"If you are not doing that thing you were really meant to do, that's when things can go really wrong and you feel that great sense of relief when you are doing the right thing again," the Dunedin mezzo-soprano says.
She is singing in Bach's Mass in B Minor in the City of Dunedin Choir's concert on Saturday.
She learnt about the struggle trying to do something else when she took a couple of years off singing in 2008-9 to study for an MBA at Otago University. She hoped to add another string to her bow, as it is difficult for singers to support themselves by singing, she says.
"The process of doing the MBA really taught me in quite a difficult way that I need to be singing. I missed it terribly and I found it a real struggle to get through the MBA, but as soon as I started singing again I just felt so much better."
Growing up in the Waikato and Auckland, Court (31) was a musical child and played a lot of instruments but none of them really settled with her. She sang in choirs, but as a teenager she started taking serious singing lessons and found her abiding passion, she says.
Having studied music at the University of Otago, then at Waikato and in Prague, she started on a musical career in the UK.
In 2006, she returned to Dunedin to sing Mercedes in the university's production of Carmen, and while here started a relationship with her now partner, Associate Professor Sue Court.
"I already had the visa in my passport for a working holiday and I had to go.
"I was on the plane and I thought `Why am I going?' I got to London and phoned Sue and said `I'm coming home'. She said, `Good, come home' and I've never looked back.
"I've just been so happy to be back here. I was very homesick when I was away on the other side of the world," she says.
"It's funny, because when I was an undergraduate student, all I wanted was a singing life and to be overseas and the big jobs. I have friends who studied with me who are living that life now, but I'm really glad to be home."
However, the following year her partner became ill, which spurred her to undertake the MBA in case she had to become the main breadwinner.
After her two-year break from professional singing, she approached Patricia Payne who had retired to Dunedin after an international career as a mezzo-soprano.
"I didn't know if my voice was still up to it or if taking time off was OK.
"I went and sang for her and she was really encouraging. She said `Definitely you should be singing', and `that voice needs to be working'.
"I really am so grateful to have that encouragement, so I went out and found the teacher I'm working with now, Ravil Atlas, an American who lives in Christchurch."
Last year she travelled up every fortnight for lessons but this year the lessons have been conducted via Skype.
She also has two part-time, flexible office jobs which allow her time off to go away to sing if she needs to.
Last year she sang Messenger in Opera Otago's Orfeo, and Bach's Christmas Oratorio in Hamilton and Auckland - with tenor John Murray and baritone Daniel O'Connor, who are also singing in the Mass in B Minor.
After Saturday's concert she will go to Invercargill to sing Hansel in the newly formed Bluff Opera's production of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.
Although sopranos are usually the stars in opera - mezzos tend to sing the role of a maid or sister or aunt - she says it's less competitive being a mezzo, as they are always needed.
Her voice is a lyric voice, not too heavy nor too light, so she can easily slip into many styles, she says. She is looking forward to singing the Mass in B Minor.
"The work is so transporting, uplifting, moving. It's a real gift of a work to be able to sing. For the mezzo, the `Agnus Dei' towards the end of the work is just divine."
She feels the break has made her more spiritually aware of what she is singing and the emotions she is conveying.
"I've been through those years of wanting success in capital letters, and now I come back to it I'm just hugely grateful."
There is something about music-making - whatever your instrument or your media, whether you are a pop musician or a folk musician - that's almost a therapeutic process, she says.
"It's really an emotional process and if you can remove your ego from it - I want this or that job - if you can take that away and just feel so grateful for being able to express what these composers wrote, and on top of that express how you feel about it, it's just the most extraordinary gift. I can't thank my lucky stars enough that I have this opportunity to sing and be in touch with something larger than myself, something outside myself."
She was made aware of this by the encouraging atmosphere she and her partner found as members of the New Edinburgh Folk Club.
"The supportive atmosphere was a revelation. For a classical musician, it was a real education in how to be and how to let go of that ego and worrying about how good you were.
"What mattered was you were having a great time playing music with your friends, and that has contributed hugely to the way I think about my singing, and how grateful I am to be singing. It's a bit loud sometimes, though," she adds.
Hear it
The City of Dunedin Choir, with soloists Lois Johnston, Sarah Court, John Murray, and Daniel O'Connor, supported by the Southern Sinfonia and conducted by David Burchell, present Bach's Mass in B Minor in the Dunedin Town Hall on Saturday, April 16, at 7.30pm.
Virtually perfect
A couple of members of the City of Dunedin Choir have also been busy participating in an internet-based project.
The Virtual Choir 2.0 is made up of more than 2000 people from around world recording their voices and uploading the result to YouTube. A technical team in England then put together a Virtual Choir recording.
Singers from 58 countries participated, with eight singers from New Zealand, three of whom are from Dunedin, and two members of the City of Dunedin Choir. The premiere of the choir's song Sleep was staged in New York last week.
Go to ericwhitacre.com.
