Stand Up Straight and Sing! (10 page)

At the time, I had no idea that this kind of practice had anything to do with my ancestors, but once I became aware of the connection, I felt a special pride in it.

In any church, it was possible to find at least one star singer, most often a woman. In our church, the senior choir was anchored by one Mrs. Elizabeth Golden, with a voice that equaled her name. She had easily a three-octave range, with some extra high notes at the top of her magnificent voice. She was marvelous; her voice was strong yet gentle, and she clearly enjoyed the joyful noise she made. Her pride of place in the senior choir was the end of the first row on the right-hand side as one faced the choir stand. We all admired her. It was she who guided the children’s chorus. We all wanted to grow up to be able to sing like Mrs. Golden.

Our church’s missionaries group had their own star, Sister Childs, who would bring forth a song at any point in the service that suited her, whether she was on the printed program or not. I admired this immensely. She simply acted “as the Spirit moved her,” and no one ever dared to ask her not to interrupt the proceedings with her singing. The spirit seemed to move her most especially on Communion Sundays, the first and third Sundays of the month. This meant that on top of the already long regular service, extra time was given to the ritual of bread and wine in remembrance of the Last Supper of Christ. I can still see Sister Childs in my memory’s eye, in her white dress worn by all the missionary ladies, sitting over in the corner just below the children’s chorus platform, and beginning her singing from the seat in which she sat, always. She would begin first with a bit of rocking back and forth in her seat. When she was truly taken over by the Spirit, she would rise and sing. That was all there was to it. She had the floor and would hold it until she felt like sitting down again. With one hand waving a white lace handkerchief in the air, she would throw her head back in ecstasy and sing:
In the morning, soon in the morning, when the clouds shall roll away, I’ll be happy, soon in the morning, when the clouds shall roll away.
Soon there would be the clapping of hands in rhythm to her singing and the congregation’s encouragement to “go on and sing, Sister Childs, tell the whole story!” She was happy to do just that.

We could all well do with a little Sister Childs inside of us from time to time.

THAT IS THE BEAUTY
of music. No matter the genre, it is spiritual—a ministry—and the rhythms, the lyrics, the pacing, the dramatic content, the delivery, each of these things has the exquisite power to touch people, to bring them immense joy. I was about twelve years old when I began to understand this. It happened as I was beginning to understand the Christian religion more deeply. I came upon the principles of Hinduism in the school library, right there in the pages of a Childcraft encyclopedia, which I read voraciously. I thought that Hinduism sounded like a really interesting religion, and found within its tenets the idea from my backyard a few years earlier: reincarnation. Perhaps I could come back to earth as a tree after all. As I understood it from my very young perspective, practicing Hinduism meant embracing the idea that God wants us to be happy and that our reason for being on earth is to be happy and to share that joy with everybody we meet. I thought it sounded really wonderful, particularly since in our church, happiness didn’t always seem to be the point of Sunday-morning services—at least not after the pastor had his way in the pulpit. It seemed to me that the minister thought his service was a success only if everybody in the congregation was in tears and the sermon ended with everyone incredibly emotional. And I thought I wanted this other kind of faith, the happier state that I thought Hindu practice produced, as my own. And so, as was my wont when there was something on my mind, I brought this new idea up at home, during dinnertime.

There is no doubt that some Christian parents, upon hearing something like this from their child’s mouth, would have had an unmistakably negative reaction. But my parents were very patient; they had a lot of children who had a lot of ideas. My mother and father always encouraged us to say what we were thinking. Pronouncements such as mine were accepted, but they had to be accompanied with solid information and an opinion, the latter being of utmost importance to my father. I can remember many instances when we would sit in the living room listening to him give a long sermon about some social or political subject that was upsetting him, only to have him take a breath and look into a six-year-old’s eyes and say something like “Now what do
you
think?” Be clear: one needed to have an answer, which could never be “I don’t know.” We were expected to have an opinion and to be able to express it as best we could. We didn’t have to agree with every part of the sermon, should we have had enough courage to say so, but we did have to have some thought on the matter.

