By Lucy Hurlbut

Over the past few years, singing has become a very important aspect of my life. I sing whenever I have the chance, even when it’s just around my house.

A while ago, my dad told me that when I was little, I used to sing all the time. Sometimes it drove my parents nuts, because there was no way to avoid hearing the sounds coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t that I couldn’t carry a tune, but I sure wasn’t background music either.

I’m a soprano which means I’m able to sing really high notes. This also means that my parents sometimes have to cover their ears to protect those precious little eardrums of theirs, and I don’t blame them. When my brother plays the soprano sax, I sometimes have to cover my ears, because it is so loud and so shrill.

However for me, singing the high notes is the best part. In Chambers choir, we are singing a Mozart mass, and I just get completely lost in it all. It’s about a half hours’ worth of music, but it goes by so quickly. From the Kyrie to the end of Agnus Dei, I feel like I’m in paradise. Free. Nothing else matters, just the emotions that engulf me.

It took me some time to discover this feeling of exhilaration, because up until high school, I had never sung in my upper register. I didn’t even know if I could really sing, because neither my chest voice nor my head voice (vocal timbres of sorts) had been developed at this time. In fact, it wasn’t until this year that I realized I could have the same feeling of pleasure in my chest voice that I had acquired in my head voice.

Being on that stage singing my heart out in “Rock ‘n’ Roll #43” opened my eyes to this new sensation. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could sing the song with the anger it needed to have. I closed my eyes and told myself that I could do it, and that I would rock it, and that’s exactly what I did. I grew more and more confident with my singing to the point that it didn’t matter if I was only singing to one person or to hundreds. When I stepped onto that stage, it was just me. No one else was there.

Though the high notes will always be where I feel the most enlightened, the newfound satisfaction I get from singing in my chest voice, is certainly making me feel even more wonderful every time I open my mouth to sing. It is another part of myself that I did not know I possessed. Accepting the mystery of who I am has helped me continue to discover what I am truly capable of.