Letting It Crack

A piece I wrote for my Narrative Journalism class at Columbia.

“How’s your voice?” 

Kristofer Eckelhoff likes to begin his vocal lessons with a check-in-- with how-are-you-feeling’s and admonitions for being too self-critical. “You’re not allowed to judge yourself,” he tells today’s pupil, a tall and timid woman with red-framed glasses, bubblegum pink pants tucked into brown buckled boots and bright pink nail polish to match. Wisps of bleached blond hair poke out of her black knit cap. 

Now, in a gray, fluorescently-lit music room in CUNY’s Graduate Student Center, the student stands before a rickety black music stand, one hand placed lightly on her stomach as Eckelhoff guides her through scales, through the entirety of her range, from tenor to a high falsetto. Eckelhoff’s hands roll over the piano keys. His brown-loafered foot bounces on the pedals as he leans in and out with the motion of the scale, rising in his seat and lifting his dark eyebrows with each high note and relaxing with each low. He’s a small, stout man with a shaved-bald head, a pale face framed by a thick black beard, silver-blue eyes, and metal rings looped through his right earlobe. He tosses out goods and nice’s and how-does-that-feel’s intermittently as his pupil sings. 

At the end of a set of scales, he stops her. He’s grinning.  “We don’t usually go that high,” he says. 

“We don’t?” she says. Her excitement is tangible. Months earlier, she didn’t think it was even possible to sing in an upper range. 

Eckelhoff shares her excitement. He’s been there. He himself is a transgender opera singer. For Eckelhoff, transitioning meant undergoing a vocal transition that would shape not only his identity, but his career. Now, he runs the Trans Voice Studio— a one-man vocal instruction service— to help singers across the transgender spectrum through their own vocal transitions, to sing in their own voices. 

Eckelhoff began his singing career as a soprano, back when he was living in rural Arkansas as a lesbian woman named Kristina. Music had always been a part of his life, but singing, especially, felt right to him. He loved being his own instrument, loved using his voice to tell a narrative. 

“It was a way for me to express things when I didn't have a means to do that otherwise,” he says. 

He moved to New York to pursue a Ph.D. in musicology at CUNY and to further pursue his singing career. But New York also gave him the tools to recognize who he was. It gave him the vocabulary. He saw himself in the transgender people he met at church and knew he couldn’t hide anymore. He left school one spring break as Kristina, and came back as Kristofer. 

He said that for a whole year, he lived as a man but sang soprano. He thought about taking testosterone but was terrified of what it might do to his voice. His voice was his livelihood. His whole career was pinned to it. Eventually, desperation overcame fear, and he began hormone treatment. 

It was a painful process. 

“I had no control over what was coming out of my face,” he says. He lost stamina-- he could now only perform for 15 minutes at a time. He lost his range. His voice cracked. He jokes that he sounded like Peter Brady from The Brady Bunch. “I just felt like I was going through a testosterone puberty, but as an adult.” He was depressed. He wondered if it had all been a mistake, because his soprano voice and everything that came with it-- his career as it had been, his vocal identity-- were certainly gone. 

“I cried a lot in that first year,” he says. “Well, as much as testosterone would let me cry.”

Through it all, he took meticulous notes. He recorded every one of his lessons, tracking his progress in hopes of ultimately putting together a method to help other transgender singers through their own vocal transitions.

About six months into testosterone, Eckelhoff was scheduled to perform at the Metropolitan Community Church for the Transgender Day of Remembrance. It had been just a couple of weeks since his top surgery, an important day for Eckelhoff. He’d had a large chest. Now, he felt as if a weight had been both literally and spiritually lifted from it. He no longer had to wear chest binders, which had restricted his breathing and made it difficult to sing. He no longer had to hide who he was. Instead, he stood alone in front of a church congregation, wearing a shirt that said “Transgender and proud” across his newly freed chest as he sang “The Last Goodbye” by Billy Boyd, sang with a confidence he’d never had before in a voice that felt like his own. 

It was the first time since starting testosterone that he’d sung an entire song without his voice cracking. 

That was more than three years ago. He’s transitioned from soprano to baritone, and is now shifting back up to more of a tenor range. As his vocal identity continues to shift, it’s difficult to do the same caliber of work he did as a soprano, to find roles suited for his voice. Still, singing feels better than it ever has. 

“I feel more comfortable now because this is my voice,” he says. “It just feels right… And a lot of that probably has to do with, like, I feel right now.”

And the lull in his singing career gave him time to discover a new passion: teaching. Now, through the Trans Voice Studio, Eckelhoff is bringing everything he’s learned to people who might not otherwise have an instructor who understands the complex challenges of singing as a trans person, like singing with the added complications of chest binders or hormones. He’s also aware of the ways in which outside stress can affect the voice through tension in the body.  “Sometimes when trans students aren't singing super well, it's not because of hormones,” he says. “It's because of living in this society.”

Eckelhoff loves seeing students discover what’s possible with their voices. Like when one transfemme student hit a high C. Or when his students decide to step outside of the comfort of a practice room and actually perform in public. “Finding spaces to use your voice is super important,” he says. It’s a means of expression. It’s a way to put your practice to use, to show off what you’ve been working on, to share it with the world. 

He says it also shows other people what’s possible. 

Now back in the music room, Eckelhoff’s student is singing “Where Is Love,” a particularly high-pitched song from the musical Oliver! 

“I hope you can see the progress we’ve made,” he tells her. Even now, she’s hard on herself, stopping every time her voice cracks on a higher note. 

“Let it crack,” he tells her. “When it cracks, it just cracks. It’s just a part of the process.”