Stand Up Straight and Sing! (7 page)

Mrs. Sanders and I prepared my songs for the competition. And soon enough, we were on a train heading from Augusta to Philadelphia. I was more than excited about this adventure; it was utter joy. All of my father’s siblings and their families lived in the Philadelphia area and so I had made this particular journey with my family on a few occasions. But this was different; somehow, even more exciting.

The age group for the Marian Anderson competition was sixteen to thirty, a very wide span, and I was on the way to being sixteen, but not quite there. So I should not have been allowed to participate, and I was competing against singers who were up to twice my age, some of whom were already singing professionally. Others, too, had a great deal more experience than I did. But I was too excited and happy to worry about these things. When my time to perform arrived, with Mrs. Sanders at the piano, I sang Schubert’s “Leise flehen meine Lieder” (“My songs lie gently on the wind”) in English—I had not yet studied German—and “Stride la vampa” (“The rising blades of fire”) from Verdi’s
Il Trovatore,
since one of the requirements was to include a Verdi aria in the presentation, and the sheet music for this aria happened to be available at the local music store in Augusta. I promise, this was why this particular aria, about a woman burned at the stake, found its way into the repertoire of a fifteen-year-old. I laugh out loud at the thought! I can still see the orangey-red and white cover of that sheet music.

Needless to say, I did not win a prize at the competition, but I was fortunate in meeting the sister of Marian Anderson, who told me that she “wished to keep an eye on me,” and encouraged me to reenter the competition once I had had vocal training. This was good enough for me. I was much too delighted by the whole experience to feel any disappointment at failing to win a prize.

Since the day following the competition was a Friday, we decided that on the way back to Augusta, we would stop in Washington, D.C., where we both had relatives and where Mrs. Sanders was acquainted with the associate dean of the School of Music at Howard University. As it happens, Dean Mark Fax had been chair of the music department at Paine College in Augusta when Mrs. Sanders was a student there. Upon our arrival in Washington, we went straight from Union Station to the Howard University campus, where we met with Dean Fax in the school’s College of Fine Arts building.

After meeting for a few minutes with Dean Fax, he suggested that we visit with the head of the voice department, and he ushered us upstairs, where the renowned professor Carolyn V. Grant was in the middle of a graduate class on vocal anatomy and pedagogy. Too excited to be nervous, we waited outside her classroom until Professor Grant, no doubt wondering who we were, came to the door. After she received an explanation from Dean Fax, she welcomed Mrs. Sanders and me into her classroom, and suggested that perhaps I would sing one of the songs I had performed in Philadelphia. There was a piano in the classroom, and I had no thought of warming up or concern as to whether or not I was dressed properly for the occasion, and without further ado, I offered one of my songs. I was ever ready for a performance. Afterward, Professor Grant thanked us and asked that we wait for her outside the classroom.

It was not long before her class ended and Professor Grant was standing before me, saying that she had been pleased with what she heard. She asked my age, and whether or not I was a good student. “Oh, yes,” I answered enthusiastically. “I am on the dean’s list in high school.” Then and there, as amazing as it sounds, she told me that if, indeed, I had good grades in high school—and my high school transcript would have to bear this out—then after I completed high school, she wished to teach me at Howard. To say that I was flabbergasted would be the understatement of all time.

We called my parents with this amazing news, and without seeing a single relative, we took the train back to Augusta.

The train ride home was a blur of excitement and anxiety. What had just happened? I had been to Philadelphia, had an enlightening time of it, had not won a prize, but then had met Dean Fax and Professor Grant at Howard University, all within a very short period of time. My mind was swimming. Had I truly been invited to become one of this storied professor’s students? Dean Fax had told us how revered she was as a teacher. Oh my, it was all too wonderful.

I was so happy, the following Monday morning, to tell Principal Reese all that had transpired on our trip. He was no more disappointed than I that I had not won a prize at the competition. The invitation to Howard, he said, was a far better prize for me.

