Quote of the Day (Soprano Barbara Bonney, on How Mastering a Text Helps With Stage Fright)

"When you start to sing it after all this preparation, you have that wonderful deep memory; it’s like you’ve implanted it in the soles of your feet. So when you’re in a concert, let’s say you’re distracted by something and the words fly out of your head, there’s so much memory inside of you that you can quickly get back into it when you are about to completely fall apart. When I teach I find usually the first thing that goes when kids get nervous is their text; because they haven’t learnt the text—they’ve learnt the music and then sort of got the words along with it; that’s the wrong way to go about it. It’s much more fascinating and much more useful in life to have the words, because let’s say you’re driving along a country lane and all of a sudden the passage—not just the music, but the words—will come to you, and you make a connection in life as a poet would, and it’s so much more rich than just knowing words and knowing music, and performing them.” —American soprano Barbara Bonney quoted by Daniel Jaffe, “The Intimate Art of Barbara Bonney,” Classic CD, May 1999