I didn’t find the voice.
The voice found me.

My voice as a child

Before I started school, my grandmother wondered whether something was wrong with me. “She is so quiet. Could it be brain damage or something?” she asked my mother. I listened more than I spoke. I kept my observations to myself and rarely joined in when the family talked or shared. If I was pushed hard enough, I would cry rather than speak. Even as an adult I could feel that discomfort at using my voice, at having to tell others what I thought. As a child I was often quiet and observant — but thankfully I did not have brain damage.

At the pink primary school in Ullevål Hageby things were quite different. There I had my own stand-up show! I performed whenever I felt like it, and the material was made up on the spot. The flight of steps up to the headmaster’s office made an excellent stage, and the audience was a small crowd in the schoolyard who found it interesting enough to gather round and watch. It was fun, it was natural, and nobody expected anything. I decided everything myself. My voice was free.

The way into music

When I turned seven, an enormous van pulled up with the words Aspheim grand piano and piano centre on the side. I was beside myself. At last I was going to learn to play the piano. Every Tuesday my grandfather walked me to Wanda Wang, my very first piano teacher. He told me he saw music as colours. He coloured melodies with chords and played both piano and guitar by ear. With Wanda Wang there was only classical piano teaching. I found sheet music difficult, but I could manage if I heard the piece first. At home I got my piano homework out of the way as fast as I could so I could play something of my own. I made up my own melodies and sang them too, but I kept that to myself.

I played classical piano for twelve years, but I never gave up hoping I could play the way my grandfather did. At music college the piano was my main instrument. I was apparently a promising classical concert pianist, but what I still wanted was to play freely, without sheet music. In my final year of upper secondary I nagged my way into getting a jazz teacher. Unfortunately he was a dreadful teacher. What he said to me after my jazz piano exam planted a deep fear that I would never be good enough. It ended with me giving up the piano altogether. That episode followed me for years, and it was a long time before I dared to play the piano on a stage again.

I applied to SUND folk high school with singing as my main instrument. Singing was still fun. I played at being a musician within safe walls. We went on tour and I sang with the voice I had. The standard was sky-high, and it seemed everyone in the class already knew they were going to be jazz musicians. I liked the taste of that life. Was this the way to making music on my own terms? I practised the piano in secret and decided to become a jazz singer.

I did not get into any of the conservatories I applied to. The disappointment was enormous. They said I lacked vocal technique. Reluctantly I began studying musicology in Trondheim. That same year I also worked as a répétiteur and singing teacher at Studentersamfundet during the student festival. That was where I came across the book Complete Vocal Technique by Cathrine Sadolin. I read the whole thing in two days and ended up enrolling at the school in Copenhagen where the technique is taught. There I spent three years learning EVERYTHING about vocal technique, commuting between my studies in Oslo and Copenhagen. Eventually my singing teacher in musicology told me I no longer needed to focus on technique. “Andrea, isn’t it time the world got to hear your music, all those lovely songs?” The words sent an intoxicating feeling through my whole body. At last someone believed in my voice and in the music I had been writing in secret. I started saving money to record my first album.

Cancer and career

I am a twenty-one-year-old music student. The doctors have just found a large tumour in my mother’s brain and give her three to six months to live. I have no time to cry. The phone rings constantly and I take on the role of medical professional. After all, I have worked weekend shifts in nursing homes for years. I comfort people and state the facts. “Yes, she is starting chemotherapy.” “No, I don’t know how long.” “Yes, it is very sad.” “Yes, we hope it goes well.” “We will know more from the doctors tomorrow.” “I understand that you find it terrible.” “No, it is hard to believe.”

I am determined that the cancer will not be allowed to stop my studies or a potentially promising music career. I sit my exam in music production at Blindern on the same day my mother has surgery for brain cancer. After handing in the exam I take the song I have written to her at the hospital. I think there is no time to record an album before she dies, so she may as well hear this song even if it is only an exam assignment. I am a little embarrassed that it is about her, but she listens, and she cries.