Now, even in the midst of all this excitement, I was still harboring the desire to pursue a career in medicine. But I decided not to bring this up with Principal Reese. It did not seem a good time to speak about it.

My parents were, of course, thrilled at the prospect of my going to Howard University, and totally overjoyed when, just a few weeks later, word arrived that not only would I have the opportunity to attend, but that on the recommendations of my two new best friends there, Dean Fax and Professor Grant, I was being offered a full-tuition scholarship. I did apply to other universities in the course of my senior year in high school, just for the fun of it. I found myself in happy disbelief that I was accepted wherever I had applied, though none of the others offered me the scholarship assistance that Howard had.

The summer before I entered the university, I spent a great deal of unnecessary time packing my trunk. My mother would walk through my bedroom while I pretended to have so much to do to get ready to travel to Washington. She knew well that I was feeling torn. Part of me wanted to study in the College of Liberal Arts at Howard, in preparation for medical school. Yet I also held the “bird in the hand” prize of the College of Fine Arts. In her typical fashion, my mother stated something like “I’m not trying to tell you what to do, dear, but you do have a full-tuition scholarship to the School of Music.” We both had a little laugh at that.

I’m most grateful for that not-so-subtle nudge. You have to wonder how many parents would have encouraged a child to pursue music over medicine.

AT LAST, THE FALL
of 1963 approached. I would arrive again at Union Station in Washington, this time accompanied by my father, only a few days after the great March on Washington and one of the most renowned speeches of all time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” Even then, the irony of this now historical speech’s title and my arrival in Washington was apparent to me: a dream.

At Howard, I arrived to find that even though I had been accepted to study vocal performance, I would still have to sing for the entire voice department, as only Professor Grant and Dean Fax had heard me sing those many months ago. This is a normal part of the entrance process there. First-year music students present themselves before faculty in determining their two primary courses of study. I recall my uneasiness when waiting for my appointment outside the door to the audition room, I spotted another student holding a stack of music scores in what seemed to be about eighteen different languages.

“Do you know all those songs?” I asked nervously.

“Yes,” she answered confidently.

“Are you going to sing your Schubert songs in German?”

“Oh, yes!” she said matter-of-factly.

I thought I might as well go home right then and there. I still knew only the one Schubert song, and I was not going to sing it in German. I didn’t know that anyone expected me to. When the time came, I sang the music I had prepared, including my Schubert song in English. The faculty was pleased with me and asked me all kinds of questions about my education in Augusta. I was happy to talk about the many teachers who had supported me throughout my public school education. I also sat for an initial piano examination, which went so well that I was allowed to choose piano and music education as my second subjects.

It was Carolyn V. Grant who helped me to find and know my own voice. She had been teaching for about forty-five years when I came to her, and there was nothing about singing that had not come across her desk at some point. It was so wonderful to work with a person who, though a trained singer herself, was dedicated to teaching, who
wanted
to be a teacher, rather than a performer. Professor Grant was a person who, from the time she was a student studying music, wanted to teach other people to sing and to sing properly because she felt very strongly that, somehow, we were getting away from the understanding that the sounds we make as singers should be produced naturally. She insisted that there were not any tricks to the understanding of the science of one’s own physiology as it relates to breath control, posture, and the functioning of the whole body in support of the respiratory system. For her, it was essential for singers to have this understanding and knowledge, and to draw from it over the course of their careers.

I remember her saying to me after my first lesson: “Hmmm, underneath all that breath is a rather good instrument, and I am going to help you find it.” Those were her exact words.

