We recently connected with Alexandra Gilliam and have shared our conversation below.

Alexandra, appreciate you joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me! I’m very fortunate in that I have been able to make a full-time living from my creative pursuits, but this has not been without a tremendous amount of work, a wonderfully supportive group of people pushing me forward, and the need to consistently revisit what, exactly, constitutes a “full-time living” from my musical and musical-adjacent career path. As we all know, being a professional performer in our modern world bears no resemblance to the glamorous and oft-touted lives that our predecessors during the Golden Age of opera led; no impresarios are going to rise from the ether to catapult you to stardom.
Out of this realization, I’ve developed as both a business model and passionate pursuit the concept of being an “operapreneur.”
In the fast-paced, ever-evolving realm of 21st century operatic performance, a successful singer is much like Figaro in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia: She is a jack of all trades, with a toolbox of skills gained only through diligent practice and dedicated research. She is a lean (or, well… in my case, maybe not quite so lean), mean, singin’ machine, and she must hone her skills to the point of razor-sharpness, much like our clever fictional barber, so as to constantly be on the cutting edge. In order to achieve success as a performer, modern singers must be familiar with social media, recording techniques both audio and visual, web design, and must be competent in numerous other areas that are not taught in a traditional conservatory environment. Essentially, if we don’t promote ourselves, put ourselves out there, build a brand, and run our own businesses, no one else will.
Once I started to develop these skills for my own promotional and artistic purposes, I realized that there were a lot of other folks out there who could benefit from these services and that I could lend a hand to support my fellow artists. In my mind, a rising tide lifts all boats, and I’m determined to be a force of positivity and support for my colleagues. Although my skills as a web developer, social media manager, graphic designer, and video editor are largely self-taught and accrued through a significant amount of trial and error, I feel that I have something unique to offer to all of my clients – whether they’re a motorcycle club, acupuncture practice, Pilates studio, or a fellow singer – because of my dogged determination to see the good (and, by extension, marketable) in everyone I meet.
In short, with technology, if you can dream it, you can do it. Although I am primarily an opera singer, all of my endeavors return to that central part of my identity, and the “-preneur” aspect of my moniker has enriched my understanding of the art form and my appreciation for its ever-relevant position in modern society. In our fractured world, we need music now more so than ever before, and by becoming an all-around “professional tech geek,” among a continuously growing list of other things, my ability to support this magnificent medium and ensure its ongoing viability in an evolving world is now just as important a part of my identity as it ever was. My mission as a performer is to understand, interpret, and dissect the human element so that it can be shared with the world – and so, too, is my mission as an operapreneur as I collaborate with my clients and support them in telling their stories, both musical and otherwise.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Certainly! I have been performing in some capacity since I was a toddler in various extracurricular ensembles and private voice lessons, though I did not start to consider performing arts to be a viable career path until my sophomore year of high school, when I was afforded the opportunity to perform the role of Mabel in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.” Through the experience of working with my voice teacher to learn and sing high-octane classical music, I realized just how passionate I was about the art form, and I started to think of ways that I could share it with others in an upbeat, relevant way.
Ultimately, through my education at the New England Conservatory (BM 2015) and San Francisco Conservatory (MM 2017), I continued to connect with classical vocal music and began to perform with small, local troupes. When I returned to the Philadelphia area in 2019, I began to work with the local chapter of Opera On Tap, a nonprofit who seeks to share opera with the masses by singing in bars, restaurants, and other nontraditional venues in an effort to take classical music off the pedestal and deliver it approachably to an audience that otherwise might not be aware of its beauty. In 2020, I was invited to join the leadership team, at which point I became one of the official “co-managing divas” of the chapter. Under my leadership, I’ve been proud to expand our partnerships beyond purely bars, restaurants, and breweries, toward historical preservation nonprofits, educational institutions, and other vibrant, culturally significant organizations. We continue to grow, and we are very grateful to our dedicated audience for supporting us as we reemerge from the pandemic.
Through my work as a musician and nonprofit leader, I began to offer a host of technological and marketing services, including but not limited to web development, social media management and content creation, graphic design, film editing, hybrid concert production, and branding consultation. By connecting my non-musical work to my performance pursuits, I am able to uniquely tailor my services to support my clients in highly personalized ways that otherwise would not be afforded to them by those outside off the artistic community. My range of offerings continues to grow, and my willingness to learn and expand is limited only by the number of hours in a day.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

In every aspect of my life, I look for real, authentic human connections, and these connections in turn inform the way I interact with the world. Particularly in a genre wherein the emotions that the characters experience are so heightened that they’re unable to talk about them and are driven to sing, you’re not always going to get to perform the part of the “good guy” – the characters in opera are all flawed in some way and have their own internal motivations, as reflects our own nature. Additionally, the music adds yet another layer of nuance to their personalities, for while the character may be saying one thing, the musical composition implies a deeper, perhaps slightly hidden agenda that the audience alone is able to perceive, even if it’s not readily apparent to the other characters in the scene.
To that end, I strive to look at every single person I work with as a multifaceted prism, complete with their own strengths and weaknesses; we all try our best to show up positively in our own realms, to varying degrees of success. With that in mind, when I’m developing a website or helping someone to build out their brand identity, I always try to “read between the lines” of the information that they share with me in an effort to highlight traits about themselves that, while they might not personally view them as strengths or even really see them at all, make them stand out among their peers and state their value proposition in whatever field they’re working. I love being able to make people feel good about themselves.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

As a musician, I am so blessed to have the opportunity to support people in all facets of their lives: weddings, funerals, major life transitions, nights out on the town, religious ceremonies. Every single time I step into the spotlight, regardless of the venue or context, my goal is to be the conduit for people to feel a connection to something higher than themselves, be it God, humanity on the whole, nature, or whatever transcends each audience member’s personhood and uplifts them. The goal is to turn myself over completely – body, mind, and soul – to the music, forgetting myself completely, so that I can be a servant to the character, the composer, and to the audience themselves to facilitate this higher connection. In so doing, the marker for what constitutes a “good” performance is no longer a question of whether or not I sang all the right notes and hit all of my marks, but whether or not the audience was able to fully inhabit the musical realm that my colleagues and I painted for them. If I was able to put Alex Gilliam on a shelf for the duration of a performance and not take her back down until afterward, then I’ve succeeded.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.alexandragilliam.com
• Instagram: wildgillyflower
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexandragilliamsoprano
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-gilliam-408678112/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpzUYtVbpN1ZRScRO0Dw0g
• Other: https://linktr.ee/trebleshooting Opera On Tap Philadelphia: https://linktr.ee/ootphl

Image Credits
Rachel Morgan-Wall Butler, Veronique Kherian, Micah Gleason