8 I’VE SEEN MANY, MANY OF MY FRIENDS WHO’VE GONE TO VERY REPUTABLE CONSERVATORIES BUT HAVE LESS KNOWLEDGE OF MUSICAL BASICS. Since she graduated, she has been all over the nation, married in 2008 to a consultant with Oracle, and had her first child, Katie Rose. Between being a singer, new mother and a wife, her life doesn’t allow much time to make it back to Stillwater, she says, and some opera assignments can last as long as seven weeks, such as her trip to Cardiff last summer. But she was on campus last January for a performance with OSU’s Allied Arts series. She told a master class that while some success in music is due to talent, it’s mostly due to perseverance. “A lot of really talented people give up, and there are a lot of average singers making a great living because they stuck it out,” she says. “In this business, you get rejected much more than you get accepted. You have to have a thick skin about it. You never know why companies decide they’re not going to hire you or have no desire to listen to you. It just happens to everybody.” That persistence comes in part from her stubborn nature, she says, but she also attributes it to the seed Julie McCoy planted when she encouraged her protégée to audition with Larry Keller at Oklahoma City University. The new graduate was getting ready for a job interview at an Edmond elementary school. “I had applied to several — lots of them, actually — big, important music schools, conservatories, and didn’t get into any of them. So, I thought, ‘Well, that’s obviously not meant to be.’” However, she took McCoy’s advice, and the rest is history. Keller honed her on-stage performance craft and, thanks to a bit of luck, some hard work and no small amount of expensive vocal lessons and rejections, some great opportunities came along. She ended up in New York City anyway, but it wasn’t to attend Juilliard. While she was finishing her master’s degree in voice with Keller, she was a national grand finalist in the 2001 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in New York City. She would move there in 2002 after an apprenticeship with the Seattle Opera. Since then, there have been too many highlights for her to remember them all, but a big one was singing with Placido Domingo. These days, she’s considering pulling back a bit so she can spend more time being a wife and a mother, and she admits it’s a struggle balancing work with enjoying her life. “So many things have been great, and I’m very thankful. It’s one of the most fun careers. It can be crazy at times, exhausting and lonely,” she says. “But I feel very blessed to do what I do. I get to play dress up and sing beautiful music with an orchestra and play pretend on stage for a living. I have many things to be thankful for.” Stacy Boge PHOTOGRAPHY
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAxMjk=