The Sound of Her Music: D’Andrea Pelletier ’14
When D’Andrea Pelletier ’14 was growing up, her parents recognized her creativity, and especially, her gift for music.
“I think I always had what I would consider the ‘music in me,’” Pelletier says.
Pelletier has played the violin since she was 10, and was influenced by her father who was a singer and could play “pretty much any instrument he put his hands on.”
Pelletier’s mother, while not necessarily musically inclined, was very artistic and loved listening to music. Pelletier recalls being “surrounded” by music.
“My mom signed me up for multiple theatre companies,” Pelletier recalls. “I guess I was a bit of a showman, even back then.”
“When I was 11, I went to a competition at James Madison University where I played Puccini’s O Mio Babbino Caro on the violin, not really knowing anything about the piece.”
When she asked the conductor about the composition, she told Pelletier it was from an opera.
Pelletier was puzzled – and curious. She didn’t know anything about opera but had enjoyed the Puccini piece so much that she wanted to know more.
The sixth grader had an old-fashioned turn table, so she started buying different classical music records and listening to them. Pelletier was hooked. The genre became her favorite throughout middle school and high school.
Along the way, Pelletier began trying to imitate the lush, soaring vocals that she heard in the scratchy records, so different from any other music with which she was familiar.
“I had always liked to sing,” Pelletier says, “But I didn’t prefer any particular genre. Nothing really felt like it was good for my voice, but I just told myself that I wasn’t a good singer.”
Pelletier’s high school music teachers felt differently. They recognized that she had the perfect voice for singing classical music, and she began to fall in love with the artistry of the craft – its trills and vibrato, its cadenza and coloratura; and the special nuances of the form that whisks its listeners across peaks and valleys telling stories of romance, comedy and tragedy.
When she was 15, Pelletier was further ensorcelled when an opera singer came to her school.
“I wondered, how does this tiny woman have such an amplification in her voice,” Pelletier recalls. “And then I thought, well, if she could do this, then maybe I could, too.”
And from that point on, Pelletier was all in.
She began posting affirmations around her house like, You are a future opera star, and other notes that outlined the high-schooler’s dreams for the future. .
At the time, Pelletier was living in Georgia. The family had recently lost their patriarch and moved to Florida to be closer to Pelletier’s grandmother, and that’s when she discovered UCF. She attended nearby Valencia Community College first, continuing her focus on singing opera.
“Opera is something you have to study – and study intensely,” Pelletier says. “It’s not just about the music, but the entire pageantry of it – the acting, the stage, and all of the intricacies of each.”
Also, Pelletier says, when singing opera, the soft palate (the part of the roof of the mouth where the uvula is located) is raised to create more space in the throat for sound to resonate, which helps produce high notes and a classical sound.
Pelletier started at UCF as a vocal performance major, but she was not so interested in learning about other genres of singing – such as R&B, gospel or pop – as she was about perfecting what she knew was her path: classical and opera.
“I realized early on that there is a difference, for example, between singing a pop song vs. singing an aria,” Pelletier says.
That difference, Pelletier, boils down to discipline. While many singers can hit and sustain a very high note, their efforts are usually the result of emulating something they have heard, not from studying the mechanics of vocal intonation.
“This is not to diminish or minimize any other singing artist,” Pelletier says. “But singing opera is a very rigid, very disciplined art form – and maybe even a science.”
When she was learning opera, instructions from her teachers were not telling her to just “breathe from her chest;” rather, they would spend hours just on the breathing aspect of a song, making sure she was breathing from as low as possible, and then filling up her chest to make sure each note had as much vocal force as possible.
The inherent, disciplined nature of classical/operatic compositions stems partly from the fact that most of them were created more than a hundred years ago. They have already been worked into a very disciplined place vocally so that both the singers and the concertgoers know what to expect.
Pelletier now understands the rigor and discipline that is required of singing the difficult pieces; she may have been the teensiest bit reluctant at first to follow her instructors’ advice while at UCF.
“Even though I was initially a vocal performance major, I went in thinking that I was just going to be an opera singer,” Pelletier says. “I was training one-on-one with a separate vocal coach, in addition to my training at UCF, and I might have thought that I already knew it all.”
Pelletier credits JoAnne Stephenson with trying to rein in her talented student.
“I told Dr. Stephenson that I already knew I ultimately wanted to be an opera singer, so what was the point of learning this other stuff?” Pelletier says. “She understood my headstrong nature, and she gently convinced me that studying the art song repertoire was indeed important to my future career. I am so grateful to her for insisting that I concentrate on my vocal technique.”
Pelletier says she also became interested in the business side of the music business.
In the typical business model in her industry, Pelletier says that opera singers are contracted by a company and are given very little autonomy over the direction of the production for which they are hired.
“I was ready to manage my own career,” Pelletier says. “I have always been an entrepreneur and love to run businesses.”
She knew, however, that she wanted to run her career a little differently.
Developing the Queen of Opera
“My husband, Drew, and I co-own Queen of Opera,” Pelletier says. “We are the creators and the producers of everything, but with me as the principal singer.”
The Pelletiers met just after high school while Drew was in the Navy, and later on took a few classes together at UCF. After D’Andrea graduated, they became involved in real estate and established their own brokerage firm. Because of their successful business, they began wondering what it would look like if they began to focus their acumen on their shared vision of owning an opera company.
Pelletier had been doing a lot of solo shows, and she realized that most opera singers do not hold their own solo concerts. The couple figured that difference could be a game-changer.
