Editor’s note: As the Juno Awards 2013 prepare to celebrate the best of Canadian music this weekend, Western Journalism students help us celebrate the best in Western Music. Read the full Music Issue.
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A small room lined with autographed opera posters is almost filled up by a grand piano with an ornate tablecloth draped off its side. A woman’s voice ringing out takes up what little space is left.
Jackie Short stands in front of the woman, waving her arms horizontally. She’s training this student in the classical bel canto style — meaning ‘beautiful singing’— in her job as a private teacher in Western’s Don Wright Faculty of Music.
“When in doubt, squeeze your bum. I should put that on my door,” said Short after her student’s voice lasts through a particularly long run on a single breath. Short describes the strategy as one that gets every last note out.
It was every last note of Short’s soprano voice that led her into every opera house in Canada, performing with all of Canada’s big orchestras multiple times. From Korea to Singapore, Germany to Israel, her 15- year performance career spans across continents, but began in rooms like the one she teaches in now.
After scoring the highest test score in Ontario on her Royal Conservatory of Music Grade 8 examination at 17-years-old, Short now describes her career as something she had blindly fallen into. She began studying Music with a minor in Calculus at Western in 1982 thinking she would leave as a music teacher.
After her first year at Western, her teachers suggested she follow the performance stream of her music degree — an option she had never thought about. “I had been to two operas in my life when I was a teenager and I left halfway through at both of them thinking ‘This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life,’” Short said.
Operas at that time didn’t have subtitles to help people understand the plot. “You’re sitting in the dark watching fat people sing in a language you don’t get and you’re 16-years-old, so it didn’t go over well.”
After graduating in 1986, Short worked with her mentor, Stuart Hamilton, who ran an opera company in Toronto — Opera in Concert — when she was 21. The program gave novice singers the opportunity to gain experience. After a couple of roles at Opera in Concert, she got an agent, followed by auditions, followed by jobs.
“It sort of snowballs from there,” Short said. “I got to the point for about five years when I was in my late 30s where I would go for auditions and I was just offered the job.”
Short describes the travel as great, but stressful. She has come full circle back to both Western and her initial aspirations for teaching after asking herself a second question: “Do I really want to be sitting in a hotel room by myself for a month rehearsing in Vancouver?”
She was notified of job openings at Western by a colleague she had been performing with — Theodore Baerg — who encouraged her to take on part-time teaching 11 years ago.
Now back in her small office, she sways back and forth to the soprano voice ringing through it. “I like the Cadenza,” she said to her student. “You better, you wrote it!” her student responded. The pair burst into laughter, demonstrating the kind of relationship Short says she hopes to have with all of her students through the rest of her career.