Singing a woman's life: How singing lessons transformed the lives of nine women

The disturbing film The Burning Times (Armstrong, Pettigrew, Johansson & Read;1990), about the persecution of women during the Inquisition, closes with the image of modern day women enacting an ancient tradition of dancing and singing in a circle under the full moon.They hold high above their heads a circular net of ropes that intertwine, weaving together to make a web.It is a powerful image that speaks to me of many things.That net held high is, for me, a twofold symbol of how women experience the world, one strand of a woman's experience intertwining with other strands to create the fabric of her life, many separate lives weaving together to create a web of community.The image of the circle of women and the net they hold is celebratory, certainly, but it also speaks of how much of what is important in a woman's life still takes place in the shadowy margins of our culture, rather than in the full light of day.Perhaps this image has had such a powerful effect on me because it reflects what I am learning in the research I am conducting into eight women's experiences of taking singing lessons.I have been a teacher of singing for the past fifteen years.Many of the women I have taught have told me that the effects of the singing lessons have reached far beyond the weekly session we spend together and beyond the growth of their singing voices, having what they have described as transformative effects on their whole lives.They have told me that they do, indeed, feel that important parts of who they are and what they have known as true have been forced into the shadows, neither accepted nor honoured by others nor, often, by themselves.The singing lessons have taught them that there are kindred spirits in those shadows and that through singing much of the darkness may be dispelled.The aim of my research was, originally, to understand how, for eight women, ranging in age from thirty-three to fifty-five years, taking singing lessons has transformed how they feel about themselves and how they live their lives.I chose as my focus the wider experience of the singing lessons, rather than the specific activity of singing, because my study participants told me that what happened between them and me in the pedagogical setting of the lessons was essential to their processes of change.Deborah Britzman (1993), in her article Beyond Innocent Readings: Educational Ethnography in Crisis, reminds us that researchers "intervene in and rearrange the lives of those they study" (p.14) and that the researchers themselves are changed by their research.My study participants have told me that they have certainly been changed by both

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