“I was not in love with real estate,” D’Andrea Pelletier says. “And I genuinely missed music so much that we decided to just go for it. And although Drew doesn’t sing, he runs basically everything else, and we do it hand in hand.”
Drew manages logistics and promoting, doing all the back-end stuff that he loves. And because of the structure of their company, when the global pandemic hit, the duo was able to transition into recorded performances. Now, all the Queen of Opera’s music is on Spotify and iTunes.
Offering recorded music also had the unintended consequence of increasing their international base, allowing them to concentrate on their target market.
Pelletier has also been invited to collaborate on some non-operatic compositions. She found the perfect compromise between a classical piece and a more contemporary one by singing some of the songs in French.
“When I sing a song in French,” Pelletier says, “There are a lot of midrange notes that make it relatable.” And even though she is not a “crossover” artist or a pop singer, her extensive training allows her to adapt her voice to a variety of singing styles.
It’s the same reason that Pelletier can sing along as she’s driving with pop songs without using her opera voice.
Pelletier has also worked with a composer to write some songs in French, and also released a version of Ave Maria, co-written with her husband.
“I knew early on that I wanted to have my hands deep in the clay of the creative process,” Pelletier says. “It’s a little different that what a traditional opera singer would do, but we think there’s room at the table for all of us to explore these different creative sides that we have.”
Pelletier has also been growing her social media presence; at present time, she has over 10,000 followers on Instagram and over 17,000 followers on TikTok. When she graduated in 2014, she and her husband had recognized that social media marketing was exploding. Their own foray into social media initially began when they began a real estate company called “Follow Me Realty.”
[D’Andrea Pelletier would like non-opera aficionados to listen to her Lamento Della Ninfa by Montverdi on Spotify. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” Pelletier says. “For anyone who doesn’t know classical music very well, I feel that this is a wonderful introductory piece of music.”]
“We had huge success with that,” Pelletier says. “We knew that the key to growing our base was to engage with them in a meaningful way. With Queen of Opera, we feel we did it even better because it’s something I genuinely love.”
Pelletier connected with every opera singer she knew, and then the fans of their fans. Before long, she was reaching out to people in the industry, and just collaborating with them for about four or five years.
The name of their website could have made things go either way, she laughs.
“Some people were not necessarily on board with me calling myself the Queen of Opera; if you call yourself something like that, a reaction could be, ‘Well, I’ll be the judge of that.’”
Of course, people were intrigued by her audacity to name herself that, and its catchiness caused her to go slightly viral. The people who listened to Pelletier discovered that she was “for real.”
In the opera community, Pelletier says there can be some preconceived notions about its singers. One word that gets bandied about is “diva.”
The dictionary has multiple definitions for the word, which generally means a female singer, particularly an opera singer.
But a diva is also described as “a self-important person who is temperamental and difficult to please (typically used of a woman).
Pelletier is familiar with the term.
“I think that the use of that word just comes with the territory of this industry where the music is larger than life. The pageantry is also larger than life, it’s like acting on steroids.”
Pelletier has fun with the transformative aspect of opera. She and her husband spent a lot of time in Hawaii, where her husband is from, and where she spent a lot of time performing at local schools. The kids would see her arrive in regular clothes and then emerge for a performance in a glittery gown, theatrical makeup, and the other accoutrement that turned Pelletier into the Queen of Opera. But because she was immersed in the character, it was possible to mistake that for “diva-ness,” she says.
When Pelletier and her husband attended UCF, they were already talking about owning their own business, with D’Andrea being the ‘Queen’ and Drew doing everything else. D’Andrea switched from vocal performance to interdisciplinary studies so she could have a more well-rounded curriculum that included Philosophy, linguistics, and business courses in preparation for launching their business.
The Pelletiers are planning some live performances for 2025.
“We’re looking forward to getting out in front of the community,” Pelletier says. “We are also looking to incorporate some non-opera music, yet performed with operatic vocal technique, for those who may not be so familiar with the genre. One way is to incorporate a classical cover of a contemporary artist, Chris Issak’s “Wicked Game”. We’re pretty excited about that.”
The Pelletiers are also excited to get more involved in UCF. Last year, Pelletier performed the national anthem for the UCF vs. Baylor football game.
That was a huge moment for Pelletier, who at times despaired of the rigor in the music program, and sometimes doubted her ability to persevere.
Her advice for any instrumentalist or vocalist who is grinding away every day in the practice rooms is that if they love what they do, and want to keep going, that there are so many different ways they can get themselves out there.
“Trust me, I know that the work never stops,” Pelletier says. “If you truly love what you’re doing and are OK with doing the work, just keep going. It’s going to take a lot of discipline and focus from you, but when you leave UCF, there are a lot of ways that you can achieve your dreams. Keep charging on.”
D’Andrea Pelletier’s Tips for Vocal Maintenance
- Vocalize every day. OK, If I’m being honest, I didn’t vocalize this morning, but typically you’ll see me at least six days out of the week. I walk 15,000 steps every morning, and I’m also vocalizing at the same time. Sure, people look at me when I’m vocalizing and walking, but often, someone will stop and talk to you and ask you about your singing. It also helps me always keep my stage presence up.
- I don’t know who started this advice, but I quickly realized that honey does not help the voice and dairy does not help the voice. One thing that worked for me was having hot water and lemon before a performance.
- I also don’t eat before a performance, just in case there’s some food that I’m taking in that’s going to coat the throat.
- Always be learning new repertoire and keep perfecting the old repertoire.
