How Has Your Voice Grown and Changed Over Time?

I started working with a new voice teacher a couple of months ago. At the end of the first lesson, he said: "Well, that much is clear - you are a bass. A basso profundo, actually." That was a powerful statement because it was the first time someone gave me a clear vocal identity. I am 56 years old and started taking voice lessons at age 38; until now, my two previous teachers had me sing "low voice" (bass, bass-baritone, and baritone) literature more or less randomly, even though I have always sung 2nd bass in choir. Neither my teachers nor I truly understood how satisfying it is when you know precisely what is and what isn't your fach and your repertoire; I'm very happy now to no longer look longingly at a bunch of baritone arias that are gorgeous but are not and never will be for me. That said, I do believe my voice might not have been as clearly defined when I first started taking lessons, partly because I have always used a somewhat artificially higher speaking voice (which, interestingly, I'm losing rapidly now that I "know who I am"). So, I think have changed and grown into the deep bass register. 

Every other change and growth, however, has to do with technique.  Learning to consistently take a proper breath in which the larynx falls and the throat opens and widens instantaneously like a trapdoor; to reliably find and maintain the Singer's Formant (squillo); to treat each incorrectly shaped vowel like a wrong note on the piano and not be satisfied with an aria or song until each vowel is precisely outlined, defined and articulated; to know the limitations of my breath and work within them so I can lay out the lines and breaks within a piece: all that, I am starting to realize, is what makes up my "voice". The voice doesn't exist outside or independent of singing (or speaking). The voice is an act, an activity, a process in time, a movement of air, something that is born and reborn constantly in every split second of singing, and that means that as a singer, I never feel like I "have" a voice, I can only create it anew from moment to moment. And creating it requires technique. Thus, even as an amateur who will never sing anything for an audience except as part of his choir section, I hope for ongoing growth and positive change of my voice as my technique improves.