re not a music major, but get in the picture. You on there, come on," which is just hilarious to me because it's just this is not the representative of reality, anyone's reality. While perhaps some of their experiences were simply the result of ignorance, there were occasions where it took on a much more uncomfortable tone:
One of my undergrad teachers was super creepy, not my voice teacher but the choir director. He really liked black women. Really liked black woman. He had this giant ridiculous crush on Leontyne Price." Everyone was compared to Leontyne Price if they were black or even [slightly of color], at all. This was particularly confusing for them, because, being a Catholic school, the chorus sang a lot of straight toned liturgical and early music, which Liana says, “I automatically translated to being ‘hollow white music,’ because that had been my experiences with it.” Yet at the same time, the same director was asking for what translated to his idea of a “black soprano sound.”
I was really confused because [in choir] he wants me to sing this super pure sound and then we get to opera or anything else and he’s like, "You need to sing more like Leontyne." What the fuck does that mean? What are we talking about? I'm thinking, wait, "You want me to sing this hollow white music in
this hollow white way but also we're fetishizing black people in the same breath?"
This kind of dual expectation left Liana frustrated and confused. “I couldn’t be the representative of all blackness and also– I couldn’t live up to [those
expectations]. I didn’t know what he wanted from me.”
“It was my wall of self-bolstering.” Besides the stew of external
complications which Liana was experiencing around gender and race, their own internal issues were compounding things, as well. Things that they’d been able to manage till that point became much less so as they approached the professional world. Expectations were raised, and with them, stress also intensified. The imbalance of their mental and emotional health
was definitely something that was brewing well in advance to college. My self-esteem was absolutely tied to being good at things and being, if not the best then being on the best’s heels – 100%. That was in every aspect of my being at the time. I was so ridiculous as a youth. I had this wall of vanity – legit, that's what I called it, was a wall of vanity. It had all of my photos for whatever group I was in, choir and track and whatever.
I had all my photos and all of my medals or ribbons or whatever meticulously measured out. I was like, "This is my wall of vanity," but really it was my wall of self-bolstering. Every aspect of my extracurricular life was devoted
towards feeling like I was good enough. Music was absolutely no exception. I realize now so much of my competitiveness was directly related to that. I was just like, No, I need to be acknowledged and I need to feel validated and people to think I'm good enough. I'm going to do that by better, and being smarter, and being more vocally beautiful because those are things within my control, whereas being black is not in my control, and being a femme person is not in my control, but I can be the best damn person I can be at these things, and then maybe people will like me.
Act III – Climax: “I Can't Be Free And Beautiful When I'm Afraid”