LIFESTYLE
WEDNESDAY
MAY 3,2017
^1
MUSIC MISDIAGNOSED:
EVEN THOUGH SINGING
IS STILL SUCH A RELIEF,
HEARING MYSELF SING
MAKES ME SAD. BUTTHAT
FEELING-I
GOING TO GO AWAY, BUT
ITHINK IT WILL CHANGE
AND I’LL BECOME MORE
COMFORTABLE WITH IT.
A LOSS OF VOICE, DISCOVERY OF IDENTITY
Christina Elias
Assistant Design Chief
@eliaschristina4
When senior Iliana Brodsky woke
up on the day of the most important
auditions of her high school career,
her voice was gone. So she did what
most singers would: pretended noth
ing was wrong.
“I couldn’t speak,” Brodsky said. “I
couldn’t even whisper. Nothing was
happening. And I did what you were
always taught to do. I got up and got
dressed, took my music, put on my
makeup, drank about three gallons of
tea, put on the biggest scarf I could
find and I went to the audition and
just stood there.”
Rewinding
Brodsky had grown up in a mu
sically inclined household in Brook
lyn, New York. Her grandmother
and aunt went to what later became
the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High
School of Music & Art and Per
forming Arts in Manhattan.
“I loved, loved, loved to sing,”
Brodsky said. “If I could sing at
school, it made math and science
and history better, so I just started
singing at school. When it came
to applying to high school, it was
kind of a no-brainer to do what
they had done.”
She auditioned for LaGuardia
where alumni include Jennifer Anis-
ton, Liza Minnelli, Al Pacino and
Nicki Minaj — and got in.
“It was in my junior year when I
started getting sick a lot,” she said.
“All of a sudden I was tired all the
time, but I thought maybe it was just
the stress of living in South Brook
lyn and going to high school in mid
town Manhattan.”
So Brodsky continued to go about
her daily life.
“It wasn’t that my voice was
changing, it’s that I started having to
work harder to maintain the sound,
and I stopped getting better,” she ex
plained. “I was maintaining a sound,
so nobody thought anything was
wrong with me.”
Things took a turn the day of au
ditions for the highest-level chorus,
individual voice instruction and
opera workshop all in the same day
with her voice nowhere to be found.
For one audition, students learned
five arias (foreign-language piec
es) and their translations. Brodsky’s
teachers read her random lines from
the arias and let her write the trans
lations to try to accommodate her
inability to sing.
“I actually wound up getting into
the class,” she laughed. “But joke’s on
them, I came back after summer and
still didn’t have a voice back. I didn’t
get into the chorus, but I got into op
era workshop.”
A closer look
She was still sick and strug
gling with her voice August of her
senior year.
While one doctor put her on three
months of vocal rest and a special
diet, she started seeing Dr. Benjamin
Asher who practiced a more homeo
pathic approach to
medicine. She was
sitting in his office
one day, waiting to
hear test results.
“Iliana, have you
ever been bitten by
a tick?” he asked
her. When she im
mediately said no,
he continued, “Are
you sure?”
“And all of a
sudden, I recalled
this memory of
two years earlier
when I was volun
teering for a weekend in the fall at
my summer camp, and I got a tick
on my shoulder,” she said. “I just had
some guy pull it off. There wasnt any
bump, there wasn’t a circle, it didn’t
look like anything, but that was the
only time in my memory that I’d
had a tick and that was about when
I started feeling sick.”
Asher was the first doctor in New
York City to be able to diagnose
Brodsky with Lyme disease.
According to the International
Lyme and Associated Diseases So
I JUST REMEMBER
I HAD THIS SOUND
OF WHO I WAS,
AND THEN MUST
STOPPED HEARING IT
AFTER A WHILE.
ILIANA BRODSKY
ciety, Lyme presents differently in
each patient and is difficult to catch
through screening. Because under 50
percent of those afflicted remember
being bitten by a tick or show symp
toms of a rash, many cases go undi
agnosed. Those with chronic Lyme
require long-term treatment and still
experience relapses.
