The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  Pat would further explain that resonance, in simple terms, is a function of the direction of your air. As you’re singing, you actually use your mind to direct the air to combinations of certain parts of your body: either to your head, because there are multiple sinus cavities behind the eyes; or to the mouth, which creates a different sound; or to the mask; or to the chest, which results in the lowest kind of sound. Resonance is easily understood by looking at any instrument. Imagine that the sound made by the vocal cords is the same as the sound that comes out of a trumpet mouthpiece: on its own, it’s nothing more than a buzz—it’s the resonance that creates the tone. What makes a voice what it is, is a combination of the sound from the vocal folds and the blending, or balance, or processing through the resonance tract.

  If I send air into the highest resonating chambers, I get a very light, childlike sound: the head voice. This is all that a lot of beginning singers have, a voice with no body to it. The head voice is something we associate with flaky girls, the high lilt of Glinda the Good Witch discussing the positive attributes of ruby slippers. Aiming at the mask makes more of a nasal sound. When someone has a nasal-sounding voice, it’s very distinctive: imagine Roseanne Barr speaking. A chest sound would be very low. Sarah Vaughan had a beautiful chest voice, all deep and smoky. In her later years, it was difficult to tell when listening to her in a blind test if it was a woman or a man singing. Ideally, an opera singer will maintain an enormous amount of focus in the mask while using all the rest of the resonance areas as well. The trick is going up and down and blending them all. I always imagine that the voice is a tapestry, and that as one thread goes up, different threads are woven in. Coming back down, those threads are woven back out and other threads are pulled through. What that creates is evenness in the tapestry, up and down, in length and breadth. The picture changes, the colors change, but the quality and texture of the tapestry remain consistent.

  “What’s your mental picture?” Pat would ask me. “Where are you sending your voice?” At that time I didn’t yet know, but I was working fast to figure it out. I was learning to think in imagery that would affect involuntary muscles and cause the body to produce a healthy, even sound. “Inner smile!” Pat would say. “Lift those cheeks!” “Breathe through your nose to find the lift!” “More focus!” “Breathe!” She likewise demanded rhythmic accuracy, complex shaping of phrases, and at least a working knowledge of foreign languages—in short, more musical multitasking than any eighteen-year-old was capable of. I felt infinitely stimulated by the challenge.

  I stood at the piano doing my best to keep up with her, trying not only to sing but to follow her instructions with my body and my voice. What parts of my anatomy was I supposed to use to focus my sound so as to have the least amount of tension and gain the most projection? Muscle isolation and coordination are first requirements, taking years to develop fully. I left her studio feeling as if my head were filled with the very resonant buzzing of bees, every one of them trying to tell me something I desperately needed to know. Every time I went to see her it was as if she threw open another window by teaching me how to be mindful in my singing. She was giving me the very foundations of how to think about my voice, an alphabet from which I could begin to build a technique. She instilled in me a sense of vocal health, very bright, with an emphasis on closed vowels. While another student might have felt overwhelmed by her exacting criticisms, Pat and I were the perfect match.

  Studying singing is really not so different from studying any other instrument, except that perhaps the exercises sound more peculiar. One of Pat’s warm-ups was a long series of undulating scales ending in a descending arpeggio on a single breath—“wa-MA-LOOO-see, wa-MA-LOOO-see.” Who knows where that came from, but it worked for the voice in the same way that playing scales helps loosen up the hands, shoulders, and arms of a pianist. A young student might come in with only a kernel of sound that’s interesting—maybe an octave or even just a fifth that shows some promise—and it’s the teacher’s job to take that kernel and develop it, to stretch the range into something both wide and deep and then fill it in with texture and light. In the beginning, the lessons typically involve instructions like “Keep your shoulders down,” “Take a low breath,” and “Pitches aren’t formed with your chin.” Young singers have to train the breathiness out of their tones, to rid themselves of the popping veins, the trembling jaws, the faulty pitches, the straining for high notes, and the inability to sing coloratura or move the voice without moving the whole body. I couldn’t roll my r’s at all. To solve the problem we discussed cutting the narrow flap of skin that attached my tongue to the base of my mouth, a prospect that didn’t especially appeal to me, and after several years of practice I was finally able to roll with the best of them.

