By Sandor Slomovits • Photos by Kate Jackman

Jessica Ryder’s business card lists her credentials (MS, LLPC, NCC) as a professional mental health counselor, yet, she also has printed on them “MM” or Master of Music. Ryder’s academic training for her work as a therapist has been typical, though her life experience prior to was anything but. For twenty years she was a full-time professional musician working in some of the highest tiers of classical music. As Beverly Morgan, her birth name, we’ll get back to that, she sang leading soprano roles at Lincoln Center, La Scala, the Berlin State Opera, and the Vienna State Opera, among others; she sang solo recitals at Boston Symphony Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall, at the 92nd St Y, and recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and Columbia Records. She performed and recorded the role of Dede in Leonard Bernstein’s opera, A Quiet Place, with Bernstein conducting, and sang the role of Micaela on Broadway in the adaptation of Carmen conceived and directed by the legendary English director Peter Brook.

Sandor Slomovits: Was there music in your family?

Jessica Ryder: Both of my parents were great music lovers. My mother had a fine singing voice. I asked her, very late in her life, “Would you like to have done what I did?” And she said, “Oh, yes.” I was so touched by that. There was always a piano in the house. I have three older siblings and we all had music lessons. I remember one of my father’s birthdays and him opening an LP of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. I said, “Ooh, what’s that?” I spent hours and hours just soaking in all the recordings that came through the house from then on.

Sandor Slomovits: When did you know you wanted to make a life in music?

Jessica Ryder: College was presumed in my family. My dad was a scientist and a professor at Dartmouth. So, I started out at a liberal arts school, Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. That was where I met my first true mentor, a conductor named Tamara Brooks. She went on to have quite a significant career as a choral conductor. It was she who recognized me. I remember her taking me aside after one concert when I had been given a little solo, and she said, “You know, you could do this professionally if you want.” It was like a universe opening up. I had intended to stay at Mount Holyoke because I was taking music theory classes and I played French horn, my primary instrument. I had my heart set on continuing to work with Tamara, but at the end of my sophomore year, she announced that she’d taken a job at SUNY Albany. So, in a sort of very quick response to that, I decided to apply to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. All their audition deadlines were way past, but I put together a recording, and on one side I played the first movement of the Beethoven Horn Sonata, and on the other side, almost as an afterthought, I put a couple of songs, a Schubert and maybe a Mahler. And they sent back a response: it was one of the most exciting moments in my memory, taking that letter out of the mailbox. They accepted me with junior status as a voice major. Now, mind you, I’d never had a voice lesson in my life, but I’d sung a lot. I’ve never been really all that certain whether it was a statement on my singing or a statement on my French horn playing.

I liken that moment in my life to the moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything goes technicolor…. Not that my life had been black and white, but I found everything there. I felt socially more competent and engaged. I had a home, a circle of friends; I found my wavelength.

Sandor Slomovits: You sang very successfully for a long time.

Jessica Ryder: It was such a powerful means of not only creative expression, but personal growth, personal development. I’d had a lot of issues as a young person. I didn’t have the strongest sense of who I really was, and singing different operatic roles, stepping into different characters, allowed me to slip out of my skin and become somebody else. That was incredibly liberating. But the other thing was the incredible gift, the incredible opportunity I had of being able to work with great musicians, great artists. You know the rule of thumb, if you want to be a good tennis player, you play with somebody who’s better than you.

Sandor Slomovits: Why did you stop?

Jessica Ryder: First of all, it was a wonderful, wonderful time. I loved it. It was also very demanding, and I reached a point where I kind of wasn’t finding what was next. My voice, once I transitioned from mezzo soprano to soprano, never fit neatly into what they call in Germany the Fach system. You know, if you’re a lyric soprano, you sing these roles; if you’re a dramatic soprano, you sing these roles; if you’re a coloratura, you sing these. I never fit neatly into any of those boxes and there weren’t a lot of roles that really fit. I was getting kind of frustrated. I remember doing one audition for the Komische Oper Berlin. After that audition, there was kind of a click, like an aha. “I don’t have to do this anymore.” I felt like something just let go. So, I finished out the contracts I had and then made a radical left turn. I sold my apartment in New York City, where I was based for all of my professional career, gradually gave away or sold most of my belongings, and set out to explore.

