Renee Fleming Quotes
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Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.
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While it's a fact that a voice begins with natural talent, any talent must be nurtured, cajoled, wrestled with pampered, challenged, and, at every turn, examined.
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The student's job is to stay open-minded, to quell the knee-jerk defensiveness we all possess in the face of suggestions for improvement, and to maintain patience when faced with a process that is often slow, confusing, and frustrating.
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There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.
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It is our responsibility to learn how to speak to an audience that is less informed about music, to give it a reason to want to come and see us instead of going to the movies.
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Everybody's a work in progress. I'm a work in progress. I mean, I've never arrived. I'm still learning all the time.
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We sing with the entire body. The sounds that we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul, and, most important, the gut.
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Someone once said that there are probably seven naturally good singing days in a year-and those are days you won't be booked. What we must learn is how to sing through all the other days.
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Music was language in our house. It was air.....I feel certain that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and years of my life, they must have been about the work that went into making a beautiful sound.
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Perfection often creates such a flawless surface that there's no place for the audience to enter into a piece, while the idiosyncrasies of individual style are like windows into the singer's heart.
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An interpretation exists because of what we find between the notes.
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In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.
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I have a noble history of being rejected by a lot of places, only to discover that the one that finally lets me in is in fact the perfect fit.
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Music enabled me as a fragile young person to give voice to emotions I could barely name, and how it enables me to give my voice the unique and mysterious power to speak to others.
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Among the important realizations I had in my own days in the practice room was that if any one route to any one phrase didn't work after days of trying, then the exact opposite route should at least be explored, as well as every alternative in between, as counterintuitive as that often seemed.
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I don't want to record anything unless it can be great and genuinely interesting.
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I cannot imagine a more satisfying calling than my own: beauty, humanity, and history every day, combined with the cathartic joy of singing.
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In a sense, it's less about seeing how high up I can vault than about seeing how deeply I can explore my potential...Ambition for me is about the willingness to work, the ability to mine my own soul fearlessly.
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The more you put into it, the more you and the audience will get out of it.
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So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing what they do and what they don't do, seeing how they look when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high note.