When we were planning our patreon and our next steps for this fall season of our podcast / our lives, we realized that we want Thrilled to Announce to grow into a collective of radical operatic voices. We want this podcast to be a movement, a dreamspace, a home for creation, brainstorming, and the rebirth of the classical music world. With that in mind, we wanted our next steps to involve more than just our sweet little voices. So we decided to start an interview series, interspersed among our chit chat episodes & essay-style episodes, where we talk to a bunch of our cool opera friends - either people we’ve known for a long time, people who have reached out to us over the course of the past year, or people we’ve reached out to ourselves. We want to have cool conversations, hear about the awesome shit you’re all doing, and open a dialogue about what it looks like to bring your dreams and your politics into an operatic space.

Our first guest is the lovely Gwendolyn Kuhlmann. Gwendolyn is an activist, an artist, a mother, and a mezzo soprano. She lived in Berlin for 10 years, studying art song and performing in various opera houses. In 2018, she moved to Oakland, California where she worked as a utility advocate. She worked as a liaison between utility consumers and utility companies, advocating for consumer’s rights to fair and affordable utilities. She worked on preventing shutoffs for low income people. This advocacy inspired her art making in some powerful ways you’ll hear about on this teaser version of the episode. We dig into the wandering in the internal wilderness one experiences while trying to find their artistic voice and purpose that comes from within, not from external validation. We talk about the ‘winter’s journey’/ hero’s journey of being a mother in postpartum, the wilderness of being surrounded by precarious labor as a freelance singer who wants to make meaningful music, and how we use that time in our own ‘Winterreise’ to transmute these experiences and come out the other side of the woods more whole and artistically confident. It was such a powerful and invigorating convo.