Kate Miller-Heidke and soprano Allison Bell will hold a masterclass to help undiscovered singers realise their dreams
Have you always wanted others to hear your music or to sing on stage but don’t know how to go about it? Two of Australia’s most experienced singers are holding a masterclass next year for undiscovered talent. Audition
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Soprano Allison Bell knows for certain that there is a lot of remarkable and undiscovered vocal talent out there, hidden away in Tasmania’s cities and towns.
She knows this because she has come across a few of them while giving free singing lessons to people during the pandemic.
And also because she used to be one of those undiscovered dreamers, growing up in North-West Tasmania’s Forth Valley and wondering if she would ever find her way to the stage.
Today she is an award-winning soprano with 25 years of experience singing on some of the world’s most prestigious stages and with some of the world’s most iconic musical institutions, including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bolshoi Opera, and the BBC Concert and Symphony orchestras.
In 2012 Bell met Melbourne-based singer/songwriter Kate Miller-Heidke when both of them were performing at Mona’s Synaesthesia music event, and realised they were mutual admirers of each other’s work.
Something else they have in common is a background of wishing they had been able to access more assistance and good advice as up-and-coming performers, when they were still trying to navigate the music industry for the first time.
So, in order to help the next generation of performers have a better running start than they did, Bell and Miller-Heidke will be running a special masterclass for up to seven previously undiscovered Tasmanian singer/songwriters.
Auditions are now open and will close on December 13, with the masterclass taking place on March 6 next year supported by Detached.
Bell returned to Tasmania from London in March last year and is currently Artist in Residence at the Detached Cultural Organisation within The Old Mercury Building in Hobart.
She curates and performs in concert series focusing on Australian premieres of 20th and 21st century chamber music, and since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic she has been offering free singing lessons to people who normally might not have access to a teacher.
“Through that program I’ve discovered some really outstanding talent in Tassie that should be given that chance to grow and succeed,” she says.
“It made me realise how important it is to nurture that new talent, especially when we don’t know what the music industry is even going to look like post-COVID.
“People need help with not just their technique, but also in how to present themselves, how to stand up for themselves and how to actually perform as well.
“Between myself and Kate, we can cover all of that from technical through to practical, and covering just about every genre.”
Bell says she wants to give others the kind of mentoring and advice that she wishes she had had when she was younger.
“Of course, that’s not to say that I didn’t have any mentors in my life,” she says. “I had help and advice from some really great people, from singing teachers, psychologists, performance coaches, other people in the profession.
“But wish I’d had someone at the start tell me not to take it so seriously. It is so important to have someone give you that perspective.”
Growing up in what she calls “socio-economic adversity” in the North-West, Bell says it was difficult, as a child, to see herself as having much chance to succeed in her chosen musical pursuits.
Nonetheless, she went on to study music and history at the University of Sydney, as well as acting at The Australian Theatre for Young People.
Continuing her studies in Europe she received numerous awards including the La Scala Prize and scholarship to study with Virginia Zeani at the Francisco Vinas Competition in Barcelona. She has participated in masterclasses with Joan Sutherland, Magda Olivero, Ghena Dimitrova, Ileana Cortrubas, Gundula Janowitz, Dalton Baldwin and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
Today she has a reputation as one of the leading and most exciting performers of 20th and 21st century music of her generation, and she owes most of it to her own pure determination.
“In 1995 I just turned up in Europe. I thought, ‘Hey, I have nothing to lose!’” she laughs.
Miller-Heidke trained as a classical singer at the Queensland Conservatorium and has gone on to become an award-winning singer-songwriter who effortlessly traverses the worlds of contemporary pop, folk, musical theatre and opera, and has released four albums in Australia.
She recently appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer, has performed several roles for the English National Opera, and in Jerry Springer The Opera at the Sydney Opera House.
Her debut opera as a composer, The Rabbits (based on the book by Shaun Tan and John Marsden), was commissioned by Opera Australia and premiered at the Perth Festival in February 2015, and won four Helpmann Awards including Best Score and Best New Australian Work.
And last year she was unanimously chosen by both the jury and public votes to become Australia’s representative at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest. Her heartfelt performance and the out-of-this world staging of her original song Zero Gravity won her first place in her semi-final and a top 10 placing at the Eurovision Grand Final in May 2019.
It was in 2012 that Miller-Heidke and Bell’s paths crossed in Hobart at Synaesthesia, which was the first time Bell had been back to Tasmania in more than a decade.
“I was asked to come back to sing with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra at Synaesthesia,” Bell says. “I had seen Kate earlier that year, on stage at the English National Opera, but hadn’t realised who she was – I put it all together when I watched her perform at Synaesthesia.
“She was singing something non-classical. I was so impressed with her voice. She has serious vocal chops, so unique as a performer with her dry humour, classy vocal and stylistic choices, right up my alley.”
The pair kept in contact and became friends, occasionally meeting up in London when Miller-Heidke was touring.
In late 2018 Bell was already planning to return to Tasmania.