I’m not sure I could have expressed this at the time, but I would say that I had found something as a performer, you could call it a presence, that sense of kind of forgetting your self—with a small “s”—and something else moves you or moves through you. I had really found that on stage and not in the rest of my life. Once you’ve tasted that, you know what that is—and that it’s possible to experience that—you just want to live there all the time. In retrospect, I can say now that I set out to find that--to really live that.

Of course, all the spiritual teachers tell you it’s not out there, it’s in here. At the same time, there is a reason that we travel geographically, which I did, and there is a reason that you work with different teachers, which I also did, because it helps you to contact or activate or bring to life what’s in you. So, I traveled, and I worked some with Emily Conrad whose medium was movement; she was absolutely brilliant, and a great deal with Paul Lowe, hundreds of hours of listening to him. Paul was always empowering; he would have none of the guru nonsense, but he was also kickass. And there were some areas in which my ass needed kicking to wake me up.

In a way, I kind of stepped away from ordinary life. It was an amazing journey. It was also profoundly challenging. Eventually it was time to come back to, let’s say ordinary life. And I gradually found my way back in through performing—at that point my own music—and teaching, and that gradually led to the counseling.

Sandor Slomovits: We’ll get back to the counseling, but would you talk a little about your own music?

Jessica Ryder: People have asked me, what kind of songs do you write? I never really know how to answer because, again, it doesn’t exactly fit in any boxes. Part of those years of exploration was exploring different styles of music and singing in different styles. The classical training is very specific to that style. [I was] seeing if I could get back to the pre-trained voice and evoke that in a more direct way. Kind of asking, what does the voice want to do? Not what I want it to do, but what does it want to do? That took me into the shallow end of the jazz pool. I don’t compare myself in any way to serious jazz artists, but eventually that led to writing my own songs.

Sandor Slomovits: Do you still sing?

Jessica Ryder: Not currently, but I don’t think it’s gone. In 2016 I decided that I really should do formal training as a counselor. In order to work professionally, I started a master’s in clinical mental health counseling and that was really pretty all-consuming. So, since then, the creative work has been set to the side, but it doesn’t feel like it’s over.

Sandor Slomovits: Your name as a singer was Beverly Morgan, your birth name. Why did you change your name to Jessica?

Jessica Ryder: I started hanging out with a friend who ultimately became my husband, now deceased. As we got to know each other it came out that the name I knew him by was not the name that his parents had named him. And it was like, “You can do that?” So, as that gradually sank in, in the years after I left New York, I started experimenting with different names. I had never really loved being called Beverly, it never quite felt like a fit. After several years of experimenting with different names, when I hit Jessica, it felt like what I imagine a bell feels when the clapper strikes. Yes! That resonates.

Sandor Slomovits: What brought you to Ann Arbor?

Jessica Ryder: After I left New York, I lived in a number of different places: in Boulder, in northern California, briefly on Maui, in Berlin for several years. When I finally landed back in the US in 2001, I was trying to develop an independent teaching practice and finding that difficult because I’d lost a lot of the continuity of what I’d been doing before. So, I took a position at a community college in New Jersey and taught music history and music theory there.

In 2008 I experienced a great personal loss—my husband. I had friends who owned a house in Ann Arbor but were no longer living in it and weren’t ready to sell it. They invited me to live there, and I knew I needed a change, so I said yes. Then, kind of as an afterthought, I thought, “Well, I probably should have a job,” and was able in the nick of time to find a lectureship at the University of Michigan Dearborn and taught music history there.

Sandor Slomovits: Did you study psychology at U of M?

Jessica Ryder: No, I explored a lot of options and finally decided to go with Walden University, which is one of the oldest online schools. I have nothing but good things to say about them, aside from the fact that it’s expensive, but a really excellent faculty.

Sandor Slomovits: So, when the pandemic hit you were perhaps more comfortable than many people with working online.

