I Was A Singer Before I Was An Artist
On achievement, artistry, and the things we only understand in adulthood
For most of my life, I’ve loved to sing, but It wasn’t until recently that I ever thought of myself as an artist.
That realization didn’t come from a music theory class or a particularly moving rehearsal. It came from watching my parents cry in the audience.
A few years ago, after joining Berkshire Concert Choir, I began experiencing choral music differently than I ever had before. Growing up, most of my choir experiences focused on the music itself – learning notes, mastering rhythms, blending with the ensemble, preparing for performance. The goal was to sing the piece well.
With the Berkshire Concert Choir, the music was still important, but it wasn’t the whole story. Each concert season’s program is built around a theme. The choir’s programs have explored immigration, wrestled with aging and memory loss, and even examined our complicated relationship with democracy, patriotism, and civic life. The music became a vehicle for exploring ideas much larger than the notes on the page.
For the first time, I found myself asking different questions. Why did the composer write this piece? Why does it still matter? What conversation is this music having with the audience? What are we trying to say by placing these works together in the same concert?
One concert in particular changed how I thought about all of it.
In November 2024, just after the presidential election, Berkshire Concert Choir presented a program called Hope Unfolding. The concert paired Bach’s Cantata 150 with more contemporary works that wrestled with uncertainty, resilience, and what it means to move forward when the future feels unclear.
One of those pieces was Paul Simon’s American Tune.
My parents came to see the performance. They had heard me sing countless times over the years—in school concerts, regional festivals, high school musicals, college a cappella shows, community choruses. Choir was hardly a novelty for them.
I’m being honest, they probably tolerated the Bach. Same old same old. Smile and clap because its your kid on stage.
But then we reached American Tune.
From the risers, I could see the audience. I could see my parents.
American Tune was released during their senior year of high school. It belonged to their generation. It captured something about coming of age during the Vietnam era, about uncertainty and hope and trying to find your place in a country that felt complicated and imperfect.
Yet decades later, those same words seemed to land just as powerfully.
Only now, they were hearing them as grandparents. As citizens trying to make sense of another divisive election season. As people looking back on a lifetime of American history while wondering what might come next.
As we sang, I could see tears.
Not just from them, but throughout the audience.
That was when it clicked for me.
The art wasn’t simply in the performance. The art was in the connection.
It was in the way a melody written centuries ago could find its way into a song written in the 1970s and then, fifty years later, still help people make sense of the present moment.
After the concert, I told my parents something they hadn’t known. The melody of American Tune comes from Bach’s Passion Chorale—the same melody that some may know as O Sacred Head, Now Wounded. Paul Simon had borrowed a centuries-old musical idea and transformed it into a meditation on the American experience.
The audience didn’t need to know that to be moved by the performance. But for me, understanding that connection felt like seeing the entire arc of the artistic conversation at once:
Bach speaking to Simon. Simon speaking to us. Us speaking to the audience. The audience connecting the music to their own lives.
And for the first time, I understood that I wasn’t just participating in a performance. I was participating in art.
What makes this realization especially strange is how long it took.
By the time I stood on those risers singing American Tune, I had been singing for nearly three decades. I sang in All-State Choir twice in high school. I had competed in collegiate a cappella competitions all over the country and Sweet Adelines barbershop contests. I had performed in venues that many musicians dream of visiting, including Boston Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. Heck, I even yodeled in the Swiss Alps with my Girl Scout Troop (a story for another day for sure!).
If you looked at my musical résumé from the outside, you might reasonably have assumed that I considered myself an artist.
But I didn’t. The thought never occurred to me to describe myself or what I was doing in that way. Singing was something I did, and the thing I was doing? It was definitely not some sort of artistic endeavor.
That distinction sounds ridiculous when I write it now, but it made perfect sense for most of my life.
Part of that was the story I had absorbed about myself growing up. I was a STEM kid. The good student. The future engineer. Constantly focused on achievement. The artistic kids were other people—the ones carrying sketchbooks, filling their electives schedule with art classes, or filling notebooks with poetry. I never questioned the distinction. I simply assumed that because I was analytical, I couldn’t also be artistic.
Choir fit neatly into that worldview. Music, at least the way I experienced it, often felt more technical than creative. There were notes to learn, rhythms to master, entrances to count, and endless details to refine. Success came from preparation, discipline, and repetition—the same skills that served me well everywhere else in my life.
I’ve also come to realize that my relationship with music changed.
As a teenager, nearly every musical experience was tied to achievement. I auditioned for ensembles. I competed. I collected accomplishments and opportunities. Being selected for All-State Choir felt like success. Performing at Symphony Hall felt like success. Standing on a stage at a competition felt like success.
I loved singing, but I experienced much of it through the lens of accomplishment. And maybe that’s how High School drives us to experience a lot of things. Maybe that’s why the realization didn’t happen until adulthood.
As a teenager, I was doing what teenagers tend to do to make sense of the world: sorting myself into categories. Smart or artistic. Analytical or creative. STEM kid or art kid. I was also measuring myself by achievements, accumulating evidence of who I was and what I could do. Music was one more place to succeed.
But adulthood has a way of exposing how artificial those boxes really are. By now, I’ve met too many creative engineers and analytical musicians to believe the distinction means much of anything. More importantly, I’ve stopped feeling the need to choose.
As an adult, that achievement framework largely disappeared. No one is evaluating me. No one is assigning rankings or handing out medals. I show up to rehearsal after work because I want to be there. I spend Thursday evenings singing challenging music with people I enjoy because it enriches my life. Choir is no longer something I do to prove anything.
It’s simply part of who I am. And in some ways, its a sacred space where I get to be me in a different way, and it fills me with so much joy.
I think that’s what finally allowed me to see it differently. Once achievement moved to the background, I could finally appreciate the thing itself.
Looking back, I spent years focused on the mechanics of making music while overlooking its purpose. I absolutely love honing my craft – working hard to get better and produce the best possible performance. The technical work mattered, of course, but it wasn’t the reason audiences showed up. Nobody leaves a concert talking about whether the altos nailed a difficult interval. They leave talking about how the music made them feel.
That’s what I saw in my parents’ faces during American Tune. Not appreciation for a well-executed performance, but recognition. Memory. Connection.
For years, I thought art was primarily about self-expression; an individual creating something from scratch and offering it to the world. What choir eventually taught me is that art can be communal. Sometimes it lives in the space between people. Sometimes it emerges from dozens of voices joining together to tell a story that none of them could tell alone. The choir is a community in concert.
I think many of us have a habit of minimizing the creative parts of ourselves. We’re comfortable claiming competence. We will tell you we’re hardworking, organized, practical, or reliable. But “artistic” somehow feels too grand, so we downplay it. We just sing in a choir. We just write for fun. We just take pictures.
I did that for years.
These days, I think differently.
I’m still an engineer. I still love systems and spreadsheets and solving complicated problems.
But I’m also a singer.
And singers are artists.
If you’ve read this far, please consider supporting the truly transformative artistic endeavors of the Berkshire Concert Choir. Our choir is supported by membership dues, ticket sales, grants, and contributions from folks who share our mission to build community through music and connection.. You can learn more or donate at http://www.berkshireconcertchoir.org. Thank you for reading and supporting!