Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Renee Fleming - Page 2

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.

Well, any time Im preparing for a performance or even a rehearsal, its as if in a way, like any other athletes, these are muscles that support the vocal cords which are just I believe cartilage. It demands a kind of constant warming up and a constant feeling of where is the voice today.

An interpretation exists because of what we find between the notes.

I think singing it when its done well is extremely natural. It feels great.

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.

The first thing I did when I made a little bit of money as a singer was to buy myself an amber necklace. This is often the way we put together our lives, adding the striking qualities of others into our own character.

If I have to hold a note for a long time, I imagine it as moving and spinning, for the note has to have life. In a way, a singer actually refreshes a note with every beat that it's held.

I haven't really been able to transfer into that extraordinarily other worldly creature, other than I hope on stage.

A lot of bad behavior in singers is caused by nerves.

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.

My whole career I played these girls sort of 18 to 23.

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.

I've lived in New York all my life, and we went to the Mormon Pageant each year in upstate New York. It still is a wonderful production. I remember going and seeing the performance and listening to the music. My father had Mormon Tabernacle Choir music, and we would listen to it and sing with it.

The more you put into it, the more you and the audience will get out of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I sing, the sound is a totally different range, color, all of it. It's all about the breath. You take in a breath and you make a sound.

Your brain has a music room, and evolution would not have gone to the trouble of designing that if it didn't have some benefits. So, that suggests to me that we and our ancestors have had music as a central part of our experience for eons. And we're just beginning to understand how that might be. I think that's fascinating.

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.

Singers can also get away with a lot based on youth, strength and enthusiasm, only to find ten years later that what was once just a niggling problem has brought their careers to an end.

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.

You finally have to learn to pull all the different kinds of teaching and training and coaching together on you own, so that your voice and body and technique for a sound that is consistent and solid.

My philosophy is that the people around us are there doing as much work if not more work behind the scenes and they're the last people you would ever be unkind to, so I hope I'm not a diva off stage.