Jessica Ryder: Yes, surprisingly so. I was no more thrilled than anybody else about “Okay, now we can’t meet in person.” But I’ve been pleasantly surprised with just how well it works. It is a tradeoff. There are advantages and disadvantages, but it also makes it possible for a lot of people who couldn’t do it otherwise.

Sandor Slomovits: I’m a musician, a performer, and in my own experiences with therapy, I’ve long felt that there is a resemblance between playing shows and therapy. Obviously, therapy is not an audience-performer relationship but, as in playing music before an audience, there’s listening—both ways—and more significantly, in both situations you’re creating something together. It’s not one person doing something to or for another person. Yes?

Jessica Ryder: Absolutely. You got it. Thank you. Could you write that up? I’ll put it on my website.

Sandor Slomovits: Can you talk about how your counseling work now is informed by your experiences as a musician as well as all the other studying and work you’ve done?

Jessica Ryder: It is literally true that my work as a therapist is informed by the totality of everything that I’ve done. While times I may have felt that I was on some sort of spur, or gotten off track, but then have moments (much later) where you go, “Oh, everything was for this.” It might be just one moment with one client, where I hear something come out of my mouth, and afterward I can reflect and go, “Right. I couldn’t have said that without all the rest of the journey.” That’s very gratifying.

Certainly, the training and discipline of music practice and performance has been powerfully informative. You start out thinking you practice for that performance. You practice and you practice so that you can get it right on the night [of the performance]. And [eventually] you understand a whole different sense of practice, much more of the Buddhist sense. You just practice. This is your practice, the practice of being right here, right now. You practice that daily, moment to moment. Then on stage, you are right here, right now. It’s not, “Oh, this is it. This is the big moment,” but you just keep practicing.

Also, ultimately, I had to acknowledge that whether I was playing a noble heroine, or a boy, or a murderer, I was actually finding all of that in me. It was the beginning of a profound sense of compassion and being able to empathize with a wide range of people. And of course, it didn’t end there. It has deepened and grown substantially since I left that world. Also, through my work as a performer, I found the ability to be in the presence of strong emotion.

There were many other chapters since leaving the classical stage to what I do now, [one] certainly being a classroom teacher. I taught at Dearborn for about eleven years, and that taught me another level of humility. The classes I taught were generally introductory classes where some people have some musical experience, some have absolutely none. Finding a way to meet people where they are, really taught me other levels and ways of listening and paying attention. In the years of teaching, some of the most satisfying or meaningful moments would be when a student would come to me in distress and say, “I couldn’t get this paper in on time because...” And I would just sit with them and see what we could work out. But as a teacher, you’re very restricted as to what you can say or do, to what extent you can involve yourself. I wanted to be able to support more and at another level, and not only through the subject matter. In fact, when I began counseling professionally, I worked for a time at the counseling center at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Sandor Slomovits: We’re meeting on Zoom, and I see that you’re surrounded by several plants.

Jessica Ryder: Well, you know, I have to have family. I have had the great gift of having grown up in rural New Hampshire on a hundred acres of fields and woods and so my connection to nature is profound. I understand intuitively, and always have, that I am part of nature. It’s not me and then there’s nature out there. I use the word understand, but I don’t mean this in an intellectual sense. I understand the healing power of nature and that that is so much of what we’re groping our way toward as a species, is reconnecting [to nature]. I see it in my clients. I see the pain of it--people spending all day inside, usually on screens… Something as simple as going outside and looking at the sky, is huge. I think of them [the plants] as my counseling adjuncts. Maybe I can get a little subliminal message in, “See, green stuff.”

The dual themes of communication and connection that have imbued Ryder’s life, from her childhood experiences in nature, through her years of singing with other musicians for audiences, her studies of self and human potential, and her teaching, have culminated in her present work as a therapist. Ryder seems to have found a way to harness her experiences on the varied and fascinating path she has traveled, to now be able to support others in healing and growth.

You can learn more about working with Jessica Ryder by calling (734) 224-9869 or visit her online at Jessicaryder.net.