2023 Classical Crossover Star competition winner Stephanie Horowitz-Mulry almost did not apply. Experience had left her a bit jaded, “I don’t like to do competitions a lot… I don’t like competing. I also don’t think I’m the best, you know.” Stephanie grew up a musical and popular music fan, supported by her family but her voice seemed to lend itself well to opera. “People were just telling me your voice is going this way. You should go that way.”
Stephanie found herself studying in a classical program for her undergrad and graduate programs. While Stephanie loved discovering that part of her voice, she felt herself lost in a quest for perfectionism. She found herself finding some work but not making quite the impact a new artist hopes for. “I think part of the reason is because I’m such a people pleaser,” Stephanie corrects herself mid-thought. “I’ve been such.. I’m a recovering people pleaser and I wanted to just do it right. I wanted to do it Mozart’s way, Puccini’s way, and I stopped… or maybe I didn’t know that, we’re supposed to be artists. We’re supposed to have points of view and things to say, and to bring joy to it. It was just really obvious that I was just trying to get hired and just trying to get, like the acceptance and the recognition.” Stephanie kept trying but one especially hard audition season put things into perspective. “I didn’t book anything, nothing and I was like, ‘Okay, this is about me’…I had to really regroup and find joy.” One of Stephanie’s mentor’s put it to her plainly, “She was like, ‘You don’t love it enough. You don’t love opera enough to do it at the expense of everything else.’ And I was like, it’s not that I don’t love it, I love it, but I just I have room in my heart for all of these other things.”
Stephanie began to realize that her eclectic love for music was where she was finding joy. “When I was like, close to turning 30 I was like, ‘What am I doing, pushing this other stuff away in favor of this thing that is not working for me right now, you know?” she began singing in restaurants, trying pop, cabaret, theater, jazz. “It just all opened up for me and it was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. Because I was always singing karaoke, on the slide, you know? The secret, you know?” she laughs. “And I was like, why am I keeping this a secret? Why don’t I just do it. And once I did, that, a lot opened up for me, and I was able to still sing classically, I felt more balanced. I felt like I didn’t like need it to validate me and then I could bring more joy and a little bit more perspective into it. I found that I really like exploring music that isn’t one thing or another, it really just kind of uses different styles and different performance practices from different styles. I really like that.”
Another missing piece for Stephanie was songwriting. Although she had begun writing songs at an early age, her enthusiasm was quelled in university. “I got really disheartened, because everything I would submit, he would just be so knowledgeable and say,’ Well, this is derivative of this…’” Although Stephanie did end up submitting a composition that her professor like and graded well she realized the process had been exhausting. “I was like, that took everything I had and I don’t think I have that in me. So I literally stopped writing music for like 10 years. I was like, ‘Fine, that’s not my gift, it’s fine.’”
However, in 2017 Stephanie’s voice went through a difficult period thanks to a bout with bronchitis combined with autoimmune issues. “I had to cancel all my gigs and shut up for a while and be quiet. That was, in a way devastating, in a way completely lifesaving because I was able to bounce back, I had voice therapy, and I basically just got on a new autoimmune medicine, and it kind of helped me. But during that quiet time, I started hearing the music again.”
There on her own Stephanie, was able to write just for the pleasure of it without worrying about pleasing anyone else. “I was like, I don’t care if this is good, I don’t need it to be good, because no one else is gonna hear it. I’m gonna do it for myself, because I still have music inside. It was kind of my way of being like, I’m not done yet. You know, I’m going to find a way to still have a life of music. I don’t know what that looks like yet.”
She kept writing using the varied influences she had been exposed too. “I ended up taking a songwriting mentorship with Kathy Heller, who’s now like a kind of a guru of wisdom, I don’t know, for everybody, and she basically said, ‘We want familiar things in pop music, we want that it’s comforting. You can’t just give us everything completely new, then there’s nothing for us to hold on to nothing for us to relate to’. At this moment, I was like, I am not a composer, I am a songwriter.”
