A Brief History of Mine
12:24 p.m.
Yes pantasy, I teach singing at Bishop�s University in the beautiful Eastern Townships of Quebec. I have been performing said task since 1988, when I was pregnant with my second child, a bouncing baby boy, and found it extremely difficult to demonstrate to my students how to support their sound by using their abdominal muscles when mine were stretched to the limit. It was pretty funny, actually. My husband, Mr. Canadian Composer (as another diaryland member has christened him), had been unsuccessful in the job search that year, and had landed one position with a well-known opera company in their artist-in-residence programme, and Bishop�s created its very first artist-in-residence programme that year specifically for him. We lived in a house on campus with very cheap rent and the principal was a really good guy who really liked us and wanted things to go well for us. Hubby taught a number of courses part-time, and he composed a large piece for soprano solo, choir and string orchestra. I was not the intended soprano, believe it or not. Instead, I had to fill in at a late date because she had doubled booked. I was at the time of the premiere eight months pregnant and because I am a very petite lady, I looked like a beach ball with legs.
Just savour that image for a moment, if you will.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the baby was born two weeks later by planned cesarian section (much to the disappointment of the members of the tenor section who had been laying odds on the likelihood of my going into labour during the performance), a permanent third position was created in the music department which Hubby applied for and got, and we have been here ever since. My teaching credentials were pretty poor when we first arrived here. I had obtained an Honours Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance several years earlier from a respected Canadian university, but had never taught until 1985 when we lived in Brandon, Manitoba where Hubby had landed a sabbatical leave job (his first). Being bored to tears (and pregnant with my first child), I started teaching for the Brandon Conservatory as the singing teacher at the university did not think I had enough experience (and she was perfectly correct) to be teaching at the university level.
I had three students that year: a woman in her thirties with young children, a 16-year-old girl, and an 83-year-old woman. They were all really sweet and I learned quite a bit about teaching on the job. As you can imagine, all three of them presented interesting and unique problems.
We were at a university in Ontario the next year where I busied myself with singing in a choir and looking after my baby girl, and then we moved to the area we are in now. It was supposed to be for a year. Ha ha. Anyway, that sort of sums it up in a nutshell. I have now been teaching singing at the university level for almost 16 years. It has helped me immeasurably in my own performance and understanding of the art, and I would recommend teaching to anyone who wants to improve his knowledge of a subject. There is nothing like having to explain something you take for granted or do as second nature to someone who cannot, to make you analyze and simplify.
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