Westminster voice professor motivates former Marine to pursue opera career

When Laura Brooks Rice, a renowned voice professor at Westminster Choir College, met aspiring opera singer Jeffrey Braaten, he was wearing a cowboy hat, boots, jeans and a leather vest. He had on no shirt and was covered in tattoos.

“I thought, ‘OK, let’s work,’” Rice recalls. “Then he opened his mouth and this most phenomenal voice came out.”

The pair came together for the first time last summer at the San Miguel Institute of Bel Canto, an opera training program in Mexico. They have been working together ever since.

“He has got this extraordinary raw talent that would be comparable to someone discovering an athlete who could throw the football harder and farther than anybody else,” Rice says of her student, a 35-year-old former Marine, who now works in construction and has never been to music school.

Over the past year, Braaten, who served two tours in Iraq, has been traveling from his North Carolina home to spend several long weekends in Princeton to take lessons from Rice.

And in July, Braaten spent three weeks at the intensive CoOPERAtive Program at Westminster, where he and other aspiring opera singers gathered with professionals from the field. The students received private coaching, focusing on things like operatic style, performance techniques, dramatic presentation, language, and diction and body awareness.

The program, directed by Rice and fellow Westminster professor Eric Rieger, “was an amazing experience,” Braaten says. He walked away knowing what he needs to work on to become a professional — skills like languages and how to project a character and make changes under pressure.

Braaten has toyed with singing for a while. He was in a hard rock metal band at 14, and has done about 10 roles in community theatre, he said. But seeing other people — like Rice — believe in him made him realize he needs to start working harder, he says.

“I met Laura and she has been behind me from the beginning. Even though it has only been a year, she truly motivated me to take it seriously and try to make it happen,” Braaten says.

Now back home in North Carolina, Braaten has set a goal to strike a balance between making his living as a contractor and pursuing his dream of becoming a professional opera singer. He is trying to work less and sing more, he says.

He is continuing to take lessons from Rice, and hopes she can set him up to sing in front of professionals in the field.

“I am always amazed at the way life works,” Braaten says. “Especially now, in the situation I am in. I never thought I would actually be doing anything with singing. And the opportunities, they look like they are coming on the horizon.”

“I am trying to grab everything. I really want this,” he says.