Editors note: David Holloway, famed opera singer from Gas, recently delivered the commencement address at the New Mexico School of the Arts, where his son, Robin, and daughter-in-law Kate, are teachers. David Holloway recently retired as director of the Apprentice Singers Program with the Sante Fe Opera.
Here are excerpts of his delivery.
As high school graduates, you are at the beginning of independent lives. The big decisions and a lot of daily ones are up to you. How do you go about making your way as an artist and as an adult?
Music entered my life at a very young age. My sister, Ruth, four years older than I, started me singing at the age of 3, mostly because she learned Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah on the piano and needed someone to accompany. And I started studying piano myself when I was 5. From that time on, every opportunity that came my way, every conductor, director, coach and colleague I worked with all over the world, helped me look for a way to be the most authentic me I could become. The drive to be authentic has been the most powerful force in my life. And I wish that drive on you, because whatever you undertake or study, if you strive to find your essence, to know yourself, to become you, and to understand what that means, then you have something genuine to put out into the world.
I was born number six out of seven children, and I needed to find my uniqueness or I wouldnt have been able to survive in the context of a large rambunctious family. My survival was through music.
Maybe that is what makes all of us who pursue some form of art who we are. We are simply trying to find our unique way. When we are on the path, no one can take it away from us. We get our sense of freedom in our form of art, in what we are doing.
Home is one aspect of who you are, and it is pretty hard to disconnect from that place. In the program books of the Santa Fe Opera from 1966 and 1967, it lists apprentice singer, David Holloway, baritone, Gas City, KS.
My younger brother, Steve, still lives in our hometown. You could send a postcard to me today and address it to David Holloway, Gas City, KS, and it will get to me, because Steve owns the post office building, and he lives next door.
Life is a lot about reconciling home, with the person you are becoming. It is about finding ways to grow beyond your past, and still carry it with you, allowing it to inform who you are.
As a kid, I put a lot of feeling into what I did as a musician. The need to express myself was basic to my being. I poured my heart and soul into church songs, school songs, and pop songs from the 1950s. Later, as I progressed into becoming a professional, I had to move beyond the way I had gone about singing as a kid. I had to break down the parts of singing, the songs and the music.
Frequently, I worked in other languages for which I didnt necessarily have a personal, lets call it hometown, affinity. I had to translate every text and then work with it until I really arrived at an understanding that I, David Holloway, from Gas City, could express.
Not all arts involve musical notes or foreign languages, but all arts involve tools, techniques and materials to be mastered. That is the process of growing, studying and becoming a professional.
According to Google Search, the Metropolitan Opera is 1,392 miles from Gas City, a 19½ hour drive, but the journey is a lot longer than those numbers suggest. For me, there were years of vocal study, acting classes, languages to learn and incorporate, music to memorize, hours of practice, rehearsals, and, finally, performing. But this was my route. It may turn out that New Mexico is a good long way from wherever you are headed, too.
BECAUSE of the demands of my profession, singing opera, I have had to grapple with foreign language in the very nature of what I did. I arrived at the University of Kansas, after one year of really easy Latin in high school, and they put me in beginning German, at 8:30 a.m. Busy with shows and rehearsals, I really struggled in that class but somewhere deep inside, I realized that I could get this language. Twelve years later, I met and married a woman who loves language and grammar. By this time in my life, diagramming sentences looked pretty exciting! …There is no better way to expand your world than to experience the world of others through their language. So, my advice to you is study a second language, or for those of you who already speak two languages, study a third.
Some of you will become actors, or dancers, writers or musicians, painters or sculptors. And others of you will pursue equally fulfilling careers that may not be quote-unquote artistic.
But already, in studying the arts as you have, you have developed skills and talents that will serve you in whatever kind of work you choose. As artists, we know how to start a job, break it apart into basic units, look at it from different angles, and then complete it. Administrators love to hire people from the arts, who know how to pursue a problem until it is solved.
Above all, as artists we take our imagination seriously. We use our brains in ways not limited by academic structures or by what has been done before. Trusting our intuition, relying on our imagination these are hallmarks of creativity. And they will enrich any course of life you may follow.
