The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (11 page)

In fact I was obviously overdoing the covering, because when I came back to New York everyone kept saying to me, “What happened to your voice?”

“What happened to your voice?” is not a question a singer wants to hear.

What had happened was that not only was I working in a repertoire I couldn’t master, but I was now trying to make beautiful sounds that were more suited to lieder in a small room than to opera. The result was that my voice had shrunk and moved to the back of my throat. Now I had a lot of work ahead of me to undo all the work I’d been doing. The confusing part was that this new sound I was making was lovely in my own ear, in my mind’s ear, so I didn’t believe Beverley when she told me that I should stop singing this way.

Along with this confusion came a fresh wave of stage fright, since I now felt unsure of every note. I sang in a master class at Juilliard that fall and broke down in tears, saying, “I just can’t do this!” Fortunately, Jan DeGaetani was passing through town the same day, and after I finished bemoaning my fate she said, “I never won any competitions. Nobody ever handed me anything.” In short, she gave me a brisk slap and told me to get to work, which was exactly what I needed. She also mentioned that it looked as though I had tension in the muscles in my chest. That one comment sent me on another exploration of physical tension, which later provided another piece of the puzzle, as I tried to understand how I could possibly survive my choral singing job.

In the end, I could see that what I had learned wasn’t wrong, but that I had simply taken it to an extreme. My task now was to incorporate a brighter, healthier, more open style of singing. Taking a vague vocal concept from another singer is a little bit like sinking your life’s savings into a stock tip you overhear at a cocktail party: even if there’s a momentary boom, chances are it’s not going to be the thing that sustains you into old age. Such is the potential danger of master classes, which can begin to seem like smoke-and-mirrors once the “idol” has boarded the plane a few hours later. You finally have to learn to pull all the different kinds of teaching and training and coaching together on your own, so that your voice and body and technique form a sound that is consistent and solid. It sounds simple enough, but it took me forever to achieve. Still, I wouldn’t want to be someone who did everything right from day one, because then I wouldn’t have any experience with correcting small changes in vocal production myself. I would have liked it if things had come together a little bit more easily, a little faster, but I also know it could have gone the other way and taken me five years longer than it did. After all this effort, I’m confident now that I know what I’m doing and I have the tools to maintain my voice.

Even though this was a time in my life when a lot of things were going wrong, the most important thing was suddenly right: Beverley and I were now in a state of perfect communication. Ever since I’d come back from Germany, we’d been growing closer, and our relationship only continued to get better for the rest of her life. It turned out that she had been taking a lot of prescription drugs for minor ailments in the years before I left for Germany and she had no tolerance for them. She must have had one particularly horrible day while I was away, because she flushed every last pill down the toilet and went to a new doctor, John Postley, who told her she couldn’t take anything from then on, not even an aspirin; and it turned out to be exactly the advice she needed. She was a different person, energized and excited by the world again. In her eighties she was learning new things every day. She was obsessed with learning more about the voice, singing, and physiology. She loved doctors, and I suspect to a great degree they came to replace her husband. Besides, she was especially fond of Dr. Postley and the famous Dr. Wilbur Gould, ENT to the stars. She stayed in close contact with them not because she was ill—she was rarely ill again until the very end of her life—but it was because she wanted to talk to them about the body. She was constantly inspired and would come up with ingenious new exercises. I would ask, “How did you think of that?” and she would tell me, “I don’t think of it. It just comes. It flows through me.” It was the richest time in our working relationship, which at times could also be oddly reminiscent of that of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins. She wasn’t just working on my voice; she was working on
me
. She taught me how to walk and pick out dresses for auditions, how to stand, how to write a proper thank-you note, how to say no in a way that was kind but firm. I used to think, if only I’d known her in my jazz club days, she could have taught me the fine art of stage patter.

We eventually became so attuned to each other that I could call her up from some foreign country and say, “You know, I’m having trouble with this note. Can I sing it to you over the phone?” and she always knew how to fix it. When I was especially nervous, she wrote me notes and e-mails that kept me on track.

One of the many gifts I got from Beverley, along with an enormous amount of comfort and love, was my top, my high notes. She taught me how to open the back of my mouth. When I came to her I was leaving virtually no space in the back of my mouth when I sang high notes, so in essence there was not enough room for them. It’s not enough merely to open your mouth by creating space between your upper and lower front teeth; the jaw must literally unhinge. What works best for me is a square position that runs from the opening of the mouth to the back of the throat—not a long, vertical oblong, but a more horizontal placement. Different singers use different openings. Sam Ramey’s long, narrow position has certainly worked well for him, but for my bone structure that approach would never enable me to move into my higher register. I tried it—and everything else, for that matter.

I also had enough tongue tension to choke on, and I regularly did. My tongue wanted to fall back, basically inhibiting the larynx from hanging freely and thus strangling my high notes, sometimes creating a gargling sound, sometimes cutting them off altogether. It wasn’t pretty. Beverley would have me place a honey drop in the center indentation near the front of the tongue to tame its unruly wandering back and down. Not wanting to choke on the foreign object, the back of the tongue rises slightly and stays forward. One has to keep the tongue relaxed and ungrooved as well, resting softly behind the front of the bottom teeth. With the honey drop, the only scales that can be performed are on an
ah
vowel, as any other vowel would indeed put one in danger of choking. Then I had to learn how to lift my soft palate. Using hard
k
and
g
exercises helped it to gain flexibility, and even plugging my nose as I moved up into the top of my range was useful. Every time I had a cold, I sang better, since this blockage somehow helped me to relax the palate into position.