So my parents were not surprised that I had discovered Hinduism and thought it would be a fine religion for us. They were curious to know, though, just how much I knew about the subject. “Now, what do you know about Hinduism?” they asked. “And where in the world, particularly, is this practiced?” I didn’t hesitate to head back to the encyclopedia for more information, and in my research, I learned a little about India but also about that state of joy—that wonderful feeling that God wants for us. In my own innocent way, I wanted joy to be expressed in a way that I could understand. I did not know anything about crying with joy; I thought tears always indicated sadness.

Though I certainly came to have much more knowledge and understanding of the subjects of Christianity and Hinduism, reincarnation and joy, than I did when I was on the cusp of being a teenager, I’ve never stopped being curious about spirituality, religion, and cultural differences that seem to prompt the way we interact with one another. Energy is alive. On those occasions when there is that exchange of positive energy between myself and what is happening onstage and those watching and listening and receiving it, it is in those moments that my spirit thrives. The connection with the audience is there as clearly in the depth of silence that exists as in the applause.

I was encouraged to trust in this energy, in the secret of that silence, the power of stillness and slow movement, in my first production with Robert Wilson, which was called
Great Day in the Morning
, and took place in Paris in 1982. It was here that I learned the “for a lifetime” lesson not to allow the audience’s response to determine the tempo of my presentation.

Great Day in the Morning
was, in many ways, a piece before its time. The aim of the production was to demonstrate how Spirituals were created in the lives of the enslaved—in the course of a day’s work, on a long walk to church, during a moment of joy with one’s family and loved ones. Alas, the audiences that came to view our work in the first nights of the performance were not pleased. Either they were there to see what they had come to expect of a Robert Wilson production, sans someone singing, or to witness a recital of mine. Of course, this production was neither of these things, and word spread in Paris as to what was truly afoot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and how unhappy our early patrons were (which Parisian audiences have no difficulty at all expressing: cue Stravinsky’s
Le sacre du printemps
and the riot that occurred at its 1913 premiere in that very theater).

But by the end of the run of
Great Day in the Morning,
the audience had turned their own stillness, their own listening, into eruptions of approval following the final song in our presentation, “Amazing Grace.” Under Bob Wilson’s direction, I sang this unaccompanied while pouring, over the course of a full four minutes, a pitcher of water, lighted from above and below, onto a Lucite table, the water and light flowing seamlessly from pitcher to tabletop to floor, the audience becoming a part of that continuous stream. We had, in the end, become one.

One still encounters people who believe mistakenly that “Amazing Grace” is a Spiritual. While discussing the song with a journalist in London recently, I was stunned to find that he knew nothing of the eighteenth-century British slave-ship captain John Newton, a devout nonbeliever, who saw the transportation of a free people from their own land into bondage in the United Kingdom and beyond as a means of making a living. Newton’s human sensibilities were kept apart from this endeavor. As it happens when the universe is determined to teach us a lesson once and for all, a mighty storm developed on the sea during one of the captain’s crossings from Africa to Europe. John Newton was certain that he would not only lose his precious cargo, but his own life as well.

In that moment, in that instance of clarity with himself and with his trade, he wrote the words that the entire world now sings:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind, but now I see.

Some claim the melody for “Amazing Grace” to have originated in John Newton’s home country of Scotland. I choose to think that the meter, the shape of the melody itself and its resemblance to so much West African folk music, rose from the bowels of a slave ship, with human beings arranged so as to accommodate as many as possible on a single crossing, but still living and breathing through the miracle of a song, a melody, humming, as there was often no common language, yet making music from the deepest parts of their beings. Living energy, undimmed by even such circumstances, from one human being to another.