  Even though I was only eighteen when I started working with Pat, I was not in a particularly pristine state. No voice is discovered on a desert island without having been corrupted by the desire to imitate a passing seagull, and mine was no exception. I’d been performing so much and mimicking the mature sounds of my parents and other adults for such a long time that I had developed some bad habits along the way. Pat had to take away my penchant for singing too darkly and maturely, and while she took some things out of my voice, she introduced others to take their place and corrected vocal difficulties through musical means.

  In order to reach even this point in a young singer’s training, a teacher and a student have to develop a terminology, to find a language in which they can easily communicate. The essential component is rapport. The student has to feel cared for, because singing is such an exercise in vulnerability. The voice, after all, is the only instrument that can’t be sold. You can’t say, “I really don’t like this one, so I’m going to trade it in for a Stradivarius.” It’s the only instrument that can’t be returned, exchanged, put in the closet for a wild night on the town, or—fortunately for me—left in the trunk of a taxicab. For that reason it’s also important that teachers be able to navigate through a student’s psychology. Criticism can feel extremely personal when you are the instrument that’s being discussed.

  In most cases, it would take any two people at least six months to build up a relationship that would provide a foundation from which they could really get to work, but Pat and I had to start off faster than that since I had the B-minor Mass to learn. The first thing she said to me after I got the part was, “You’re going to sing this well if it kills both of us.” In the end both parts of her statement were true: I sang well and it nearly killed us. By the day of the performance, after daily sessions with Pat, I was thoroughly drilled, utterly prepared—and had a bad case of laryngitis. Pat came over to my little dorm room with hot chicken soup, and my new friends and roommates bolstered my morale, telling me I could do it and not to worry, while I spent two hours steaming in the shower. Everyone rallied, and the flurry of activity made me feel momentarily that I wasn’t quite the invisible wallflower I thought I was. I adored the attention and went on and sang without the slightest hoarseness.

  But what the day really marked was the start of my performance ritual. Some singers have a rabbit’s foot, and others depend on a lucky undershirt. Luciano Pavarotti needs to find a bent nail onstage before he sings, and heaven help the singer who wears purple in his presence. Renata Tebaldi was always escorted to the wings by her assistant, Tina, who held a picture of Renata’s mother, Giuseppina, which Renata kissed before stepping onstage, as well as a tiny teddy bear whose nose Renata pinched. Lily Pons was always sick to her stomach before a performance. Birgit Nilsson liked a cup of black coffee when she came into the dressing room and a bottle of Tuborg beer at the end of a performance. Several singers depended on the bottle to get them through. Sexual superstitions also abound. One conductor’s wife was supposedly asked, “What’s it like to be married to a famous conductor?” to which she replied, “He won’t the day before, he’s too busy the day of, he’s too tired the day after—and he does three concerts a week!” Not surprisingly,
food rituals are the most common, and they are too numerous to list. I happen to like having a lot of people I’m very close to in a state of complete panic, because, frankly, it relieves me of having to carry the performance anxiety alone. It’s as if there’s a certain amount of worrying that has to be done before any performance, and I can either take it on alone or have other people share the burden with me. For years my sister, Rachelle, was my designated worrier. I would whip her into such a frenzy before a performance, saying, “I can’t do this! I’m terrified!” that she would soon be terrified herself. A few years ago, though, she finally retired from the role, complaining that she’d had it with the worry. She knew by then that I was going to be fine, and she wanted to be able to sit in the audience and watch a performance like everyone else without having her stomach in a knot about whether or not I’d be able to hit my high notes without gagging. In fact, by now I’ve established such a reliable track record that I haven’t been able to find anyone who will take on the job, and the function of misery in performance preparation has come fully back into my court. Maybe I should place an ad: “Seeking opera lover with finely honed hand-wringing skills, paranoid hysterics a plus.” Fortunately, I now tend to save this particular ritual for only the most high-profile engagements, and the rest I am actually able to enjoy.

  Of all the lessons I was taught during my years at Potsdam, one of the things that gave me the most pleasure was learning how to practice. As a child, I had always memorized my part, attending every rehearsal religiously. Practice, though, was something I associated with musical instruments—in my case the piano, the violin, and then the viola. Heaven knows I pulled the string instruments out from under my bed on lesson day and dusted them off, erasing the evidence of not having practiced—as if the teacher wouldn’t know. Now that I was studying music fully, I began to understand that I had to put in my time on my voice the same way I would have done were I in school studying the piano. I headed off for the practice room day after day, the tires of my beloved bicycle, George, crunching through the snow. I always loved walking into that small, spare space. As I made my way through the hall, I could hear people in other rooms singing or playing the violin or practicing whatever instrument they were learning, but that room would be mine alone. I would begin by vocalizing for twenty to thirty minutes, using the list of exercises I had conscientiously copied, and then I would practice whatever song or aria I had been assigned, trying to train my ear to catch my own mistakes. The words “practice” and “practical” are almost one and the same, and the more I worked, the more I saw their similarities. It was here that I began to develop my real passion for singing, for the process of exploring every corner of the enigmatic instrument of the voice. I still think it’s a miracle that anyone learns how to sing well, since the mystery of coordinating involuntary muscles can seem impossible to unravel. It is a beautiful thing to sing in front of an audience, but singing to myself alone in a room, breaking down phrases note by note, word by word, is even more satisfying somehow, and that is how I began to learn.

  Pat’s other great influence on me had to do with repertoire. The vast mountains of music she owned represented unexplored terrain for a musical adventurer, much as my mother’s music cabinet had earlier held similar treasures. Pat challenged me with Petrassi songs, a Brit-ten canticle I adored, chamber music, Haydn and Handel arias in German. Once she saw that I was a good musician who could learn quickly, she moved me on to obscure song literature. One day, she handed me an old-fashioned and weathered piece of sheet music. The title was the “Song to the Moon” by Dvořák, which I learned in English. Little did we know how much this one aria would eventually forge my future. I was like an open well in the ground, waiting there to swallow up anything that came my way. Pat wasn’t just training me vocally; she was also shaping me musically.

  Any point she wanted to make about singing could be backed up by the recordings she had, and she was always encouraging me to listen to them. I would sit in her house in the evenings and make piles of cassette tapes: Janet Baker in Handel, Elly Ameling, Pilar Lorengar, Victoria de los Angeles. I still recall watching my first live television broadcast from the Met—Don Giovanni—curled up on her couch.

  Ameling was my favorite singer then, because the great Dutch artist actually came to Potsdam a few times and performed. I listened to her recordings so intently that her influence could be heard in my singing. But it was also Ameling who, a few years later, taught me the power of a backstage visit, when, still a heart-on-my-sleeve student, I tried to tell her in a single, brief sentence that her singing meant everything in the world to me—even as, completely uninterested, she looked past me to the next person in line. I was crushed. Of course, it’s not fair to expect an artist to respond to the needs of all her fans; but as a result, I have tried to emulate Jan DeGaetani, who would make each person in line feel as if she were the one who had given of herself that night and therefore deserved to be appreciated in kind. Jan would say, “Oh, I adored the recipe you sent!” or “My, how I love that necklace! Where did you find it?” and we would all stutter with delight, unable to imagine how she could be thinking of anything but the beautiful performance she had just given.

