The Last Closet_The Dark Side of Avalon

by Moira Greyland

  And so, like the bad penny which keeps turning up, I found myself back in Berkeley once more, three blocks from Ashby BART and a host of bad memories. I should have stayed in Lafayette, but if I had this would have been a very different story indeed.

  Chapter 30: The Ermine Violin (1984–1987)

  Dr. McCoy: “…They’re nice, soft, and furry, and they make a pleasant sound.”

  Spock: “So would an ermine violin, but I see no advantage in having one.”

  —The Trouble with Tribbles, Star Trek: The Original Series

  I started taking voice when I was still staying with Serpent and Cathy and I had had many voice lessons, fully expecting to become a professional singer one day. I could not face singing in front of my mother because she tended to say horrible things to me that made me think Hitler was to peace and freedom what I was to singing. My voice lessons had ended when I left home because I could not get to my teacher on my own, but I kept on singing and performing every chance I got.

  While I was living with Ole, I had auditioned for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I sang The Clancy Brothers version of “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” which was nebulous in terms of tempo. I did not have an accompaniment, nor had I prepared for my audition with my previous voice teacher. I did not sing in a way that demonstrated I had the faintest idea what I was doing, musically. After my audition, they told me that they were not going to unleash another singer on the world who could not count. They required me to take a year of piano before they would let me take voice, a decision I understood completely.

  I am not a good pianist, as my mother would be the first to tell you. These days, when I am leading masterclasses or rehearsals or teaching voice lessons I will simply take a conductor’s bow, and say “I am The World’s Worst Pianist, thank you very much!”

  My lessons at the Conservatory left me quaking in my boots. My piano teacher, Scott Fogelsong, either disliked me or thought he could inspire me with harsh strictness. When I did something well, he would snarl at me “I’ll show you something you can’t do.” When I did something badly or hesitated, he would sneer and tell me “I am counting the spots on the ceiling while I am waiting for you to play.” He would even pound my fingertips into the keys, very hard. I ended up so intimidated I could barely talk to him, but I persisted because I wanted to take voice again.

  I can chalk up a lot of the stuff Dr. Fogelsong did to dopey old-school pedagogical stuff. After all he sounded a lot like my mother, who had always insisted I had no touch for the piano and practically yanked the chair away every time I got near it.

  I could not have been 100% hopeless, because I learned to play all 24 scales at four octaves. I could do that, and play the pieces he asked me to play. My piano lessons with him left me absolutely cold, but like I had with math, I forgot everything after I was away from him. My hands worked well enough that I could play but I was a terrible reader, slow and inefficient.

  Dr. Fogelsong did do me one enormous favor, though. He insisted I learn rhythm from a book, and tested me on assignments from the rhythm book every single week. Of course, learning from a decidedly old-school teacher led me to an eventual awareness of the difficulty with this mindset, and it helped me to eventually devise a new teaching method which would not leave anyone quaking in their boots.

  After the year of piano lessons, I was allowed to begin voice lessons with Dorothy Barnhouse. She taught me to sing different things, including a few of the Songs from the Hebrides by Marjorie Kennedy Fraser, art songs, and small operatic things. She was going to bring me straight into the Conservatory vocal program as a voice major, but I made a very poor decision. I thought it might be better to go to a regular university and get an education which included subjects other than music. Over her strenuous objections I applied to San Francisco State, and was accepted on the basis of my SAT scores.

  There were both good and bad things about San Francisco State. I met a young man, Kristoph, and we became close very fast. We were both singers, and he was a tenor. He also played guitar and oboe, and his voice was like John Denver’s, but better.

  The vocal program at San Francisco State was not good and I found out about this the hard way. My voice teacher, Dr. Barlow, was a baritone with a tenor extension who had long performed as a tenor. His self-concept was that he was a tenor who was losing his top, but looking back on him as a voice teacher I see a baritone who managed to sing as a tenor for many years.

  The result of his vocal difficulties was that he obliged nearly all his female singers to sing either mezzo-soprano or full contralto, and the result was laryngitis, emotional devastation, and long-standing dysfunction. Of course, he was not the only factor in this equation. My mother, who paid the bills and was a Famous Author, might have had some influence on him. She was a very high soprano and she wanted me to be a mezzo-soprano to sing Adalgisa to her Norma.

  I tried. Oh yes, I tried.

  My perspective on this as a voice teacher is different than my perspective as a student: back then, all I knew is that what he was asking me to do hurt my voice and over time, destroyed it. Not only did he have me singing contralto repertoire but Wagner, which is too heavy for any singer under 20—even under 30! I understand now that he heard the dramatic potential in my voice and thought since in his view I would end up singing Wagner, why not today?

  A dramatic voice does not refer to acting, but physical characteristics: a dramatic voice can produce a huge crescendo and a lot of sound where a more lyric voice will not. However, speaking as a voice teacher, a sensible teacher will hear dramatic potential in a voice and stay light, light, light until the voice is fully trained. Letting a dramatic voice blast away will destroy the voice. Imagine that you are a trainer and your new prospective bodybuilder is born to be a heavyweight lifter: you can see it in their body and their bone structure. Do you begin with 500 lb weights? No! Naturally, you build up their strength gradually and carefully, being sure to avoid injury. The bodybuilder may want to lift the heavy stuff today, but a sensible trainer will never allow it since what matters is long-term health and what the body can do a year from now, not what we can demand from our bodies today.

