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"If you obey all the rules,
you miss all the fun."

Katherine Hepburn

I seem to follow this advice not just in my musical career, but also when I'm writing, choosing a vacation spot, and deciding what to do with my life. Today, I sing the pieces I want to, work with the composers and organizers I feel connected to, and, perhaps most importantly, sing how I want to. But it took me a long time to get to this point - wading through years of technique advice, repertoire suggestions, and rejections to find my voice and to learn who Lisa Newill-Smith, soprano and writer, really is.

I don't remember a time in my life without music. I learned to read music at the same time I learned to read, started dance classes at age 2, and began piano lessons at age 5. Throughout my time in school, I took up violin and viola, joining the school orchestra and youth symphony orchestra, sang with school choirs, and dipped my toes into electric violin with the show choir band. However, I didn't want to be a singer back then. My big dream was to go into politics. To pursue this, I studied Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia with a double major in music, so I could get priority for the practice rooms. Then, I started singing. I joined the University Singers, the Chamber Singers, and a small, student-run opera company, Opera Viva. Opera Viva served as my entry drug into the insane world of opera and theater. After my first show (ensemble in Pirates of Penzance), I wanted more.

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I constantly break the rules. When you stand on stage, whether it's at an audition, a performance, or a rehearsal, there are a million expectations waiting for you. It's the same for writing - when I sit down to work on my sci-fi/fantasy novel, write copy for a website, or work on a blog post, I'm always fighting the expectations that readers and the industry have for me.

I write weird short stories, I love purple (and am on a mission to purple-ify my entire apartment, to my husband's great distress), I spend hours exploring Faerun in Baldur's Gate III, and I'm slowly writing an epic high-fantasy, sci-fi, queer-normative series.

At the start of my career, I let the expectations rule me. Now, I use those expectations for my advantage - whether that's by subverting them, ignoring them, or throwing them out entirely. And when I can truly use the expectations on stage or on paper - then I'm having fun.

When I studied abroad in Peru to learn about the country's political history and get to grips with Spanish, I realized I missed singing more than I thought. After spontaneously joining a choir in Lima and singing in the National Cathedral, I thought - hey, maybe if I need to sing this much, I should go for it.

So I did. After graduating, I moved to England to pursue my master's and post-graduate diplomas at the Royal Northern College of Music. While in Manchester, I performed lots of Gilbert and Sullivan, learned to like beer, and met my now-husband, pianist, composer, and conductor David Wishart, when we worked together on a Hänsel und Gretel.

Once we finished school, we had to choose a continent. Knowing Germany's reputation for being a classical music haven, we chose Berlin. In 2014, we moved, bright-eyed and ready to audition. Over the years, I learned German, got to grips with the Fach system, and performed with some incredible people. I also learned the reality of the saying, "If you can imagine yourself doing anything else with your life other than music, do that." The audition circuit is BRUTAL. Of course, I got some yesses, but the rejections wear you down. I found myself questioning everything after each audition and each contradictory feedback, and occasionally thinking:

But I kept asking myself if I could see myself doing anything else. And the answer was always no - I need to make music and be creative.

In 2020, my husband got the call every musician longs for after an audition: a full-time job offer at an opera theater. We moved up north to Stralsund. And 3 weeks later, we went into the first COVID lockdown. Of course, like many musicians, at first I thought it would be over soon, and we kept up our spirits with livestream concerts featured on my new blog, Women Who Composed. I dove headfirst into researching historical female composers and did several online concerts.

As the pandemic dragged on, I turned to writing. After completing the NaNoWriMo challenge (writing 50,000 words in a month), I realized I really liked writing - and seemed to be pretty good at it. So I started working as a content writer, beginning with blogs for PrecisionContent, moving to script writing for Gaiali, and eventually working consistently in the travel industry as a content editor with GetYourGuide. I continued my work on my blog, and as I researched more female composers, I also started learning some pieces from living composers and discovered that I really like making strange noises with my mouth. And feet. And occasionally an ocean drum, ukulele, or triangle.

From there, my descent into contemporary music accelerated. I participated in the John Cage Vocal Workshop with Sarah Maria Sun, performed with PHØNIX16 at the Louvre in Paris, ATONAL Festival Berlin, and MärzMusik, and jumped into a staged experimental liederabend at Theater Vorpommern. I've sung multiple world premieres, including Nacht by Nik Bohnenberger at Staatstheater Kassel, Capriccio by Rylan Gleave, Raidne by Vanessa Chartrand (libretto by Lisa Newill-Smith), and Books 1, 3, 4, 5, voice, books and FIRE (Ullmann, 2023).

Recently, I've formed a new contemporary vocal duo - SAGA Duo - with soprano Olga Siemieńczuk to explore the many colors of the voice. I also perform regularly with my husband as a piano-voice duo, focusing on works by women and non-gender-conforming composers. And I have a full solo voice program, which I am always adding to and developing as I meet new composers.