Culture OC talks with Noori of The Chronicled Voice, and organizations set up to advocate for equality in the opera industry and beyond.
Molly Noori, an Irvine-based mezzo-soprano and founder of the new nonprofit organization The Chronicled Voice, has discovered a frustrating irony in the opera industry: Singers are being silenced.
Singers suffering from chronic illness and other disabilities in the industry find themselves stifling their voices when it comes to advocating for themselves for fear of being labeled “difficult to work with” and facing stigmas such as the assumption that they are incapable of performing their jobs.
“What do you do when the best of your ability is rarely an option? When some days your body just wants to quit, despite your best efforts, best preparation, best willpower, best hope?” writes soprano Kim Lamoureux in the Boston Singers Resource. Lamoureux, a former board member of the Boston Chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, is a chronic illness sufferer. “Whether you have an autoimmune disease, chronic migraines, depression, anxiety, diabetes, chronic lyme, or IBD, chronic or long-term health challenges affect us in myriad and hidden ways.”
Noori is working to fight the stigma. With The Chronicled Voice, she plans to “raise awareness about chronic illness, particularly within the music industry,” according to her website. Already, her work has uncovered some enlightening insights.
Noori is one you’ll want to watch. She was recently approached by a London publishing company asking her to write a memoir about her life and journey as a singer with chronic illness. She contributed to a vocal pedagogy book for Indiana University, Bloomington, educating students and instructors on effective techniques for optimizing learning and performance for singers with disabilities in the studio.
Additionally, Noori is a dedicated mezzo-soprano, having won this year’s second-place The American Prize in the Professional Opera and Voice category among other awards, and an avid photographer, stage director and voice teacher with a private voice studio in Irvine. She holds her Bachelor of Music degree in voice from Indiana University, Fort Wayne, and her Master of Music degree in voice from the University of Toledo.
Planned for release in Spring 2025, Noori’s album “My Black Swan Songs” will give voice to industry taboo topics like invisible illness, loss, and mental health. She has teamed up with an accomplished group of artists to bring this work to life and bring awareness to the spotlight. We sat down with Noori to learn more about The Chronicled Voice and discuss her upcoming work.
Culture OC: What are your goals for The Chronicled Voice?
Molly Noori: We just formally became a nonprofit organization a couple months ago, and so my goal for the organization this year is just to gain as much visibility as possible. So I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, going on podcasts, and creating the album is another version of gaining visibility and raising awareness.
I have two exciting things that are in the works (though I can’t talk about them in great detail because there are no contracts signed yet). One thing is something that was part of my five-year plan for the organization, and it looks like it’s going to happen within the next six months, so I’m excited about that. It is a legislative policy kind of change that is going to have a huge impact on singers across the country, in opera companies big to small. So whether you’re at an A-house or a smaller local company, this plan that will hopefully come to fruition very soon will have an effect all across the board. This will especially help singers who have had a non-traditional singing journey due to chronic illness; so that’s a big one.
One of my other goals for a one- or two-year plan was to collaborate with a larger company, and one that would be appropriate for a chronic illness-focused organization to partner with. I can’t say the name of this company yet, but that is going to happen, probably by the end of this year or early 2025, so that’s a huge goal that I can happily check off my list sooner than I thought I would be able to.
Long term, we want to raise awareness, educate and destigmatize chronic illness within the industry at large, and specifically within the opera industry, and hopefully get to a point where singers no longer feel afraid to speak out in fear of not getting hired or not getting cast again. Empowering those singers and making sure every workspace they go into is a safe, accommodating space that’s inclusive and well-educated.
Culture OC: Could you tell us more about your personal experience with chronic illness?
Noori: I started showing signs of chronic illness when I was 4, and til now have kept developing different brands of things; a mental illness component: anxiety, depression and OCD; physical: fibromyalgia, endometriosis, Hashimoto’s disease, thyroid cancer and some gastrointestinal stuff, issues with my esophagus and mixed-tissue issues that we haven’t quite diagnosed yet … a whole bunch of stuff … These things keep creeping in and slowly getting diagnosed, and all of those things together present symptoms that have affected me vocally. Last year these things culminated to a point where I couldn’t sing without there being pain.
There was a year of vocal rest … and so I have slowly been able to start singing again successfully, and that’s all going really well. I’ve had years and years of funky stuff going on that has put me in a position to help singers that are going through similar issues. It has also made me aware of how lonely that can be, when you are going through those things. Especially when you are having issues that affect your voice, which as a singer is a huge deal because it’s part of your identity, right?