Covering came back into play when I picked up the “Song to the Moon” from Dvořák’s
Rusalka
again. This aria not only gave me so much of my success then and now but taught me how to sing the “money” note, a soprano’s B-flat. It was that blessed B-flat sung on an
e
vowel that led me to find the exact right combination of a square opening in the back of my mouth and a relaxed, low mental image of pitch. When I’m singing well, two and a half octaves feel like five pitches. There is absolutely no sense of an up-and-down direction, but only a forward one, which is led and never pushed. My top feels as if I’m not hitting high notes at all, but still singing comfortably in my middle range.

None of these concepts on its own creates good high notes. I had to coordinate them all, while never losing the forward direction of my sound. (Holding a pencil between my teeth while singing on an
e
vowel helped reestablish the correct position if I got too far back in resonance.) The subtle interplay of all of these ideas with the body can ultimately produce a sound that is completely natural. Once I managed to figure all this out, listeners would tell me how fortunate I was to be born singing so easily. The first few times I heard this comment, I was frustrated, wanting my hard work to be acknowledged, but eventually I realized that this was the very compliment I should welcome, as it meant that everything was working properly and that the seams weren’t showing.

I helped the search for the high notes along by incorporating some of the more finely tuned breath concepts I had been working on. I watched countless videos of singers and learned an incredible amount by studying how they used their mouths, how they held their chests, how they would take a breath. Watching Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, live, in a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall helped me to understand further the importance of chest expansion. He looked like a pigeon when he sang late in his career, with his chest puffed up to the extreme. From watching videos, I came to realize that all the great singers of that generation sang with very big, high chests. I don’t think that I ever supported properly until I figured that out. Tapes of the old
Bell Telephone Hour
program from the sixties, or in fact of any compilation of singers, should be a requirement for every vocal department in every music school in the country. I had the chance to watch Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Anna Moffo, Joan Sutherland, and all of the other wonderful singers of that era. Because they were all singing in television studios, I could really view them close up. So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing what they do and what they don’t do, seeing how they look when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high note.

Another of the missing pieces of the voice puzzle came from an unlikely source: my job singing in churches. Choir singing is deathly difficult for a soprano, because choir directors are always telling us to blend, which requires mostly soft, high passaggio singing. I would die whenever I attempted this, for I was strangling, thinking I was never going to be able to sustain it.
If the choirmaster’s so interested in soft singing, then why don’t we just drop out altogether? In fact, why doesn’t he just get rid of three of us sopranos
? It felt impossible and frustrating to constantly have to hold back. But what I had been trying so hard to understand about support in school I finally understood when I was in church. I made the connection between intercostal expansion—the expansion of the muscles between the ribs—and the relatively high chest position I had observed in all of the great singers I’d been watching. I kept my shoulders relaxed, as well as my back, trapezius, and neck. I remembered what Jan had said about tension, and when I began to experiment with an even fuller expansion of my chest when I took a breath, I suddenly felt as if I had no neck. It seemed as if the distance between my chin and my chest was growing shorter and shorter, and that my neck was spreading out and in a sense dissolving into my shoulders. As a result, I never needed to reach my chin up for a pitch again. The other key was making sure I didn’t sing with any pressure in the voice. I realized that I had been singing with a high larynx for years. Every time I finished practicing, my speaking voice would be up an octave, and that’s a sure sign that tension exists somewhere it shouldn’t. Soon I was singing comfortably in the passaggio, and for long stretches—something I would need for a lot of the Mozart repertoire I eventually specialized in, not to mention Strauss’s
Daphne,
which involves extreme singing at its most intense. It’s so important that a young singer—and really, anyone at any stage of her career—remain open-minded, for you never know where you’re going to learn your lessons.

Once I got a taste for singing softer, I was adamant about learning how to sing softly. I was in awe of Montserrat Caballé, who was famous for her pianissimo. She seemed to be able to use that skill at will, anytime, in any place, and in any piece. It was a spectacularly beautiful sound. Some would criticize it as an effect, but I loved it nonetheless. With Beverley’s help, I began to find this space, which involved two concepts. First, I learned to aim the sound mentally into the two slight indentations on either side of the nostrils. The result is not at all a nasal sound, but this technique aids in focusing the use of resonance and in lifting the soft palate. I still use this concept often, particularly in extended passaggio and pianissimo singing. Second, I imagined leading the tone rather than pushing it. It was helpful to visualize this process with images like serving the tone to the audience on a platter, pulling taffy with a phrase, or extending spaghetti out of my forehead to the back of the hall. (Food-related images work well with singers, of course.) The best exercise for practicing these ideas is the
messa di voce
—which begins very softly on one tone, crescendos to a forte as loudly as is comfortable, and then scales down to pianissimo again—moving evenly up and down the chromatic half-steps on a scale. This is a painstaking and slow process, but it can teach all there is to know about dynamic control.