“So I had had this disease for two
years before it was diagnosed, and
in those two years that’s why I was
so tired, that’s why I was sick all the
time, that’s why I didn’t feel like my
self, that’s why all of this other med
ication that the doctors were giving
me weren’t helping,” she said. “I was
being misdiagnosed for about a year
and a half’
Relieved, but not reassured
Sulica told Brodsky she could still
make singing her life, but her voice
would never go back to normal.
“I was really, really determined
to do that,” she said. “To just make
it work.”
Brodsky was on
voice rest, in rehab
and on a special
diet for months.
She went every oth
er week to get an
tihistamine injec
tions at 17 and was
forced to change
her college list to
schools that didn’t
match the training
she’d dedicated her
self to for years.
“I was singing
for them, and I
was sounding not good enough for
them,” Brodsky said. “And I couldn’t
tell them, you know? I was represent
ing myself with a voice that didn’t
sound like me in my head to people
who I didn’t think I should have been
representing myself to. And it was
very damaging.”
Making it work
Brodsky lived and worked in
Israel for a year before coming to
Elon, where she finished a bach-
1
PHOTO SUBMITTED BY ILIANA BRODSKY
Senior Iliana Brodksy
poses in front of a kolam
street art contest In South
India in January.
2
PHOTO SUBMIHED BY ILIANA BROOSKY
Iliana Brodsky poses in
an opera costume for a
performance in 2011 at her
high school in New York City.
elor’s in music by her junior year.
“I was killing myself over it,”
she said. “And it was painful to
still be trying something that I
knew wasn’t representing who I
was anymore.”
Lisbeth Carter, adjunct instruc
tor in music, was Brodsky’s voice
coach. Carter has worked as a
voice coach for about 30 years.
Carter said it’s hard to undergo
that type of change and Brodsky
“worked really, really hard and
made a lot of progress, but there are
certain limits to what one can do.”
“She found a true calling and I
think that she’s going to be very,
very good at what she does,” she
said. “She will have probably
gained a great deal by her music
studies even though that’s not nec
essarily the career path she’s going
to follow.”
According to Carter, voice
abuse is common among young
musicians, even unintentionally
through illness or injury.
“[Vocal folds] are like any mus
cle, it’s like any part of the body: if
you injure it, sometimes it repairs
and sometimes it does not,” she
said. “The thing about it is if you
smash your piano, you can go and
buy another one. But if you abuse
your voice, you only get one.”
Even as Brodsky tried to recre
ate the voice she once had, she re
alized it would never be the same.
“1 just remember I had this
sound of who I was, and then I just
stopped hearing it after a while,”
Brodsky said. “I was trying to rec
reate it and I couldn’t, and it was
frustrating and it became point
less, and I started finding other
interests.”
Identity in swing
“They talk about the stages of
grief; I went through all of them,”
she said. “I think that first one
where I was told, ‘You can work
on this,’ and me falling so hard for
that idea was denial in a big way.”
She said her gap year in Israel
helped her discover other inter
ests, and she eventually declared a
second major.
“I became enamored with re
ligious studies,” she said. “I real
ized I could be successful at other
things, and it wasn’t a compromise
of who I was but it was an exten
sion of who I was.”
Despite having to move on,
music remains something Brodsky
holds close to her heart.
“I still don’t sing in front of
people, really,” she admitted. “It
was hard. I don’t tell people, I
don’t talk to people about it still.
I just still try to find the words for
it, because it’s not been a part of
my identity at Elon, but it was my
entire life before it.”
Moving forward
Now, Brodsky is looking for
ward to after graduation, when
she will go back to her old sum
mer camp as director of group
programming. After this summer,
she plans to return to the city.
“I’m giving myself two years of
leeway, but the idea is that in fall of
2019,1 think I’m going to rabbin
ic school,” she admitted. “I want
to do community work. I want to
work with people. And so this is, I
guess for me, the way to go about
it and still remain part of the reli
gious studies community.”
She credits this new facet of her
personality to the loss of her voice.
Her advice to young performers
is to trust themselves and rethink
what success looks like.
“Even though singing is still
such a relief, hearing myself sing
makes me sad,” she said. “That
feeling — I don’t think it’s going to
go away, but I think it will change
and I’ll become more comfortable
with it.”