  It was almost funny during my voice lessons with Mr. Barlow: he would warm me up to F or G above high C, which is impossible for most sopranos let alone any alto of any description. Instead of simply working with that part of my voice, he would ask me if I was all right. He liked to say that all high voices would naturally “find their way down.” He thought that because he was losing his top, all tenors would eventually be baritones; thus, all soprano voices would eventually be altos so why not hurry everything along?

  From a pedagogical standpoint, I can see his point only from the perspective of Vennard, who believed that nearly all soprano voices would be contained in very short bodies: 5’3" and under, and they would invariably have short necks. At 5’6" with a long neck, I didn’t fit. Of course, at 6’0, Joan Sutherland didn’t either!

  The real bottom line for a voice is not the size of the body but the size of the larynx and the length of the vocal folds (vocal cords), which are not related to height but to genetics. We can determine where a voice likes to be by where it—and the singer—is most comfortable. The voice will work best where it belongs. Issues with high notes are dealt with through teaching position and breath, and issues with low notes are dealt with the same way. For a very young student—and any teen is a baby from an operatic perspective—we ideally stick to the middle, with no extremes of range on either end.

  The long and the short of it is that I received appallingly bad voice lessons for two semesters, and ended up barely able to sing at all. Between O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion from the Messiah, and Agnus Dei from Bach’s B Minor Mass, Senta’s Ballad from The Flying Dutchman and Allmacht’ge Jungfrau from Tannhauser, I was vocally wrecked. He even had me sing Wagner’s Wesendonk-Lieder, which as a voice teacher I would no more give to a young opera singer than I would demand they sing while w
alking a tightrope. What all these songs have in common is they are loud!

  If a singer does not have both support and technique, which I did not have—let alone the correct type of voice—they will invariably create appalling tension at the level of the larynx. A sensible voice teacher will assign light music to a young singer and only increase the weight of the repertoire when the voice is very well developed and can handle the music without strain.

  There are huge numbers of soprano voices out there. Real mezzo or alto voices are a much rarer thing. One reason I know this is that I train and audition around twenty sopranos to one real alto.

  Most “altos” in choirs are sopranos who do not understand breath well enough to be able to reliably access their tops. The result is usually pushing in the lower registers as identification with the wrong classification buts up against physical reality, and a set of coping dysfunctions must be used to create the desired low, loud sounds.

  In college there are nearly no voices that have any business singing dramatic music of any sort, and assigning Wagner or even Puccini to young sopranos does them a disservice. Bellini, Donizetti, oratorio, straight art songs, Mozart by the bucketful, heck, even Gilbert and Sullivan would produce better results much more quickly.

  Dr. Barlow was going through many changes besides his voice: He was leaving his wife of nineteen years and his daughter because he had fallen in love with a man. He was also most inappropriate with the young men in my family who came to him for lessons. One managed to rebuff him and manage the situation, but Dr. Barlow was also inappropriate with my brother Patrick, telling him to “let [his] throat relax, like there was a cock in it.” That was my brother’s first and last voice lesson with him, and who can be surprised?

  If I had known what he had done at the time, I would have ended my lessons with him and gone to the department head to complain. It is ethically unforgivable to try to seduce a student. Pardon me for not being surprised when I heard, many years later, that Dr. Barlow had lost his life to AIDS.

  After two semesters with Mr. Barlow and chronic laryngitis, I protested and got another teacher who let me sing in a register which I could actually sustain without pain. My new teacher, Kathryn Harvey, had me singing Lucia di Lammermoor, Violetta from La Traviata, and all the normal dramatic coloratura repertoire: Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi. I was in loads of opera workshops, of course, singing stuff like “Susanna” from Nozze di Figaro and “Musetta” from La Boheme. The music was easy and felt good, and it no longer hurt when I sang. I learned huge amounts of music and had a blast. She had high hopes for me and called me “the Callas” when she talked with other people about me.

  Kathryn would tell me that I could sound like Joan Sutherland and I could sound like Maria Callas, but I had no idea how to sound like Moira. Her observation about me was correct, although I do not know if she understood the depth or importance of what she had said to me. The truth was that I had no self, nothing to sing about.

  I was not allowed to be me. If I was allowed to be me, I would matter. If I was allowed to be me, I could protest what had happened in my house or what had happened to me, and my protestations would actually matter, but I did not matter. My father’s past crimes did not matter, my pain did not matter, the bellyful of things I tried to forget never mattered.

  I was a shell, a doll, a mask, singing someone else’s music and pretending the joys and pain of other people instead of talking about my own, or even admitting it.

  In therapy circles, they call this “dehumanization,” but I did not understand that yet.

  My mother wanted me to sing opera and although I loved opera, singing was emotionally painful and I did it mostly because it seemed to be what I had to do to please her. My mother expected me to become the famous opera singer she had always wanted to be, and my life had to be devoted to that forever. I did not understand then that if my heart was not in it, my voice would not be in it either.

