Reclaiming Calliope

Freeing the Female Voice Through Undomesticated Singing

By: Fides Krucker

Narrated by: Fides Krucker

The practice and politics of the unfettered female voice—reclaiming your power through voice, song, and opera-inspired exercises.

For centuries, opera has used women’s voices to convey male stories. Within an art form dominated by men, the female voice is a means to an end: controlled, denatured, and crafted to carry words and intentions that belie the true depth and complexity of the female experience.

Here, author and opera singer Fides Krucker shows listeners what it means to find—and use—our authentic voice, to sing wildly and uninhibited from the depths of our bodies and spirits. Part memoir, part radical vocal guide, and part feminist call to action, Reclaiming Calliope offers an intriguing look at the rarified world of opera, with fascinating behind-the-scenes details to which outsiders don’t typically have access. Through incisive critique, personal stories, and intriguing exposé, Krucker razes the male gaze that packaged characters like Carmen, Tosca, and La Traviota’s Violetta for viewer consumption—and radically envisions an empowered, new way of finding and fueling the authentic female voice.

Through a series of breathing and vocal prompts that anyone—not just singers—can do, Krucker helps listeners reconnect to their authentic primal voices: she takes the listener inside her vocal studio to learn new methods of breath, voicework, and embodiment to uncover and access personal and social truths. Each chapter includes a theme-related exercise—an act of expression, release, self-discovery, or resistance—that guides listeners to develop voices unbound from anyone else’s storytelling, boldly and without apology.

©2022 Fides Krucker (P)2022 North Atlantic Books

Critic reviews

"Reclaiming Calliope is both a finely wrought, intimate artistic memoir and a triumphant journal of a lifelong quest for the authentic, liberated female voice in face of historical and present-day patriarchal disdain.”
—Gabor Maté, MD, author of When the Body Says No

“Reclaiming Calliope is many things at once. It is a memoir of such honesty and insight that it illuminates all our individual lives. It is an unflinching assessment of how the authentic female voice is systematically deprecated and silenced in our culture, exiled from the body’s deep wisdom. It is a keening, outraged lament for that violence—and at the same time a patient, nurturing methodology to help women, especially, reconnect. It is a fresh, story-filled, life-affirming, beautifully calibrated message of hope.” —Philip Shepherd, author of Radical Wholeness coauthor of Deep Fitness

“Fides Krucker’s personal and prismatic reflection on womanhood, art, the voice, patriarchy, the body, and history offers various brilliant methods of unshackling our most primal and most free selves....It is a revelation, a freewheeling compendium of insight and great depth.” —Patricia Rozema, filmmaker, Into the Forest, Mansfield Park, Mouthpiece, and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing