The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  It was through my reading that I came to believe that happiness was something that required a horse, and because my mother had also always loved horses, my parents, on their very modest schoolteachers’ salaries, decided that I should have one. Her name was Windy, and she lived in the garage for a couple of weeks, until one day she pushed her way into the kitchen, having apparently decided she deserved a more intimate place in the family circle. Finally, someone from the city council came and explained that neither the kitchen nor the garage nor any other part of our tract housing complex was zoned for horses and that Windy would have to go.

  My mother and I also fell in love with a spider monkey named Jethro, who made his home in the pet section of Sibley’s department store, and so, on my twelfth birthday, he came home—fortunately, on a three-day trial basis. We soon realized that he was a bit beyond our suburban capabilities. Even if neither Windy nor Jethro could continue to live with us in our split-level on Valencia Drive, I learned a valuable lesson: There was no dream too large or too exotic to be realized.

  If my mother typically offered specific guidance regarding the shape of a note or a turn of the wrist, and set an example with her unflagging energy, ambition, and work ethic, what my father taught me about singing came packaged in larger life lessons, and many of those lessons had to do with horses. We moved to a house in Churchville, New York, in order to have a proper place for animals, and ultimately wound up with three of our own horses, four boarders, and three dogs on our five acres of land. It was exactly what I had dreamed of, but my father made it clear that with dreams come responsibilities. “Horses can’t feed themselves,” he’d tell me, and I would be out in the bitter cold mornings before school, breaking the ice in the ten-gallon water buckets, filling them up in the basement, and lugging them back up the steps to the barn. I regularly dragged hundred-pound sacks of grain from the car to the tack room after mucking the stalls. It was hard, heavy, freezing labor, but it was the price of having horses, and horses were what I wanted. I understood that you have to work for what you want, for what you love. Having observed the girls who sang at the piano for my mother, I knew that beauty could occur naturally, but more than likely it was the result of discipline, and so I curried and brushed and picked out hooves. There was no praise for my efforts; hard work was simply what was expected.

  Even when we went camping, my mother, who was given to high heels and stockings, packed a vacuum cleaner and a double mattress in the back of the seventeen-foot motorboat that trailed behind our car. When we set up camp for the night after boating to an island, with all of us holding the mattress on board, my mother would ferret out the camp’s single electrical outlet, plug in her extension cord, and then proceed to vacuum off the ground the tent would sit on. That was pretty much the point at which my father bade farewell to sleeping outdoors.

  I remember how my mother would teach all day and then have everyone in her family over for a giant meal. We would bake and stew and chop and sauté for hours, serve and pick up the plates and wash them and put them away, then scrub down every inch of the kitchen, and when I stumbled off to bed half-blind with exhaustion my aunt would shake her head sadly at my mother. “Renée’s a little lazy, isn’t she?” she would say.

  The women in my family often misused the word “lazy,” because they simply did not understand the concept. I can trace that attitude back as far as my great-grandmother, who came to America alone from Prague as a teenager to escape the unwanted advances of a German soldier. To be a girl alone in a new country without speaking the language would be a daunting story of courage in most families, but in my own it was just another example of an occasion to roll up your sleeves and do whatever needed to be done. That great-grandmother from Prague produced a daughter with a beautiful voice who played the piano. Her friends called her “the Girl of the Golden West,” after Puccini’s opera. My grandmother had wanted to be a music teacher herself, and so she steered my mother into that profession. My mother, for her part, wanted to be a singer or a movie star. We were all so intertwined that sometimes it was difficult to tell who was living out whose dreams.

  If a work ethic and a talent for music are transmitted through the genetic code, then I inherited them from both my parents. My father’s family was the most inexhaustibly capable group of people I have ever encountered. Need a house? We’ll build one! Don’t know a thing about foundations, plumbing, electricity? We’ll figure it out! It seemed that every one of them could rebuild an engine, shingle a roof, fix a refrigerator. My paternal grandfather was a coal miner in the hills of Pennsylvania, and my uncle Lysle spent five years in the service in New Guinea, surviving on the snakes and insects he caught for food. His stories of rescuing nurses from headhunters and keeping his reconnaissance soldiers safe, thanks to the training he had received from my grandfather in the hills of Pennsylvania, fascinated me. But even in this madly industrious group my father stood out. As a boy, he learned to play the trumpet, and it was the trumpet, along with his love of music and diligent practice, that got him to college, the first member of his family to attend. Even on his teacher’s income, he managed to own a small airplane, a Piper Cub, with three other men when I was a little girl, and I thought that taking afternoon flights was what every child did after Sunday lunch.

  In the face of so much accomplishment it was hard at times not to feel like a dull penny. I started going to horse shows and competing in barrel races, but like so many other things I longed to do, competition didn’t come naturally. The only person I know how to be competitive with is myself. I can push myself to any limit, but I am worthless when it comes to competing against other people. Those early horse shows nearly broke me. For me, fear manifests itself in a nearly catatonic state. The more panicked I feel, the more my eyes go dead. I become so utterly still that I could put down roots and grow leaves. While most animals experience a sense of fight-or-flight when they perceive danger approaching, I always fell into the “faint” category. As a freshman in high school, I was supposed to compete in the state fair horse show. I’d already ridden in a few 4-H shows by then, but they were much smaller events. I looked around at the crowds, the smiling girls with confident ponytails, and I leaned against the stall, mute and motionless with fear and nausea. My father, who saw me hesitating to get up on my horse, thought I wasn’t paying attention. He mistook my frozen panic for indifference, an unwillingness to make any effort.

  “I didn’t spend the whole day and all this money so that you could just stand there,” he said to me sharply. “I want to see you at least try.”

  It’s funny to think that my first inklings of stage fright came not on a stage but in a dusty corral, surrounded by horses and people in cowboy boots. But my father was right to lean on me and wisely did not let me give in to my fears. I went behind some bales of hay, threw up from my heavy sense of dread, tucked my shirt neatly into my jeans, and got on my horse and rode. I did my best, which was what my father expected of me, though at that moment my best wasn’t very good. It was that quality in my father, his no-nonsense determination, that instilled in me a drive to overcome my limitations. I was lucky to have someone who didn’t baby my fears, but was always there urging me on.

  I wasn’t the only one my father refused to coddle. His church choirs were also held to his exacting standards. He chose music that was very difficult for them, pieces like Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms or Bach’s long, complicated cantata “Christ lag in Todesbanden.” When they complained, he would simply tell them, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to learn it. It’s going to be hard, but you’ll make it.” If they tried to refuse and told him he had to pick a different piece, he responded calmly that if that was the case, they would have to pick another choral director. What he expected of other people was the same thing he expected of himself: to go out there and try. He didn’t look at anyone—not his students, not his children—and think, Well, you’re just not up to this. It was his higher expectations that pulled all of us up.<
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  Regardless of whether performing frightened me or I enjoyed it, or whether I was any good at it, one thing was certain: I kept doing it. In high school I was cast in yet another production of My Fair Lady, this time by the music teacher, Rob Goodling. In retrospect, I have to say it is nothing short of amazing that I had such talented teachers to work with early on, especially since we were not exactly in the heart of a booming metropolis. Rob was a man with big ideas who later toured groups of talented students through Europe. He cannily populated his musicals with handsome basketball players and track stars, which in turn made our after-school rehearsals the place to be. Suddenly, the popular kids were the ones onstage, and having a good voice made me even more popular. (I’m sure I have Rob to thank for later being chosen prom queen.)

  I only wish that all children had the luxury of the arts education I enjoyed. In inner-city schools, for example, where financial challenges are serious and relentless, music programs are considerably less widely available. Conversely, in Texas, music education has achieved a high level of importance, comparable to athletics. In New York State, many public schools operate robust music programs, and some assign them a priority that rivals more traditional academic subjects. This lack of uniformity makes it difficult to generalize about the state of music education, though there is clearly a relationship between the availability of financial resources and the existence of school music programs.

  When I was growing up, we crowded onto the school bus with our violin cases, flutes, and trombones and practiced “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and Chopin’s nocturnes as studiously as we drilled our multiplication tables and memorized our spelling words. Everyone knew that we weren’t all going to grow up to be musicians, but educators appreciated that the discipline of music, not to mention the joy that understanding it can bring, is both a deepening and a broadening experience in any life. Fostering creativity in children is as important as any other part of the school curriculum because it feeds the soul. A daily dose of creativity helps children imagine a better world and then create it.

  About that time I was accepted into a special weekly composition program offered to just a handful of students throughout Rochester. I had written songs and poetry since junior high school, and “Stargazer,” the first song I wrote, had become a veritable hit among my friends and family, a favorite at talent shows and holiday functions. I followed with many pieces composed on piano and guitar until my second year in college, when I learned to actually communicate through speech. There’s no doubt that composition provided me with an expressive outlet I genuinely needed to compensate for the shyness that kept me painfully bottled up. It was when I started writing music rather than just performing it that I first began to develop a sense of who I was as a person. Composition wasn’t about pleasing; it was about expressing. Not surprisingly in those days, my hero was Joni Mitchell, and I listened to her soulful lyrics until I nearly wore the grooves off the records. I thought that I had personally discovered The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Her unique poetic and music voice so perfectly expressed the world I wanted to inhabit.

  William Harper, a doctoral candidate at Eastman, taught the composition class and completely opened up my ideas about music. I’ll never forget that first session, when we listened to Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. I couldn’t believe that these ideas existed and I had never known anything about them at all. I sat there, thrilled and silent. I remember everything about that moment: the little classroom where we met, the late-fall light coming in through the windows, William Harper sitting there on his desk listening, his chin down, his eyes closed. Everything in the world froze for a minute, and I felt as if I were hearing music for the first time. All of the interest I’ve had in new music in my life can probably be traced back to that moment, that piece.