  Music was so exciting to me in that period of my life, you would have thought it had been invented the week before. There were two pieces that absolutely obsessed me. One was Anne Trulove’s aria from Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, “No word from Tom.” I would sit in my dorm room every night and listen to it before I went to bed, and then it got to the point where I had to listen to it three or four times in a row. But it was almost like drinking three or four cups of espresso: the energy of that aria and the way it built made it impossible for me to sleep. Its jagged vocal line and its use of English with wrong syllabic accents were so quirky as to seem nearly electric in Judith Raskin’s performance. I learned it and I sang it in a lot of auditions, but it was never that successful for me. People weren’t familiar with the piece at the time; it seemed too long, and I didn’t sing it quite well enough. It was hard for me to know the difference then between the things I madly loved and the things my voice was meant to sing. I operated under the mistaken impression that only an aria that was difficult for me would be impressive in an audition, rather than the correct idea that if the piece was easy, perhaps that meant it was a good fit. Still, this constant stretching ultimately gave me the solid technique I would need to withstand the real rigors of a career. The other piece that lodged itself in my imagination was Jan DeGaetani’s recording of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children. I was so attracted to the mystery of the piece and the vocal writing that the “Todas las tardes en Granada” section—with its marimba tremolo and its exotic-sounding toy piano, DeGaetani’s voice resonating directly into the piano, whispering, then the next moment shrieking—became my favorite piece for a while. Years later, when I had the good fortune to study with Jan and had the chance to get to know her better, it made me admire both the song cycle and the artist all the more.

  Classical wasn’t my only interest in those days. Potsdam was the place where I fell in love with jazz, a love that, for a while at least, I thought would be my life. When I had the chance to audition as a big-band singer my sophomore year, I jumped at it. My mother had taught with Esther Satterfield, who was Chuck Mangione’s soloist when his Rochester-based band was enormously popular. Esther sang “The Land of Make-Believe,” and that song, with all its sweet exhilaration, had always stayed with me. It was the piece I used for my audition, and I would picture myself as Billie Holiday, my hand cradling an old-fashioned silver microphone, a gardenia pinned behind one ear. I had worn out the soundtrack album of Lady Sings the Blues while learning every song from the piano/vocal score. I got the big-band job, which soon led to a weekly engagement with a jazz trio. We performed every Sunday night for two and a half years, developing an incredible following and packing the house week after week.

  Singing with that group was a great release after spending school
time disciplining my breathing and my resonance. Instead, this music was teaching me about performing. Jazz is, of course, incredibly interactive, and every time a given song is played, its actual performance is going to be different. Singing jazz was a great way of letting go of my fears, because the music was just going to happen, and I had to make constant decisions about which direction I was going to go. It also taught me to be much more instinctive. As the vocalist, I quickly discovered it was my responsibility not only to sing but to make the friendly patter between numbers. I could handle the vertiginous high notes and the endlessly extemporaneous melodies, but simple sentences like “How’s everybody doing tonight?” proved to be almost too much for me. Pat O’Leary, the bass player, would lean forward and smack me on the shoulder. “Say something!” he would hiss. “Tell a joke!”

  A joke? No one had mentioned that in my job description. The worst of it was that at every performance it had to be a different joke, a new direction in my one-sided conversation. (“Pretty cold out there tonight, eh, Potsdam?”) It was perfectly acceptable for me to sing the same songs week after week, but my unwritten monologues expired after a single use. The audience was like a shy blind date that expected me to make all the conversation, and so out of sheer necessity I did, but never with any flair. There are a lot of different ways to capture your audience’s heart, but learning how to talk to them wasn’t a bad place to start.

  Jazz was also a perfect opportunity to experiment vocally. Pat came to see me a few times and during the breaks would say, “Do you know you just sang a high D above high C above high C?” Pat had perfect pitch, so she knew exactly what I was doing even when I didn’t. I could hit those high notes as a jazz singer, mostly because I had no concept of just how high they were at the time. I was simply improvising. The trouble was that I couldn’t yet manage the high notes I actually needed for the soprano repertoire. Anything above the staff, from G to high C, was still difficult, at best. These pitches were inconsistent, still strident and shrill.