Skip to main content

A Master's Degree at age 59

In the summer of 2011, when I turned 59, I began a master’s degree. I had been thinking of it off and on for more than 15 years. In 1994, when I got back to Toronto from the Phantom of the Opera tour, I considered getting a master’s in performance under Lois Marshall, an artist whom I adored. Something held me back. Perhaps it was a fear of studying under my own professional colleagues, perhaps it was a fear of the state of my transcripts: at any rate, I never filled out the forms.


By 2001, I was thinking again thinking of post graduate study. I had in the intervening years turned from performing to teaching, having had some success coaching advanced singers in Europe. This time, I thought of a master’s in education. I got as far as downloading the application and writing away for my transcripts. When my transcripts arrived, I tried to convert the letter grades into the standard 4 point system. I was overcome with shame. Confronting that trail of successes, failures and incompletes was too much for me. I never even finished computing my academic average.


As a more or less ‘gifted’ child, I had graduated from college at the age of 19, and left behind me an academic record rife with inconsistency. For every “A” in literature or music, there was a “C” in quantum mechanics, or a B- in biology. I took far more courses than I needed, in every conceivable field, but I often didn’t finish them.


In 2010, after the opera workshop I taught at a prominent Toronto music school was canceled, I thought once again of going back to school. Somehow, I knew that I could not face approaching 60 without beginning something. Because I didn’t want to leave home to study, I looked for a plausible distance master’s. I found a program that looked really interesting; the Master’s in Psychology for Performers at the University of Sheffield in England. Working with singers does bring you to the heart of psychological issues, and I thought this two year program might be just right for me.


Once again I began the hell of applying. To my amazement, when I finally confronted the shame of my messy transcript, I had just over a 3.0 average for my BA and a 3.4 for the first year of a graduate diploma I did in 1981. I filled out a ream of forms, and sent them in. I was accepted to the program.

I began the degree with a residency in Sheffield in August, and I loved it. At first I was overcome with anxiety. I thought I had been out of school for too long to succeed academically, that the subject would be horribly dry and I would die of boredom, that poor eyesight would not allow me read the assigned reading. I was all wrong. The teachers have been wonderful, the assignments interesting, the readings fascinating. Whether this degree leads to me getting a good university teaching post or not hardly seems to matter. I feel welcomed into an entirely new community of scholars, and I feel like I belong there. 
To any of you out there who also feel like it’s too late to start, I say “Go ahead. Start your Master’s at age 59. Maybe you’ll even have a PhD by the time you retire!” 
 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where's My EEEE!

I read somewhere that the "ee" vowel, correctly produced, is the foundation of singing. And therein lies the problem. I spent my whole career as a singer unhappy with my "ee" vowel. It was either too shallow, too "spread" or too dark.  I never could get the balance right. The best singers seemed to produce it without spreading the mouth and with considerable space in the jaw. It was clearly "ee" but had all the beauty of "ah". One teacher advised me to feel my tongue at my upper teeth on both sides. That just made me uncomfortably tight. Dropping the jaw made the vowel more like "ih", too neutral, too heavy and too far from speech. Eventually I realized that for a good "ee", the one that can become the foundation of your singing, the jaw has to be released rather than dropped. It is the quality of the released opening that is important, not so much the quantity. Of utmost importance is the feeling of "hollowne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Si canta come si parla: Si o No?

  I am sure that most of us are familiar with the adage of the Italian school, “sing like you speak”.  We also know from experience that while in some respects this is completely true, in other respects it is not. It would be equally correct to say, “to sing well, you must have a flexible vocal position that will allow for modification of the vowels when acoustically necessary.” There is no single correct vocal position that will accommodate every note in the singer’s range. While the first two formants of the singer’s voice determine what vowel is produced (and in this way are intimately related to correct speech), formants 3, 4 (the singer’s formant, which does not appear in speech, and allows the voice to be heard over the orchestra) and 5 determine vocal quality and individual timbre.   Without correct balancing between the fundamental pitch and the shape of the resonance cavities, beautiful singing is impossible.  Both vowel modific...
Post a Comment
Read more

When students have PTSD

Recently, a singer came to me so bruised from her previous vocal experiences, that she virtually has post-traumatic stress disorder.   Alice (not her real name) was in such a state over her voice, that she was unable to produce a sound without paranoia. The effect of constant worry about sound is that you can’t sing. The first thing I tried to do with this student was to emphasize that there was nothing wrong with her voice; in my opinion, she had to learn how to let it out, rather than judging the sound before she produced it. If you believe your sound is intrinsically bad, and has to be “fixed” before it can be acceptable, you are stuck. No amount of fixing is going to produce a voice that is free, balanced and flexible. The problem is, first and foremost, in your thinking.   Far better to see your voice as a potentiality that needs to be released. Once you get your mind off “sound”, you can begin to do the things that allow the sound to be produced in a healthy, balanced wa...
Post a Comment
Read more