So I found myself in a position where I couldn’t sing, and I definitely didn’t have answers I needed at that point from doctors. I was having a hard time finding answers online, and quickly realized I was not the only singer going through this and I didn’t want those singers to feel alone. I didn’t want someone to have to go through the same, long struggle that I did to get some answers. I wanted to talk to other singers in the community that were going through the same thing. So that’s why I started The Chronicled Voice. I continue to figure out how to navigate my career with all of this stuff going on, but in the meantime I have been really happy with the connections I’ve made and the people I’ve helped, and this new branch of my career.
Culture OC: What are some of the barriers singers with chronic illness are currently facing?
Noori: There is the whole stigma around chronic illness in general, because the education has been poor. Singers feel like they need to hide it so that they feel like they are hireable, because odds are if you say to someone, “I have a chronic illness,” they are not going to know what that means, so they’re not going to know what that will look like for the singer in the workplace. They might assume that the singer is not capable of performing their job, or that being chronically ill means that you are sick all the time, like you have the flu all the time. I hear that a lot, and that is not what that means. So, the lack of education for our country in general, but also within the industry, becomes a barrier, because there’s just not a safe place or an appropriate time to explain that to people. So singers end up keeping it a secret, which is not healthy because that doesn’t lend itself to healthy singing, a healthy work environment, or optimizing the art form.
There’s other things like within a rehearsal setting … things like not being able to stand up for an entire rehearsal period, or in certain situations someone might just need to sit down to be the most comfortable, to sing the best they can, and being able to feel comfortable asking the director “can we try to incorporate this motility aid?” or whatever they need; feeling like they can openly ask that question without being judged or potentially being labeled “difficult to work with” or something like that.
Culture OC: Singers have been reaching out to you (often requesting anonymity) relating their own private struggles with chronic illness. Have you noticed any notable trends in the responses you’ve received?
Noori: The thing that is most interesting to me is that of the people reaching out, often internationally, the majority are A-house singers. Some of them were A-house singers who were open about their illness and were not asked back next season; some of them are very, very afraid of being public about it, and just have to fake it. The most interesting thing is the consistency at which people that are reaching out are performing at a high level. That doesn’t mean anything necessarily; that doesn’t mean that those A-houses and those singers deserve any different attention than someone singing at a lower-level house would deserve, and I don’t think there’s any more awareness at any different level, but it was interesting to me. It shows you can have this specific kind of disability, or multiple disabilities at once and still perform your job just fine.
The frustrating part of it is that it’s invisible and you don’t get judged necessarily right away from first sight. It’s extremely frustrating to have to explain yourself if you need to, or else you have to feel like you are hiding even more because someone can’t see it. There are layers and layers that go into that, and certainly when someone feels like they have to hide it out of safety: emotional safety, but also job security.
Culture OC: Tell us about your upcoming work, “My Black Swan Songs.” When and where is this premiering?
Noori: “My Black Swan Songs” is an album that will comprise 15 art songs for voice and piano, and we are planning to record it and then release it in the spring of 2025. We are going to do a bi-coastal premiere; probably LA and New York. I’m sure at some point I’ll probably do an Orange County recital as well.
There is a team of four composers and a fabulous librettist, and they are all working very hard to make this an awesome project. The plan is to offer the recording up for a Grammy nomination so we can gain the most visibility we can, so that we can continue to have the most outreach as possible from a philanthropic perspective.
The songs focus on lots of taboo topics that we don’t typically feel comfortable talking about publicly or professionally because they are taboo; heavy-hitter topics like chronic illness, loss of a parent, miscarriage and sexual abuse in the art industry.
Some of the songs are already completed, and they are really emotional, and really beautiful, and once I get past the part where I am crying when I sing them, it’s going to be really special to bring them to life.
Culture OC: Are you doing the libretto as well as the vocals?
Noori: There are four composers, and one of the composers is writing their own libretto; Kirsten Kunkle. Also, Lisa Neher pulled in the fabulous Kendra Preston Leonard who is doing the libretto for those pieces. I wrote the libretto for pianist and composer Nicole DiPaolo’s and Joel Balzun’s pieces. Balzun’s are a combination of famous quotes, some Aristotle and old old quotes that have to do with mental illness and chronic illness a little bit. There are different themes that each composer has like “resilience” and “hope,” and those themes are going to appear melodically woven throughout the whole set. Joel’s doing a cool thing where he’s working my name into the harmonies which will be recurring all the way through as a sonic theme.
Culture OC: Any other thoughts you’d like to add?
Noori: Any of the work that we are doing for our organization is going to affect the readers’ community, whether they are in Orange County or New York, or London, it will affect your personal community because it affects singers in general and singers who have chronic illness are all over the place. So, I’m happy to hopefully continue to make a bigger and bigger footprint internationally, but I’m also looking forward to doing more work specifically within our community in Orange County, and partnering with local organizations that would support that in our arts community.
