my big, fat vocal folds

Even fieldworking anthropology doctoral students need hobbies, right? This past week, I put more into singing than into anything else.

Anyone who has heard my laugh -- say, in the stairwell -- knows that my voice can carry. For a sometimes somewhat shy girl, I have a big voice. A big, big, big voice. Have I mentioned it's big?

According to family apocrypha, I sang before I talked. I've been in choirs forever, and most of the technique I know has been in the context of choral singing. I had sung alto through high school, and moved up to first alto/second soprano at university. The fact that I had no problem holding a harmony line explains, to a degree, my tenure in the alto section. Singing the melody became anathema to me.

So, when my mother gifted me with what amounted to ten months of voice lessons the year after I finished university, I found myself at logger-heads with my voice teacher. I was practically a life-long alto; I could maybe imagine myself as a mezzo. No, she said. I was a soprano, no bones about it -- a dramatic soprano, in her estimation. I couldn't buy this. My soprano friends whose voices I knew had voices that were much lighter in timbre, more delicate, and capable of those high, pretty, flowery, stereotypically feminine (if you will) sounds that I could only estimate with difficulty, if at all.

It took her six months to convince me, during which she made me do things with my voice that would make me stop and look around, wondering where the sound was coming from. That was ten years ago. Since then, when I've sung off and on, I've sung soprano. But I know my breath control is seriously lacking, as I don't control this giant instrument very well. And I just don't have one of those flowery voices. I have the kind of voice that comes to mind when you think of the name Brunnhilde, complete with the helmet with horns on the side.

Anyway, I got recruited into a local choir to sing the last movement of Beethoven's 9th. My giant instrument was well suited to shoring up the soprano section, especially over the high Bs. Time was I would have been afraid of a high B, but now high B was an old friend. So I stuck around, putting my big, fat vocal chords to work on J. S. Bach's Magnificat, shoring up the second sopranos (who were outnumbered by the first sopranos two to one).

Then a fellow soprano approached me about putting together a soprano duet for a little music soirée a friend was throwing. She proposed the flower song from Lakme; I counter-proposed the duettino from Marriage of Figaro. We wound up working on both.

Where had this been for the past ten years? How had I forgotten how much fun singing opera is? I mean, no one is going to invite me to the Met anytime soon, but I had forgotten how much fun it is to just work on the music.

Someone recently described 'the field' to me as a chronotope of unreality. This is true, but I would venture that sometimes the unreal is the place where you can reconnect with the most unlikely of forgotten loves.