“Once you achieve success in opera and classical, the workload is incessant,” she says. “Even when you get a couple of months’ break, you still spend it learning 60 pages of music and most of it isn’t in English.
“I just wanted a proper break and a rest, and thought, ‘OK, what do I do?’
“I had been teaching other opera and classical singers for a decade and working on peak performance and psychology, so I decided to do more of that, and Detached have been amazing taking me on in Hobart.”
But just before she left London, Bell got a text message from Miller-Heidke saying she had written Zero Gravity for Eurovision and she wanted Bell to help her work on it.
“As soon as I landed in Hobart I just dumped my luggage and got straight on a flight to Melbourne to work with Kate, helping her to use that incredible voice while on the top of a 25-foot pole!”
Miller-Heidke says Bell’s coaching was invaluable and Bell remains her singing and performance coach to this day, continuing regular contact via Zoom during the lockdown.
“I wrote Zero Gravity specifically to explore the extremes of what I could do vocally,” Miller-Heidke says. “Rather carelessly, though, I didn’t realise that after winning the Australia Decides’ section, I then had to sing that song literally hundreds of times, with all those absurdly high bits, and I was quietly freaking out.
“Allison basically held my hand and taught me all this clever stuff I didn’t know before about the performance side of what I do. On a purely technical level, she has taught me from bottom up how to make those top notes as reliable and consistent as possible.
“I had gone a decade without any kind of singing lessons at all! So I think there was a need to get under the bonnet and give it a major service. I had some real breakthroughs with that.”
Miller-Heidke will work alongside Bell in Hobart for the masterclass in March, and is keen to contribute her knowledge to the mix.
She says she has done a small amount of teaching and mentoring before but nothing quite this formal. But with Bell taking care of the more technical aspects of singing and performance, Miller-Heidke is confident that she has plenty of wisdom to pass on in terms of songwriting, working in the Australian music industry and the more practical aspects of forging a musical career.
“I have done Q&A sessions for young artists before and I find they usually have a lot of questions about the industry itself,” she says. “It can seem like a huge mystery for young artists or inexperienced artists trying to break into it. And it can be hard to find people who can just answer direct questions honestly, or give advice that’s tailored to your personal circumstances, so I hope I can provide that. I can listen to their songs and be constructive and give my perspective.”
For all of her musical success today – spanning opera and classical right through to more contemporary pop that gets airplay on Triple J – Miller-Heidke says she was still very green in her early days, with very little idea of what she was walking into.
“I think maybe I was a little too trusting of people in the industry. I’m sure it would have served me well to have been more clear-eyed and have more confidence, to not be so deferential.”
Staying grounded, being true to yourself, learning to care for yourself, and just being able to enjoy performing are some of the key lessons Bell and Miller-Heidke hope to provide their mentees with in March.
“Performance is such a powerfully emotional thing,” Bell says. “You can easily get so swept up in it being a business. You have to remember to care for yourself.”
“Always have compassion for yourself in that journey, find a technique to have that inner strength and resilience underneath. And it shouldn’t be all about ego and perfection – it is about connecting with people, being present in the moment, and that is often easy to forget.
“Sometimes it’s about knowing how to say no to the incessant press as well! Having the confidence to know when it’s okay to say no. Especially when your voice is your instrument, you need to have licence to say no, I need silence, I need to rest.”
Miller-Heidke says one of the most valuable aspects of the masterclass will simply be the connections created by drawing all those talented people together and introducing them to one another.
“Music – and all art – is about community and connection and it will be fantastic to bring these people together,” she says.
“So much great original music often comes out of these scenes and there is such an exciting and burgeoning art scene in Hobart and Tasmania generally. I think it is particularly important as we come out of that COVID lockdown period because people have been feeling so isolated and it is a great opportunity for songwriters to come together and feel a connection with others again.”
■The masterclass is open to singer/songwriters aged 18 and up, with no upper age limit. You must be a Tasmanian resident who doesn’t currently identify as a professional musician.
■ If you have worked professionally as a singer-songwriter, if it was for less than 12 months, and it’s been more than five years since that happened, you are eligible to apply.
■ Applicants are asked to submit an mp3/mp4, SoundCloud/YouTube link of their performance of an original, unedited song, along with a short paragraph about themselves by December 13.
■Successful applicants will be notified by January 8.
■ For the final, in-person mentoring-masterclass, chosen artists will have to prepare and present two of their own original songs. Artists from all genres are welcome – from pop and rock, to hip-hop and electronic music and everything in between.
■ The masterclass will take place in the Old Mercury Building, with a full day of one-on-one mentoring sessions and a final group session at the end.
“On the day we will work on vocal technique and performance peak performance skills, Kate will share her experiences and skills about songwriting, getting management, that next step,” Bell says.
“But it won’t just be that one day, our goal is to continue our relationship with those artists and that this will be the start of a more long-term mentoring relationship.
“I think it is really powerful for people from regional and rural areas to see someone who is one of them, someone who has struggled, and to see how far they can go and then ask: why not? Why can’t it be you?”
For further info, email voice@detached.com.au
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