Stephanie chose to focus on recording music as she could start on her own time and not push the voice. “I figured since my voice was a little janky that I could just pivot and become a recording artist and write songs that I could handle. Saying things I want to say about things I care about and messages that I really want to share but put it in a way that I can handle it, and then I can record it.”
She kept moving slowly but steadily forward and then things began to turn around. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Oh, things are coming back’. And then I had these new coping skills to help with certain areas where I didn’t feel comfortable. So in some ways, like I’m back, some ways I’m not quite back and in some ways, I’m better than I was before.”
Stephanie is keen to highlight the importance of experimentation for artists – whether it’s good or bad, or if it’s something you end up pursuing or not. “Now I allow myself to hear whatever comes through and if it’s crap, fine, no one has to hear that! I think that’s something that classical music does not cover is that we need crap… you need to go in the studio and make crap and sound like crap and just embrace it. That’s your personal time, right? And then if you keep working at it, eventually something good is gonna come out and that’s what you show people. I think that this art of crap is lost on everyone. That was a really big thing to give permission to myself to just play because we have this idea of perfection and the striving for this ideal. And this ideal is something that was given to us by somebody else, so I feel like if we play we can find the new ideal of what is our inner wisdom ideal.”
When it came time for the Classical Crossover Star competition, Stephanie almost did not submit because her original song composed with Mathew Stegner, (a vulnerable and beautiful offering to the world entitled, “Broken and Blessed”) was not finished. However, she decided to keep going. “We decided to do the audition cut of the song that we finished that morning. And I recorded the piano and made a recording of it, put it in the kitchen, sang it live, the whole thing happened in one day.”
Stephanie shared the song with her friends and family asking for votes. “I luckily got enough comments so I got to the next round. And I was like if I get past this round that I’m proud of myself, that’s all I really need. And then I got the email that I was like you’re in the finals. And I was like, ‘Wow!’”
The semi-finalists were invited to perform in our A Crossover Christmas concert. Stephanie used the deadline to create a brand new piece which she premiered entitled, “Under the Same Sky.” When the news of the October 7th attack by Hamas at a musical festival in Israel hit Stephanie was left reeling. “I was really just so distraught from that and I said I’m going to dedicate this concert to a song about this for my holiday just processing everything that’s happening from a perspective of a different kind of Hanukkah song.” The emotional performance calling for both sides to rise above and care for those still alive resonated with the online audience. At the end of the concert, Stephanie was announced as the winner.
Stephanie later shared her moment of joy on social media, “I’m so overwhelmed, overcome, and so grateful to be in that company of people and just be able to hang; that is the dream, just to hang, just to be in the company of these people… I am so grateful for everyone that voted for me and kept up with this and listened to me talk about it. I think the thing that touches me the most is that I won for a song that I wrote, and that is the biggest honor to me.” (Read full article here)
So what’s next for Stephanie? “I feel like this brought me back to life in some ways. So I really appreciate that from you.” As part of her final prize, Stephanie met with Gillian Riesen founder of Emitha for a discussion on branding which will lead to an updated online presence for Stephanie. “She really encouraged me to just embrace all the sides and really, like crossover. When I say crossover to people, like people ask what does crossover mean? And I say, ‘Okay, this is what people think it means and this is what I do with it.’ I cross all the way over and then back, and she’s like, put that all in the website. And it was like ‘Really, because that’s really confusing for people?’ And she’s like, ‘But that’s what it is, you’re one person. So don’t fragment yourself.’”
Stephanie also hopes to continue with writing and creating new music covers. Bridgerton being one big source of inspiration. “Definitely more writing and whatever else pops up.”
At Classical Crossover Magazine, we are delighted to have Stephanie as our first ever winner and thank her for sharing her journey to truly embracing who she is in the crossover world. We wish her continued success and will continue to be here to support her.
Watch our full interview with Stephanie on our YouTube channel (premiering March 3rd, 2023)
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