I have been the artistic director of the band for more than thirty years. We both dance and sing. Mostly academic vocals, but we try ourselves in different genres and directions, not limiting ourselves to classics.
During my work I have met so many different children. More than one generation has come out of my hands, and some, by the way, as adults, have brought their children to me for lessons. I appreciate very much that the children I’ve raised come back with their own children as adults and ask to bring them up the same way. Because our creative team is not limited to just singing and dancing, we also socialize and travel a lot together. I always try to take the kids somewhere during the vacations, and I also make arrangements for concert trips abroad. The mini-tours require longer and tougher rehearsals, which can make us stay up late and take extra days. Children usually don’t like this. It’s always stressful, repeating the same thing a hundred times, up to and including fighting and crying.
A month before we started preparing for our trip to Poland, my former student Monica brought her daughter. The girl was born with a talent for singing. She sang cleanly, hit the notes and quickly became the lead singer in the first sopranos. She was told by her mother to try very hard to get into the lineup of those who were going – there were only ten places.
I generally didn’t consider her as a candidate, not because of her skills, but because she was brand new and had yet to fit in. And when I announced the main roster, the girl cried, not getting into it. I decided to talk to her and explain everything, and she begged me to take her. It turned out that her mother threatened to put her in an orphanage if she didn’t go to Poland.
I didn’t expect that from Monica. I had known her since she was seven years old, I had seen the kind of girl she grew up to be, and then it turned out that she had such cruel methods of upbringing.
I was able to take the girl with me, not for the sake of singing, but to spend time with everyone. And I talked to Monica after class, asking how she could threaten her child with rejection, in fact, her own daughter, and intimidate her into an orphanage? Even if those were just words, the girl takes it seriously, she is under constant pressure, and that affects a child’s psyche. And I was more struck by what she said to me:
– Nonsense, I was also bullied like that as a child, and nothing, I grew up a normal person.
I can’t believe that her parents did this, and now she is doing the same thing. Harsh, even cruel upbringing should be stopped, I think, especially if the methods are then passed on from generation to generation.
