Something Is Always on Fire
Page 6
What do I mean by “methodical” abandon? You don’t just show up and take ownership of something you have no rights to. Dues must be paid. Research must be done. Technique must be mastered. Languages must be learned. Recitals must be programmed with an eye to the listener AND the interpreter. But. Fun must be had. No singer who has made it to a certain level of success ever sets aside his or her methodology. That would be folly. But our technique serves as an invisible off-ramp to Fun Town.
Some singers need to work at better covering up all that technical thinking. Paying audience members don’t want to see it. That’s not the “humanity” they’re after. Other singers need to rein in the emotion and trust that focusing it will actually make things stronger. Clearer. It comes down to knowing what kind of artist you are, finding repertoire that supports that and then becoming the only singer anyone calls to sing it. Because you’re the one who sings it with committed, focused, methodical abandon.
Young singers, take comfort in the fact that you’re not likely to have a wealth of endless repertoire through which you feel both connected and liberated. It’s rare that your technical strengths and personal preferences intersect perfectly, but when it does happen, it benefits soloist and listener alike. That repertoire for me is Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, Ravel’s Shéhérazade, the role of Jenny in Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Les dialogues des Carmélites. It’s worth noting that I learned all but one of these works in university (but you’d have to torture me before I’d tell you which one).
Generally, singers think instrumentalists are awkward and bloodless, and instrumentalists think singers are self-centred and stupid. Both sides are a tiny bit right. But it helps no one to perpetuate these stereotypes, because the fact is, we need each other. Not just for support but also because we could be hiring—or not hiring—each other in the not-too-distant future and karma’s a bitch. So play nice! Plus, in some form or another everyone’s paying for something: an education, a performance, a lesson, a composition. So we really should be striving to get our money’s worth out of whatever step on the ladder of (ongoing) music education we find ourselves, because the art is going to outlast us all anyway. We really should throw the biggest party we can while we can.
How do you know whether you’re good enough to really pursue the life and career of a soloist? It’s an interesting thing to contemplate, because at its worst the life of a successful soloist is isolating, unconventional and exhausting, while the career of a successful soloist is relentless, tedious and, ultimately, inconsequential. Lived as separate realities, you’d be staring down the barrel of a challenge, but marry the two? And you’ve just about put the nail in your own coffin. No one needs help surviving the high points of a career, because everything’s humming along smoothly. But at some point (likely several points) the chips will inevitably be down, and not surprisingly, many do not have the stomach for it. Whether you go on to super-stardom or not (and you likely won’t), my advice is to hold fast to what is happening now. Grab it by the balls and run as far as you can with it—wherever you are and in whatever capacity you find yourself making music or living your life.
We know now that the future economy will be built by creative minds. There will be decades of a different kind of innovative self-sufficiency, divorced from the “job market” in which our parents shopped and financed our lives. Though it may seem like a consolation prize, it’s not. My prayer is that the social pendulum will swing away from a culture of people who go to the same workplace every day to generate the same rhetoric that’s gotten us to where we are right now. Instead, let it swing toward the cultivation of minds that produce sustainable, innovative solutions for stability. A music education does a lot to set a person up on that trajectory.
Don’t look to me as an example of what could happen. I’m the example that proves the rule. It is not normal that I knew already in elementary school that singing would be my life; or that my journey, as God would ordain it, would support that initial hypothesis, because—save for that singular kernel—nothing has turned out how I thought it would. However, by putting one belief-filled boot in front of the other and going to university to study and perform with other classical musicians my own age, I would get my long-awaited boot camp, my breeding ground and my safe space where I’d finally get to talk about music all the time.
It will come as a shock to no one when I confess to being a very competitive person. But Mary Morrison has never indulged any petty comparisons, and I began to understand that it was best to run my own race. In her studio we were encouraged to listen to our fellow singers in order to learn; to attend masterclasses; and to audit courses we weren’t eligible for and for which we would receive no credit. To this day I am so grateful she endorsed my thirst for contact with people who were better than I was and who knew more than I did. In particular, she prescribed a high exposure to the teaching of Douglas Bodle and Greta Kraus. Professor Bodle taught the class focusing on repertoire from the oratorio genre—works for orchestra, choir and soloists, normally set to biblical texts or a Christian mass. He was an incredible pianist, but due to a childhood illness that had damaged his vocal chords, he could speak no louder than a stage whisper. No matter. He said everything he needed to say with the piano. When you’re taught by someone who can’t actually generate pitch, you learn that music is just as much about intention as it is about sound.
Mary was also keen for us to audit the great German Lied coach Greta Kraus. By the time I got to sit silently in her class, Professor Kraus was a frail, hunched woman with such a profound German accent that I could hardly understand her. But my ears eventually adjusted. She had coached Teresa Stratas, Douglas Bodle, Russell Braun and Mary Morrison—once again I was learning from the teacher of a teacher. Quite frankly, there was nothing about German Lieder this prophetess didn’t know.
With both Professor Bodle and Professor Kraus I had the experience of being in the presence of people who oozed knowledge, expertise and experience. It was like oratorio and German Lied were, respectively, the marrow in their bones. I’m struck with gratitude for the guidance I received in an unbroken chain of musical tutelage stretching all the way back to age seven.
But Mary was always my destiny.
Our relationship is about the work. Though I knew that her husband, Harry Freedman, was a renowned composer, I was in my third year of school before I realized Mary had three daughters. Somehow I’d always imagined her and her husband gallivanting around Europe, attending concerts and performing; never being weighed down by something as mundane and pedestrian as procreation.
Mary’s classes began with a half-hour warm-up, which at first made me itch to get to the repertoire already. I still regarded my voice as a natural gift that would always be there. It has taken me over twenty years to see the benefit of this essential step, and thirty to understand its absolute necessity, because now if I don’t warm up, my voice doesn’t work. Today before going onstage I’ll play a recording of one of my warm-ups with Mary and go through the warm-up note by note. I send Mary my recordings from all over the world to make sure I’m on track, and when I’m in Toronto, I make regular pilgrimages to her office in the basement of the U of T Faculty of Music, where she still teaches. Mary is my yardstick both for quality and for work ethic. Though she always encouraged me to collect “tools for the tool box” from other teachers, I always come back to her because I truly love and respect her.
As a teenager my singing was torso based, to the extent that I didn’t connect my voice to my body at all. Now I understand that my legs, my knees, my feet and the soles of my feet are completely involved in what comes out of my throat.
I used to fidget while singing without knowing it, a nervous tick: rubbing my fingers together at my sides or playing with my dress in a way that was distracting. With Mary’s tutelage I worked hard to streamline what I do onstage, to put all my focus into my voice—and on my face—and to
take complete control of my body as my instrument. In fact, when I first sang opera and had to actually move, I felt like I was betraying Mary! Of course, in opera you have to get to that stupid candelabra or whatever. You have to get in or out of the bed. You have to get through the door. Ideally, you want each movement to have purpose and seem natural (and not be in slow motion!), but thanks to Mary I’ve always maintained a stillness within myself while taking care of these important housekeeping items onstage.
Mary has tried, without success, to change my talking voice, which sits quite low. She knows if I raised it a few notches, that would be easier on me as a soprano. I’d have a smaller distance to go when I warm up. Yet she also understands that I’m not a singing human but a human who sings. She is all about solutions and digs tirelessly, exploring new territory, until she finds what is needed. With Mary it is the pursuit and not the destination: the persistence and insistence to get things right. Mary has given her students wings, though she would never think that about herself because she isn’t a romantic. Those of us who are worthy of her hang on to her every word, even though her actual goal is to equip us with tools that will make us independent. Those ears of Mary’s were—and are—a wonder. She combines that gift with patience and a serving heart, though she’s capable of kicking students out of her studio when necessary. She has now been teaching so long that she may be a hundred and twenty—but, Mary, you still got it!
One afternoon midway through my second university year, Mary had a surprise for me. “You’ve been chosen to workshop a new opera called Beatrice Chancy. I told the producers they could send the score,” she said.
At the time I didn’t understand what most of those words meant, but it didn’t sound like I was auditioning or even making a choice. It sounded like it was happening and I was to board the train because it was leaving the station.
Beatrice Chancy, as I discovered, was being staged by the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, founded by artistic co-directors Dáirine Ní Mheadhra and John Hess for the commissioning of original Canadian chamber opera. The composer was James Rolfe, the librettist George Elliott Clarke. It was a reinvention of The Cenci, a play by Percy Bysshe Shelley, based on a true story in sixteenth-century Italy. The Canadian production, transplanted to Nova Scotia in 1901, told the tragic tale of Beatrice Chancy, a slave who murders her abusive father and master for raping her and is then hanged with her co-conspirators.
John Hess had apparently asked Mary, a close professional friend, “Do you happen to have a young student from the Maritimes whom you could recommend for this? Oh, and maybe she could be of Afro-Canadian descent.”
Beatrice Chancy, intended as a minimal production, was very much in the gestation stage when I came to it, necessitating the trial, or “workshop,” process. Our first workshop was held at the historic Front Street rehearsal space of the Canadian Opera Company. A few of us, including the African-American soprano Christina Clark and the (white) Canadian baritone Gregory Dahl, were to sing excerpts from the opera, to be recorded for potential investors and donators. Later we would move to a rehearsal studio in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood. As funds were raised, a small orchestral ensemble was added, with Dáirine Ní Mheadhra as conductor and John Hess on piano.
At first we performers sang the roles interchangeably. Sometimes I would be Lustra, Beatrice’s stepmother; sometimes another slave; and sometimes Beatrice. I assumed the lead would be awarded to Christina Clark, a phenomenal singer perhaps ten years older than me, tiny like a gorgeous doll, with her hair pulled neatly back in a chignon. I remember listening to her perform Beatrice and thinking, Wow, that is so hard. I’m so glad I’m not saddled with that! I hoped I might be given the shadowy mezzo role of Lustra, the stepmother. But that part would eventually be sung by the lovely Lori Klassen.
It just goes to show that you never know when God will play a joke on you, because I was offered the role of Beatrice.
What? It seemed insane. Obviously, I was going to do it, because it was a huge opportunity, daunting though it seemed. With Beatrice I had the unique opportunity to see an opera built from the ground up. The creators, James and George, often attended workshops and made changes as they heard their words and music sung from actual mouths. We were also encouraged to suggest ways to clarify our parts and flesh out our characters—allowing us singers to feel like a valued part of the process. Since the experience of Beatrice, I’ve jumped at any opportunity to work with a living composer. (I am also amassing a pile of tough questions for Beethoven and Bach and Duparc.)
Director Michael Cavanagh gave all his performers a good reason for each piece of stage business instead of leaving us to overact the way opera singers so often do. In our defence, opera singing is hardly natural, and hyperbole is the engine of most operatic narratives—we’re singing at the top of our range while taking forty minutes to die. I defy anyone to make that look natural. Consequently, I’ve learned to appreciate directors who extrapolate from this grandiose art form or even play against it in a way that highlights its believability and relatability. I am also grateful that Mary always stressed singing as communication rather than as performance. My favourite stage directors—Michael Cavanagh, Michael Albano, Johannes Erath, Leonard Foglia, James Darrah—all emphasize, in their way, that the secret to looking halfway natural onstage is to never add importance to the mundane by executing any action in slow motion, and to time your reactions for after the text has been spoken. That may sound simple enough, but when you’re winding up for your big high C or singing a zillion notes per bar, remembering to shut the door behind you, place a prop for a colleague or to even act at all might be the furthest thing from your mind.
That said, no matter how high or low, fast or slow the score calls for you to sing, I still maintain that a large part of singing is glorified speech, an extension of who I am or whom I’m playing. As classical singers we get to have a soundtrack for our actions, with each nuance timed to music and every syllable put in its place. As I lean in to the uncertainty of life in general, it has actually become a huge relief to know—in my work, at least—precisely what is coming and when, so that I can craft the musical and dramatic moment for maximum impact.
With Beatrice Chancy, I also engaged with a physicality that forced me out of my head. Singing is a full-body experience; that’s especially true of opera. Shifting your weight; locking your knees; how you angle your hips and head; the placement of your sternum; the tension in your shoulders, upper arms, jaw—they all affect your technique. If you’re aware of this at an early stage, you’re ahead of the game, though it’s a continuing process because you have to adjust to the body you wake up with each new day. After thirty years I sometimes still have a shaky tongue, an issue connected to sympathetic tension in my jaw and larynx; but I’m aware of it, and I police it if it gets in my way. There’s no shortage of fires to put out, but you have to know yourself, have a set of ears you can trust and pick your battles.
We were very fortunate in our rehearsal time—a year and a half, from workshop to premiere. Beatrice’s music, its narrative, its characters lodged themselves in my brain, where they continue to live. Though I wasn’t raised in a black community and had never identified as black, the character of Beatrice allowed me to live inside a black skin as I soaked up the whole theatrical experience. When the director asked if I would braid my hair for the production, I thought I’d won the lottery. I’d always wanted braids, but they were extremely expensive and time-consuming. For people with “white” hair, it may be difficult to understand what a huge experience those braids became for me. For the first time I had hair that lay flat to my head and reached to my shoulders; hair that fell to either side of my face from a middle part; hair that I could toss or push behind my ears. Black hair can be very coarse and inflexible, with such thick shafts that it won’t do any of that without the weight of braids. Ironically, though braid extensions are traditionally a hairstyle for black people, they made me feel as if I had long, flowy hair.
I chose to cut off the chemically straightened hair, even though I had no idea what weird shape my head might be. And that’s how I came to have my famous Afro, with all the political implications and cultural assumptions that came with it. But the world continued to rotate on its axis, and I was able to lead a freer life because of my choice. I could swim when I wanted. I could go out in the rain. I didn’t have to tie up my hair when I went to bed to keep it from breaking off. When I stayed somewhere overnight, I didn’t have to take a million styling products. And my scalp could finally breathe.