During a rare Santa Barbara downpour, Agatha Carubia and I sipped fancy teas at Alchemy Café. “I was always a voice teacher,” she said when I asked her about her performing career. “My mother’s goal was for me to be a singer. We had singers in the family — my great-grandfather, my grandmother. There was always pressure to sing at the Met.” She found a different life that made her happy. “Performing wasn’t my thing. I had stage fright. I never felt 100 percent in front of people. Recognizing this healed that last bit of ‘I coulda been a contender!’ When you’re a teacher, you’re a teacher, and you have to understand your nature.” Her son, Evan Hughes, is carrying the family’s performing torch. He is a celebrated bass baritone who sings all over the world.
Carubia is a Juilliard-trained voice teacher, author, mentor to teachers, devotional singer, and yoga teacher and practitioner. Through study of classical voice technique and performance and Kundalini yoga, she conceived Heart-Based Singing, a method for helping singers find their truest, most resonant voices and wrote a book about it.
Carubia’s book, Heart-Based Singing: Vocal Technique, and method are for singers and voice teachers, but they are also valuable offerings for any person interested in freeing and enjoying his or her voice: serious singers, amateurs, or those who are terrified of singing anywhere but in front of their children or in the car but recognize that singing is just plain good medicine (that's me). She hopes her new book reaches “everyone who has lack of clarity about how to find freedom in their singing and keep it … opera singers, pop singers, yogis who sing, speakers who use their voices.”