When Tertia was awarded a Churchill fellowship in 1997 to research music education in primary schools, she was delighted. The fund gave her the chance to travel to the US for eight weeks. “As an opera singer, it was a really exciting project,” she says. “There were lots of opera education programmes in the US at the time, which is why I wanted to go there and explore. I began writing to different companies to find out more about their work.”
As part of her project planning, she contacted Adam, who was the director of education at the San Diego Opera. “I asked him what was on and where I could stay if I visited,” she says. “He was very polite in his response, but didn’t answer my specific questions, which made me think he was a bit of an idiot. I later realised they just had so much on, there wasn’t a specific time for me to go.”