Professor Grant’s understanding of vocal production remains with me to this day. It was she who taught me that the only “mystery” to singing has to do with the fact that each and every singer has a different sound, one that’s personal and unique. I was absolutely amazed when she explained to me that the timbre—the “color” of the voice—is fixed practically at birth. This has to do with our own physiological makeup—the shape of the nasal cavity, the lung capacity, the singer’s strength and stamina, the height of the inside of one’s mouth, the natural position of the roof of the mouth, the height of the uvula, the width of the nose, the distance between the end of the chin and the beginning of the nose, the distance between the end of the chin and the beginning of the collarbone, and the height of the cheekbones and their position near the eyes. All of these things with which you are born determine the timbre of your voice. Each of these things, when paired with one’s intelligence and musical understanding, is what sets us apart as singers, one from the other. It was this that Professor Grant insisted that I understand—that I learn to trust. And I was an eager student. I was especially taken with the anatomy component. I consoled myself with the fact that I was learning a little science even though medical school was not in my future. But it was equally important that I was not trying to collect a string of opera arias and operatic roles, goals that seemed to occupy the thoughts of my fellow students to no end. Instead, I wanted to know what Professor Grant knew.

And so we spent a lot of time learning how to take in a breath and allow it to come out slowly and evenly, in the same way practiced by singers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in Italy. One such exercise involved standing with a lighted candle about fifteen inches from the mouth. If you could exhale without blowing out the candle, you were thought to be breathing with control and evenly. As you can imagine, this is not an easy thing to do, but I did it for months with Professor Grant. I still work on breath control all these many years later, I assure you. My colleagues often laugh at me when they recognize the vocal exercises I use to warm up prior to a performance—exercises developed by nineteenth-century master teachers they know from their own studies, such as Panofka and Francesco Lamperti. These vocal gymnastics work for me in preparing for a performance. So does the practice of hatha yoga. These are things I have done all of my performing life, and I still practice them on a daily basis. They are the core of my vocal strength. I have Professor Grant to thank for this.

She was a real Francophile, so my repertoire was full of the music of French composers. There was still more to learn after my four wonderful years at Howard, however, and it was Professor Grant who encouraged me to study with someone new. She promised that I would always be her student and she would always be my teacher, but she wished me to broaden my musical training beyond her studio. This was a generous and thoughtful consideration on her part, and during the summer semester that followed my graduation from Howard, I was very fortunate to find myself under the tutelage of Madame Alice Duschak at the Peabody Conservatory. It was she who helped develop my interest in the great German and Austrian romantics, music that would become an integral part of my repertoire. Mme. Duschak was happy that I had, as she called it, a “classical vocal line” in my singing, but she wanted to see more drama, more daring. And so she set about helping me explore repertoire that would call on me to employ new aspects of the craft of singing.

One of the first songs she assigned to me was Johannes Brahms’s “Auf dem Kirchhofe” (“In the Cemetery”). The first part of the song describes a rainstorm, before giving way to an almost hymn-like rendering of thoughts of eternal peace. Dramatic, indeed. I also have Mme. Duschak to thank for assigning me the second aria from Richard Wagner’s
Tannhäuser.
“You already have the breath control for it,” she insisted. This aria would become the basis for every vocal competition that I entered in my early twenties. It is nothing as flashy as the character Elisabeth’s first aria, “Dich, teure Halle,” but most singers would admit that this second aria, “Allmächt’ge Jungfrau” (“O Holiest of Virgins”), is a more difficult aria to sing due mainly to the fact that one is accompanied in the orchestra only by the brass section, and the breath control required is significant.

An aside: It happens that in my first year at Howard University, as a member of the concert choir, I participated in a performance of Beethoven’s
Fidelio
at Constitution Hall, the largest concert hall in Washington, D.C. The women members of the Howard choir were singing in what is actually a men’s chorus, an effort to produce the fuller sound required in such a vast performance space. Both of the lead singers, Hans Beirer, performing Florestan, and Gladys Kuchta, in the role of Leonore, were from the Deutsche Oper Berlin. There is no way that anyone could have so much as dreamed that less than seven years later, I would make my operatic debut at this very opera house, with this very tenor, in the lead of Wagner’s
Tannhäuser,
and that I would perform the female lead role of Elisabeth!