  All that mattered was my mother’s dream.

  While I was at San Francisco State, I chose to do something that changed my life forever. I took up playing the concert harp. I had a wonderful harp teacher with impeccable harp technique, Vicki DeMartini. Go see her at Cliff House in San Francisco, if you like—she is probably still there.

  As a harp student, I proved to have all the aptitude for the harp which I never had for the piano. In order to learn the harp, one must have the ability to mimic a set of very small motions with tremendous precision and to recreate identical movements very, very quickly. All that I lacked on the piano, all the pain and terror I felt…none of that was there on the harp. The harp and I became fast friends: it was probably the easiest thing I ever learned. I didn’t figure out exactly how odd of a harp student I was until I became a harp teacher, and saw people learn in months what I learned in minutes.

  This was a musical situation that, at last, my mother could not destroy. She knew absolutely nothing about the harp and the one time she laid hands on it in front of other people, she plunked tunelessly on the strings and told us all that she had “played the harp in a past life.” She never even tried to critique my harp playing, since she had no knowledge which would have allowed her to do so. This meant that I was totally free to play the harp without fear—and play I did!

  Why is impeccable technique on the harp important? Because the harp is one of the few instruments that can really hurt you if you don’t play it properly. The harp is asymmetrical: it sits on the right shoulder and brings the right arm high with the right hand often near the ear, and the left hand and arm overextended in front of you as far as it will go, if you are playing the concert harp. If one does not use the fingers in such a way as to access forearm muscles instead of hand muscles, the risk of carpal tunnel is exceptionally high. Also, if you are not rigorous about posture, the harp will bend your spine to the left, twist your neck, and drop your left shoulder. The pain involved from allowing any of these things to happen is appalling and progressive.

  These days, I tell my students that the harp will turn them into a gnome if they do not take care to sit very straight. Much of my practice with harp students has involved correcting painful hands, painful backs, and the slow playing that results from wrong technique of one sort or another, usually claw-fingers, which curl into themselves instead of coming flat into the palm.

  Playing the harp was a guilty pleasure. It was something I was doing, at last, for me.

  My aunt Diana had given me a small, wire-strung Witcher harp, and I brought it to my first harp lesson. Neither my teacher nor I could figure out how to make it hold still on my lap. The string spacing on a wire-strung harp is very narrow, and the technique is very different than what is used on a gut strung concert harp or Celtic/Folk harp. I love the sound of the wire-strung harp, but I opted to learn to play the concert harp instead.

  My first harp was a rented black Troubador I. A Troubador is a tall, stable Celtic harp with concert spacing and tension—that means that it will feel like a concert harp while being both more portable and far less expensive. Folk harps with different spacing and tension can feel very “squishy” to a player accustomed to concert harps. Some people prefer that squishy feel because it takes very little effort to produce a sound, but if you play a squishy harp too hard, it will make a horrible rattling sound. When the strings vibrate, they will slap against the harmonic curve and the other strings. We call this “overdriving” a harp.

  I was and am a “power” player. Most self-taught harpers cannot produce any appreciable volume because the usual way of playing if you don’t have a teacher is to pluck the strings with sharply curved fingers, which is painful and tiring even if you do it very softly. Playing with concert harp technique means you can play both very loudly and very softly with no appreciable difference in effort. This works best on a harp with concert spacing and tension. You can only reliably get a wide range of possible dynamics (volume) on a harp which is not squishy.

  A good way to observe the difference between “
claw hands” and functional harp hands is to snap your fingers and notice where your fingertips go. My harp teacher had me snapping my fingers for the first few weeks so that I could get the proper motion down. When your fingertips go flat into the palm, the muscles used are all forearm muscles, not the comparatively much weaker hand or finger muscles. It is the musical equivalent of “lift with your legs, not with your back.”

  I “outgrew” the Troubador very quickly. I loved the feel, the size, and the stability; I was annoyed at the harmonic limitations. I outgrew the simple music which is possible on a folk harp. I wanted to be able to use more keys and more sharps and flats, to play actual classical music without having to leave things out or make ridiculous modifications to avoid accidentals.

  A folk harp like the Troubador has a full set of sharping levers which means that one can play in a wide variety of keys, but only those with naturals and sharps unless you retune the harp to another key like Eb, with 3 flats tuned in and then you always have levers engaged, which means that the strings sound slightly tinnier. One way to handle the lack of keys available on a folk harp is to use sorta-enharmonic keys: instead of six flats I would use one sharp, and instead of three flats I would play in four sharps. It would put the whole piece up a half step but it meant I could play more things, and since I usually played alone it made no especial difference whether I was on the original pitch or half a step higher.

  A pedal harp or concert harp uses seven foot pedals—one for C, one for D and so forth—which enable rapid key changes and accidentals (sharps and flats) while one is playing. On a folk or Celtic harp, we have to take our hands out of the strings every time we want to use an accidental, and reach up and change it by moving a lever at the top of the string.

  What a relief that I had rented the Troubador harp, so I could discover which direction I wanted to go before buying something!