Singing Lessons in Fitchburg, Massachusetts

Patricia Misslin was born in Fitchburg on the sixth of May 1940 and became a voice teacher - twenty-nine years at the Crane School of Music, then the Manhattan School of Music, then the New England Conservatory from 2003. Among her students were Renee Fleming and Stephanie Blythe. And of her own first teachers she said something every adult beginner should hear before they hand over any money: they got her into more trouble than they helped her with, because her voice was better than the people she was studying with. So one of the teachers behind two of the finest American singers of the last forty years came from this city, and the line of hers most worth repeating is a warning about bad instruction.

Why take singing lessons in Fitchburg, Massachusetts?

Because more of it is here than most people in Fitchburg have been told. Fitchburg State runs a Community Music Program that teaches voice to the general public, year-round, at published prices - which is rare anywhere. The New Players Theatre Guild has run its own theater at 15 Rollstone Street since 1975, casting musicals and plays with open evening auditions and roles from teenagers to octogenarians, downtown and walkable from the Intermodal Center. Twelve minutes down Route 12 in Leominster, the Montachusett Chorale has been a non-audition chorus since 1992 - more than fifty singers drawn from across the Montachusett region, open to men and women, directed by its founder Peter Inzerillo; it does not publish a rehearsal night, so you email and ask. Thirteen miles up Route 2 in Gardner, the Greater Gardner Community Choir meets Tuesday evenings at Bethany Baptist between seven and half past eight - non-auditioned, open to teenagers and adults of every ability, with the fall term opening in mid-September - while Surround Sound, a women's barbershop chorus, rehearses Monday evenings from half past six in the Heywood Wakefield community room on Pine Street and says visitors may attend any week they like. And Theatre at the Mount, on the Mount Wachusett campus since 1976, says its auditions and roles are open to all, takes anyone sixteen and over, and three of its four productions this season are musicals. Auditions for White Christmas are the eighth and ninth of September at half past six; you bring a short vocal selection that shows your range. That is a concrete, dated reason for an adult here to start lessons.

Personal attention for your voice

Two things people in Fitchburg are routinely pointed towards look like the community route and are not. The university's own concert choir is non-auditioned, but it is a credit-bearing course open to the university community and it rehearses at half past three on Mondays and Wednesdays - which is no use to anybody working a day shift. And the community college in Gardner teaches Voice I and Voice II, but its music catalog lists no choir or ensemble course alongside them, and the free-college scheme needs six credits in a degree program - so a single voice class there costs seven hundred and thirty-eight dollars rather than nothing. The one-to-one hour is what fills the gap those two leave.

What you'll learn in your singing lessons

Breath, and for longer than feels reasonable. Then a smooth crossing between registers, tone that reaches the back of a New England church without force, and the short vocal selection a local audition expects you to arrive holding. A good deal of the singing here already happens in Spanish, and if that is your language we teach in it rather than around it.

The advantages of the SIRIUS Music School

A single person reads your description and pairs you with a teacher accordingly, rather than a web form doing the work. Nothing rolls over and nothing renews, and the first hour is not billed to you.

Technology meets music

Nothing on the way adds reverb or quietly corrects your pitch. What your teacher hears is what you sang, and that honesty is the whole reason the thing works.

Fitchburg's musical highlights

The best proof that this city has a real training tradition is a mother and a daughter, both on its own notable-people list. Marion Rice studied and performed with Ted Shawn at the Denishawn school in Boston and then ran a dance studio here in the 1930s. Her daughter Carolyn Brown was born and raised in Fitchburg, became a founding member of Merce Cunningham's company in the summer of 1953, and was the most important woman in it for the next twenty years. A Denishawn-trained teacher, working in a mill city, produced one of the defining figures of American modern dance. Two corrections while we are at it, since both circulate widely. The singer Amerie was born in Fitchburg and left as a baby. The basketball player Michael Beasley was born in Maryland and spent one senior year at a prep school here. Neither of them grew up in this city. And the Longsjo Classic, which nearly every list of things this city is known for still writes about in the present tense, was ended by its foundation in March 2020. Its own website is still frozen on the 2014 edition.

Singing lessons for every level and age

Fitchburg, Leominster, Gardner, Lunenburg, Westminster, Ashburnham, Townsend, Shirley - a lesson lands in any of them, February included.

Flexibility for your everyday life

Fitchburg's median household income is about seventy percent of the Massachusetts figure and its poverty rate is more than half again the state's, in a state where the price of everything is set by Boston. We are not going to quote you a Boston rate as though it were normal here. Then there is the transport, which cuts both ways. The commuter rail is genuinely good - first train to North Station at four thirty-three in the morning, last one back leaving Boston at ten to midnight, a little under an hour and a half each way, with service on Sundays too. But Fitchburg is Zone 8, the second-furthest band on the system, so a one-way ticket is twelve dollars twenty-five, and a two-hour evening class in Boston works out at about seven and a half hours door to door: the four forty-three out, the ten thirty home, and midnight before you are back. Meanwhile the local buses are currently fare free and, on this summer's timetable, stop before half past six - which is before any of these rehearsals begins. So the train is worth a Saturday rather than a Tuesday, and the bus will not reach a Gardner rehearsal at all.

Start your musical journey

Take the free hour. Nothing rehearsed and no sheet music, in whichever language you happen to sing.

Conclusion

A voice teacher from this city taught Renee Fleming. The university teaches singing to the public at thirty-three dollars a lesson. The theater on Rollstone Street you can walk to; the choirs in Leominster and Gardner want a car after six. Start at home, in Fitchburg.