My mother lives longer than the doctors expect. First one year, then two, then three. Every Christmas I believe is the last we will have together. I continue my music studies. I write a master’s thesis on free improvisation. I am still searching for freedom in my voice and in my music. In the middle of the writing I am selected to join a Norwegian tour with the American star singer Bobby McFerrin. Two hundred other singers have applied. Several of them study at the conservatory that turned me down a few years earlier. Bobby McFerrin tells me his voice is a gift from God, and that this is why he has to sing. He carries a Bible under his arm and drinks green tea backstage. I think how wonderful it must be to relate to your voice that way. I myself was in constant doubt about whether I was good enough to make a living from singing.

Even though good things are happening in my life, the situation with my mother is all-consuming. How was I to find my artistic voice when the ground beneath me could be torn away at any moment? Nobody I knew could console me. Those closest to me were grieving too. I felt completely alone.

A friend from upper secondary tells me she has been to see a woman who can read people’s inner world. This Marit is a clairvoyant, a healer, and at the same time very down to earth and “normal”. It sounded strange. I booked an appointment anyway. The experience with Marit knocked me sideways. She read me like an open book without my having said a single word about who I was or what I was carrying. How did she do it? How was it even possible?

Six months later I enrol as a student at the Agape Institute, Marit’s school. I study techniques, learn to read my own inner voice and what is going on deep inside other people I have never met. I am at the school as much as I can be, often three days a week. I do it quietly, between touring, singing lessons and hospital visits. The first years at the school are mostly about me. The grief I had tried to hide away, and the joy that got dragged down with it. I release tears, muck and mess. Behind it I could glimpse a playful optimist with a burning wish to enjoy life, the voice and the music.

For many years I lived two different lives. One as a musician, artist, singing teacher and songwriter, and one as a clairvoyant healer whom people paid to read what was happening inside them. I discover that these worlds have more in common than I first thought, and that they strengthen one another. I can feel how contact with my own inner voice has strengthened my physical voice. I feel safer and braver. I no longer believe my piano teacher’s words. I keep working at peeling away other people’s opinions and expectations. It felt good to listen to my own voice instead of everyone else’s.

I decide to move to Berlin to make a living from music. I need to get away from weekly nursing-home visits and a looming fear of further defeat and death. I keep building my skills in singing, voice use, piano, intuition, healing and songwriting. I play sold-out concerts, do solo tours lasting several weeks, and even play piano at a jazz festival. In between I take lessons with Thomas Lange, a German violinist who knows EVERYTHING about how the body is best trained to be free to make music that resonates with an audience. For periods I also teach singing, usually in a park in Neukölln near where I live. I cannot afford to rent a rehearsal room, but I savour every day in Berlin, the city where you are allowed to be yourself and do things your own way.

The ending and the beginning

On a warm summer day I meet the man of my life at a barbecue at Fornebu in Oslo. I am only in Norway to play a concert, but meeting love trumps every plan. I give up the flat in Berlin and move back to Norway.

I have time to give my mother a grandchild, and I record three of my first albums. By then she has had fifteen years of decline — strokes, a broken ankle, repeated falls and bad news. In the end she loses her voice. She had cancer in the speech centre of her brain. I visit her as often as I can. Even though she no longer has a physical voice, I can communicate by reading her inner world. Seven years of training and diligent practice have made me able to use my voice to convey what she wants to say. I read her as often as I can during the last four years before she dies on 4 January 2022.

Leading Voice

Leading Voice came about from a wish to offer ALL of my expertise around the voice. Beforehand I spent several years testing the method of combining the development of the inner and the outer voice with both singers and actors. I could see clearly that they became more secure in themselves — on stage, in the meeting room and at home. I also realised that my expertise could help more than singers and actors. Senior leaders, founders and course facilitators also became steadier by strengthening their inner and outer voice. Leading Voice has therefore become a place for ambitious people who want to become more resilient, creative, optimistic and courageous. It is a place where magic, possibility and freedom are allowed to lead the way.