Getting Started on a Hopeful Note

Benvenuto, everyone!

This past Wednesday I had another first “appointment” with a singer. Alice Rivera is a transgender woman I offered to voice train, and a voice I am particularly excited to work with. Though Alice has a limited background in formal vocal training, she has enough experience to speak in musical terms with me and an ear good enough to match pitch nearly perfectly.

This presents a new starting place for me as a teacher. With someone who cannot match pitch very well, it can be difficult to determine the person’s full range. With someone like Alice who can match pitch very well, this task becomes immediately easier. Therefore, my next step with her is to leap into determining range and rolling into technique.

Simply by listening to her sing along with a song she’s comfortable with, I estimated she could be somewhere in the baritone to low tenor range, which she seemed to agree with. At a point in the song, the singer in the track started singing an octave up, but Alice did not. I asked her about this after she sang, and she told me she sometimes does make that leap, but she lacked the confidence at the time.

I’m particularly excited to work with Alice because there is so much potential there. If I can give Alice the technique and the confidence to do it, there’s great potential for a lovely falsetto sound, and, while I haven’t had the chance to listen to her higher range just yet, there is potential to work with some countertenor technique.

One thing I noticed as she sang is that she did so primarily in her chest voice. While this is not a bad thing, it does open up a new avenue for her to explore. Learning to sing in head voice may give her the ability to shift through her break more easily, therefore reaching her higher range with more accuracy and ease.

Before we left off, I took the opportunity to ask Alice a few questions while we were together. The most important answer, I feel, came when I asked where she wanted to go with her voice. She first told me simply, “Up!” She followed this by explaining, “What I would like is to be able to, more or less, have a speaking voice that can be read as feminine.”

Voice dysphoria isn’t a concern for every transgender person, but it is a very common source of discomfort. Talking to people like Alice reminds me why I’m doing this. I’ll leave you on this note: the human voice is beautiful, and everyone deserves to feel that way about their own voice.

Cantare!