WHEN WE REALIZE
that energy is truly a living thing and that it travels a room as easily as it does a whole town—or an ocean—we come to understand that our thoughts have power and consequence, that we can extend loving kindness through positive thoughts, through openness of mind and spirit. And well we should! When an audience is engaged truly in a performance, this offering of positive energy can make all the difference in elevating the level of the performance from something that is merely good to something that is extraordinary. I do think that a performer, in order to remain at a high level of artistic achievement, must feed the spirit continually. The exchange of energy between performer and audience replenishes both.

I am having a wonderful time with music that has been playing in my ear practically all my life but which I, until six or seven years ago, hardly ever performed.

The wish to add more music to an already long list of repertoire became apparent to me during my research in preparing the festival for Carnegie Hall that took place in March of 2009:
Honor! A Celebration of the African American Cultural Legacy
. The idea of the program, as suggested in the title, was to honor the cultural contributions of African Americans to our world. From the time that Clive Gillinson, the artistic and executive director of Carnegie Hall, extended this amazing invitation to me in autumn 2006, I spent goodly amounts of time listening to recordings of the greats—in a range of musical genres—and decided then and there that I wanted to feel this music in my very being. Thus was born my first solo CD in about ten years,
Roots: My Life, My Song.

I thought it vital to share these songs with an audience. Studying and performing the music of the great Europeans is a grand pleasure in my life, an honor and a privilege. Adding jazz and songs from the American musical theater simply expanded and enlivened my own artistic growth. Offering even wider attention to the Spiritual was natural to me and relevant, as I’d grown up hearing my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts humming and singing these songs to themselves as they tended to their daily lives. When all is said and done, I am African, and I cannot think of a single reason why I should not celebrate this to the hilt. So when I sing a Spiritual, I am telling a most personal story. These cries, these longings, these testaments of faith are a part of my own DNA, and my goal is always that the audience understands the music in the same way that I understand it.

In addition, I wish to help audiences appreciate the difference between a Spiritual—I use a capital
S
on purpose—and a gospel song. Whereas the whole world is filled with music of a sacred or spiritual nature, a Spiritual can only have been created by my ancestors, the slaves brought to a new land starting in the early 1600s, and their descendants up until 1865, the historical period of slavery in the United States. There were no trombones and Hammond organs to be had by them and no composers other than the heart longings of a people in bondage singing their way through the most challenging of human experiences. “Singing through,” not “singing themselves out” of the horror.

The blues came next, and then more instruments helped bring jazz into being. These new instruments, first abhorred by churchgoers, soon found their way into the church, where Spirituals, in a new presentation, became the first gospel songs. Therefore, it is possible to take a Spiritual and turn it into a gospel song, but one cannot do the reverse. The Spirituals came first. The gospel song is often a modern version of a well-known Spiritual.

If we are lucky as performers, the music and spirit together reveal themselves before our audiences, creating an added dimension to the performance—an added dimension over which we have absolutely no control. For any undefined reason one can be ill at ease during a performance, or maybe the connection with the audience can be so visceral, so powerful, that some are inspired to come backstage and say something like “I know that you were singing that song especially for me tonight. I really felt that you were looking straight at me,” when in fact, you had been conscious of no such thing. When this happens, I am grateful for it. We are human beings, and this kind of connection sustains us in our humanity, and we are better for it.

Indeed, such connections become all the more profound when the presentation is in a sacred space. Growing up, churchgoing and church activities made up the fabric of my daily life, and so I have always found singing in a church, in the great cathedrals of the world, to be experiences at once awe-inspiring and wondrously comforting. The grandeur of the spaces has never overtaken the sense of joy of being there. I seem to always know my way around these wonderful places. There are not the usual dressing rooms, and the pulpit more often than not serves as the stage. Lighting rigs are not often used, nor diffusion gels to flatter the face. And yet, somehow, the rector, pastor, or other church officials always feel compelled to make remarks prior to the performance. In other words, it’s just like home. My experiences in some of the world’s most beautiful, sacred spaces are every bit as treasured as they are memorable. In some, I sing, in some, I take part in fellowship, in others still, I mourn. I count each experience as a blessing.