Author Bio: Rebecca Fromherz is a
Singing Teacher-Student/Leader-Servant based in Oregon. Her current
work stems from a professional singing career which morphed into a
passionate desire to share Pathways to Voice with everyone. The place
for this is "From the Heart Singing." Rebecca teaches singers and
teachers of all ages virtually and in person.
When I began my Journey to Voice, my goal was to please my teachers. After all, every time I won an award or an audition, my teachers were pleased! The more success I experienced as a young singing student, the more I focused on what my teachers thought. Even after winning a spot at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory and graduating there with honors, I did not feel I could sing. I was asking everyone but myself for affirmation of my voice. I felt empty, anxious. Auditioning was at times traumatic, and voice lessons were often just cathartic crying sessions. I did not know what was "wrong" with me. In fact, when I listen back to recordings, my voice was everything I had been told it was: beautiful, powerful, deeply expressive and full of potential. So, what was the issue?
Around this time, a wise person told me the key to understanding myself as a singer and a person was in following the singing I love. I took a big chance and contacted a famous singer I admired, mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig, who took me under her wing. As I sang and confided in her, Madame Ludwig became equally perplexed with my "problem." You have gold in your throat! she would say. Why do you not sing? Christa sent me to a friend and colleague of hers, a true Stalwart Heart of Singing, the late Hilde Zadek, in Vienna, for help. If anyone can teach you, it's Hilde! Christa said, I think, with a silent prayer for me.
Signs of light to bring me out of my grief and anxiety came at my first lesson with Madame Zadek. I still cried at nearly every lesson for six months, but the framework she gave me that first day brought a life-giving context which shapes the way I interpret my past and future as a life-long learner. Singing is simple Madame Zadek said. All you have to do is learn to feel with your head and think with your heart. There you go! It's simple.
But it wasn't easy. Madame Zadek's words bore into my self-doubt sometimes with the pain of an emotional electric drill. They forced me to construct a new personal reality where I could be fully present to my own self and voice at all times, especially when I didn't want to be. I had to know myself deeply, which meant it was not nearly enough to listen to who others told me I was. Paradoxically, I went through this deeply challenging journey of self-discovery at the same time I was singing professionally around Europe. I had voice--and yet I didn't believe it. The missing pieces to the puzzle of my existence began to appear as I realized what many professional singers dread: Dear God I thought, Maybe I'm a TEACHER!
In the one thing I always strove to avoid--teaching, I found the missing pieces of myself. I began to see a drive in me was developing that had been present alongside my performing from the beginning. This drive was to observe and share the sometimes excruciating human experience of being and becoming a person who can, with full awareness, embody voice.
I found my "teaching tribe" when I literally fell into a Masters of Education at Willamette University. My enrollment there grew out of a single, chance encounter and conversation with the Dean of the School of Education where it seemed the missing part of me was finally heard. The part of me that loves to share how to find voice almost more than that I've found voice was born and grew up in that program.
At Willamette, I learned that it is as important for a teacher to be a student, as it is for a student to be a teacher. I realized the anxiety I felt as a young learner stemmed from a disempowerment that could only be remedied by seeing myself as a teacher of myself and--horrors--even of my teachers, in my own learning. My fragility as a student could only be healed by seeking and finding a deeper source of authority of voice than even the opinions of the people I revered. I had to see voice in myself so I could recognize voice in the very people who were trying to help me. This was the greatest enlightenment I'd experienced as a human being. It changed my life as a singer, as a student, and as a teacher.
From that point on I began a fascination with asking questions of my students like: How do you sing in your dreams? Does your current singing feel like it's leading to the experience of which you dream? And, after a series of strengthening exercises, for instance: Do you feel this voice expresses ALL of YOU? Or Who does your voice say that you are...?
I began to take my students' wildest aspirations as authority. I started to see their heart, their desire as my teachers. I used those scarily amorphous, hard-for-a-teacher-to-define-with-her-mind signposts to help my students design Pathways to Their Own Voice. I took notes based on my student's observations, asked them to keep journals, and listened carefully. I had learned to conduct Teacher Research. I saw its power in the transformations my students experienced. I heard it as they sang, and according to my students, my actual teachers, they felt, heard, and saw it, too.
Now at George Fox University, in the Doctorate of Educational Leadership Program, I have been invited to dance between an equally powerful set of opposites that compliments the "Teacher/Student" dichotomy, which I know now is more of a gradual convergence of two different realities than anything black-and-white. Leader-Servant. Servant-Leader... Leader-Servant... ... ... .
I realized with a shock during our first week of residency that my journey as a Teacher-Student/Student-Teacher was, in the most important ways, the same as the journey I've begun at George Fox as a Leader-Servant/Servant-Leader. In order to transform my own, painful world of "voicelessness" and those of my students, I need to serve their deepest vision for their lives as singers with a profound seriousness and positivity. I must honor their current realities while leading them on to new possibilities. I need to lead my students so that I can serve them, as well as recognize fully how my students serve and lead me!
At "From the Heart Singing" the heart and the mind Madame Zadek told me about teach and learn from each other. Heart and mind also, at times, lead and serve each other as the singer grows into what voice needs her to be. Learning to sing becomes a wonderful dance in the truth of Who We Are.
I am excited to continue this new chapter of expanded vision and experience at George Fox. I am inspired by a faculty and colleagues who embody the tools I want to foster in myself. My own dreams as a teacher include seeing how far a heart/mind balance can expand to create not only a stronger and larger body of students at "From the Heart Singing" but also perhaps a community of like-minded teachers who are interested in being and becoming Teacher-Student/Leader-Servants in the voice pedagogy world, together.
Madame Zadek was right. When we listen to the voice of the heart and the mind, when we hear the voice of powerful love inside and out...when we are teachers and students, leaders and servants, it is "simple..." and it's fun!
With Music,
~Rebecca Fromherz="From the Heart!"