  The lessons were encouraging, and yet there was still an unspoken understanding at that time that women didn’t grow up to be real composers. The best we could hope for was to someday write songs, not symphonies, and so I continued writing songs. That same year, however, Mr. Harper introduced me to a woman who would have a profound impact on my relationship to music for years to come, the mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani. I was wildly impressed with the number of scores she was working on. These were not the neat folders of music that were in the piano bench at home, but sprawling, misshapen scores of new music covered with penciled notations. It was almost as if you could hear the piece unfolding just by looking at it on the page. There was nothing static about this work; it was completely, actively in progress. When I sang for her, she listened to me with great seriousness. “Don’t train all the naturalness out of your voice,” she told me. The very fact that she took the time to advise me at all made me feel important.

  When it came time to go to college, I auditioned for several vocal programs. I was terrible at auditioning in those days, and would walk into the room looking guilty for taking up the time of the people on the judging committee. I was nervous and self-conscious, qualities I should have gotten out of my system while I was singing in school plays. My mother had really hoped I’d get into Oberlin College, and I did, but I didn’t receive enough financial aid to attend. She was so heartbroken for me that she cried all the way back from Ohio in the car. When I was a child, my family had had to struggle. My father hunted deer and fished to supplement the groceries that his annual schoolteacher’s salary allowed. I grew up eating venison, and I thought we were nothing but rich, which was a real testament to my parents’ positive attitude. But by the time I was through with high school, we had become a part of the classic middle-class paradox: we didn’t have enough money to secure a spot for me in a top-flight conservatory, yet we were no longer poor enough to qualify for some much-needed financial aid—which is how I ended up at the Crane School of Music of the State University of New York, Potsdam. That turned out to be the first great break of my career.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EDUCATION

  THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS that go into making a singer—not just natural talent and hard work but tenacity, resilience, and luck. When I started my freshman year at the Crane School of Music, I began work with Patricia Misslin. Had I somehow found the money to attend any of the better-known music conservatories I had dreamed of, I probably would have received no more than one private lesson a week. As an undergraduate, I certainly never would have been onstage except as part of a chorus. At Potsdam, I not only had the full attention of a talented, dedicated voice teacher, but by the end of my first month at school I’d been cast as the soprano soloist in the Bach B-minor Mass. A freshman! No one was more surprised than I at this upset.

  Even though I had garnered a lot of attention as a singer in high school and was now studying music in college, I was here at Crane because this was the path of least resistance. I had no burning desire in my gut to sing, no moment of recognition that led me to this particular destiny. I don’t recall my parents’ ever having cultivated much of an independent soul in me. The question was never what I wanted to be, do, eat, or wear but rather what I had to be, do, eat, and wear. I was only too happy to comply and until graduate school never questioned the whys and wherefores of my career path. At that point in time, my voice was a minefield of problems: I couldn’t sing softly, I was physically tense, and I had no high notes. Everyone knows that a soprano with no high notes isn’t going to go very far in the world. Still, Pat recognized that I had innate musicality, real musicianship, and a genuine eagerness to learn and work.

  Pat had short, fine, curly brown hair and usually stood with her feet in perfect turnout, à la Mary Poppins. As she taught, she watched me over her glasses with her chin practically down on her chest, cheeks and eyebrows lifted, humming along as she accompanied me on the piano. She was a crack musician who could play anything. Dressed in crewneck sweaters and plaid wool skirts, she radiated a no-nonsense New England reliability that made me trust her. Somehow she managed to be warm and accepting of me as a person while maintainin
g a highly critical ear when it came to work, which meant that when she tore me down I always knew it was because she planned to build me up again in better shape. I’d count it as a good day if we got through a page of music in an hour. I’d barely open my mouth before she was stopping me, saying, “Wait. Let’s do that again.” It was incredibly detailed work, and I ate up every minute of it. I never fought her, never said, “No, I think it’s better my way.” Not only would it not have been true, but at that stage I didn’t want to have to think for myself. I wanted her to tell me how to shape every note, what to do with every nuance.

  Pat put a tremendous amount of emphasis on resonance, focus, and placing the voice. These weren’t new concepts, but she worked in such minute detail that I was forced to hone each pitch individually. That in itself was a huge task: to understand the concept of actually aiming sound mentally, and to learn how to place the voice “in the mask.” The mask, I quickly came to understand, meant the nose and cheekbones—the nasal and sinus cavities where sound resonates. The use of mask resonance, as opposed to the natural tendency to speak with mouth and chest resonance, is crucial to every young singer’s development, as it’s the only way to project the voice to the back of a hall without strain. It’s the “buzz,” “hum,” or squillo that develops the nascent shape of a tone into a full-blown operatic sound.