Rashida Ashley: Blending Opera and Soul in New York
- Rashida Ashley
- 11 hours ago
- 2 min read
I did not set out to blend opera and soul. I set out to stop pretending they were two different people living in one voice.
I'm a soprano opera singer, trained through my years at NYU, where I also completed an MFA in Creative Writing. Most people meet one half of that first, the opera, the vocal technique, the stage presence, and assume the writing came later, a separate hobby tucked in around the edges. It didn't. The two grew up together. Every aria I learned to sing with technical precision, I was also learning to write with the same attention to what a single word could hold. Eventually I stopped keeping them in separate rooms.
New York City is where that fusion found its actual shape. This city doesn't ask you to pick a lane, and I stopped trying to fit into one. My original music blends opera and soul R&B, three songs so far, Tell Me a Story, Flow, and Spendin' Time, each one carrying my own story instead of interpreting someone else's. Tell Me a Story was the first attempt at that blend, a young woman searching for what life could give her, learning that when no one pulls a chair out for you, you build your own.
That same throughline runs through my live performance work. I've performed at Buffalo's Juneteenth 50th Anniversary celebration at Martin Luther King Jr. Park, and at Columbia University's Paul Robeson Conference, hosted by the Black Law Students Association, where I also joined a panel discussion. Both performances taught me something about what a room actually needs from a voice in a moment like that, not a display of technique, but presence. A pause. A place to arrive.
That belief is what became The Voice as Altar, my live performance program built around exactly that idea, a moment where performance stops and you just arrive, in your body, in the sound, in the room. Opera repertoire, my own music, spoken word, all woven into one arc rather than kept in separate categories the way I once kept opera and writing separate.
Voice. Presence. Liberation. isn't a tagline I added after the fact. It's what happens when you stop asking your gifts to compete with each other and start asking what they can build together.