Stand Up Straight and Sing! (25 page)

With President Bill Clinton following his second inaugural address.

White House Photo Office

Presentation of the Kennedy Center Honors at the White House with President Clinton, December 1997.

White House Photo Office

With the Norman family at the White House reception for the Kennedy Center Honors.

White House Photo Office

Singing atop Masada for the fiftieth anniversary of the State of Israel.

With Anna Deveare Smith.

Jenny Warburg

With Gloria Steinem and Sonia Sanchez.

Jenny Warburg

With my present piano accompanist, Mark Markham, at a gala benefit for Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center.

With flutist Alain Marion.

Performing in the Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol Building in July 2013 for the congressional commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington.

7

The Singing Craft as Art Form

“OH, GLORY!”

Oh, Glory; there is room enough in Paradise

To have a home in Glory.

Jesus my Lord to Heaven is gone,

To have a home in glory,

He, whom I’ve fixed my hopes upon,

To have a home in glory.

Singing gives me many rewards and many blessings for all the hard work it requires and on which it depends. Only through hard work can such a craft rise to the level of art.

Singing, for me, is actually life itself. It is communication, person to person and soul to soul, a physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual expression carried by the breath. Life!

WE CAN APPROXIMATE
and thereby appreciate the physical act of oxygen rushing in great waves throughout the body, as it does in singing, by distance running or a vigorous bicycle ride. Oxygen flow is deeply satisfying to me, as is my ability to communicate through poems and prose, often in centuries-old texts that can illuminate our thoughts and lives today. Songs that revel in the beauty of taking time to enjoy nature’s splendor, or to fall in love. There are a million songs about love—unrequited love, secret love, the love of a father for a son, or a mother for a daughter, or perverted, inappropriate love, like that which Jocasta holds for her son in Stravinsky’s
Oedipus Rex,
or Phèdre for Hippolyte. Conveying each of these ideas to an audience with words and music can be physically and mentally invigorating.

I love the discipline involved in bringing the breath out of my lungs and past my vocal chords with a specific control that gives me a certain quality of sound: singing! Music gives wings to words—makes it possible to say “I love you” to a person in the most moving, touching, personal way. So much so that the one who hears these words can walk away with a melody that lingers. The words have a tune to accompany the beautiful sentiment. This does not mean that the words are less meaningful if offered without music; it is simply that the music adds yet another dimension to their meaning. I am thankful that I can employ my voice to convey these meanings. Of course, a lot of music we listen to and adore has no words at all. Sometimes you can think of words that might fit an instrumental melody just because of the way that it touches you: the haunting sounds that come through the instrument, the depth of color or the beautiful length of the phrases. Each of these things can cause you to think,
Oh, wouldn’t it be lovely to have words to that!
Some composers, particularly of that grand period of European songwriting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would begin their compositions with the text and then compose the music. But there were composers like Johannes Brahms who would sometimes compose the melody first, and then look for a suitable text. Either approach could yield a song deeply satisfying for its ability to touch, to speak, to inspire.

I do tend to gravitate toward operatic characters that are multidimensional, complex. I love to sing the stories of women for whom I am capable of empathy. For me, it is both interesting and challenging to delve into a complicated character and role, such as Virgil’s Dido, who, after losing her husband and taking on the responsibility of seeing to the full economic resurgence of Carthage and its return to its place of honor and proper reverence in the eyes of the world, allows herself to fall in love again, against her better judgment—only to have Aeneas, the man whom she allows herself to love thoroughly, leave her. He considers his call to duty more significant than the love he feels for her. And what a duty it was: he would go on to found Rome!

Dido’s reaction to this tragic turn of events, as taken from the fourth book of Virgil’s
Aeneid
and translated into beautiful French, set to the meltingly romantic music of Berlioz, is, I feel, one of opera’s greatest treasures. I feel the same way about
Erwartung
of Schoenberg
,
the one-woman opera in which the character surges and suffers through a wide range of emotion as she searches frantically in the darkness for her lover, only to find that he has been murdered. She is at once frightened, angry, apprehensive, unsure, insecure. Alone. It is possible for me to sing this particular opera, which spans little more than half an hour, in three different characterizations: as the person who has committed the murder, as the person who has observed the murder, and as the person who is imagining these dire events in her head. This type of complexity is the kind of challenge that I grab with both hands! I am sure when I say such things that Sigmund Freud, who was Schoenberg’s contemporary, would have his own interesting interpretation of what goes on inside my head.