Stand Up Straight and Sing! (8 page)

I thank Professor Elizabeth Mannion, with whom I worked at the University of Michigan, for showing me that agility in the voice is necessary, regardless of the type of voice one possesses. The ability to sustain a long phrase, keeping one’s breathing in absolute control, is the basic requirement of all singing. The ability to keep one’s vocal apparatus agile is one of the many things that make for a long performance life.

I do believe that we come to this earth understanding the naturalness of breath, and then we come across those who try to change the way we sound, or maybe, if we’re lucky, improve the way we sound. We can become confused about the fact that singing is actually—and should be—a very natural process, supported by torso muscles that are there for that purpose, as opposed to the muscles in our necks, shoulders, and jaws.

To point up this fact, I have often asked nonsinging music lovers to try something with me: sit or stand and just breathe deeply—very, very deeply—for five minutes. It is a long time to do this, long enough to experience that your body chemistry changes. You feel differently after only five minutes, refreshed, more relaxed. With this small action it is possible to begin to understand what it must be like to have a flow of breath for two or three hours in the course of an evening’s performance. You can feel as if you are floating or flying when everything in the body is working as it should and added to that the flow of adrenaline in the bloodstream!

Truly, one of the most joyous things that I do in preparing for a performance is the warming-up part. Any singer will tell you that a voice is hardly ever in the same place every day, meaning that since the instrument lives in one’s own body, it is governed to a great extent by how well, or not, one has slept, dined, and all else. We need to understand and accept these vagaries of the physical self as a gift of nature, and work with them rather than against them. After decades of experience, with a few minutes of deep breathing I find that I am able to move forward in my warm-up routine no matter the circumstances prior to my entering the dressing room.

Often I find that preparation is simply allowing my breath to flow naturally so that singing happens naturally. And when it is right, when it is sweet, singing, for me, is a physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual expression of my breath that allows me to connect with myself and with an audience in ways that I would find difficult without the aid of music. Some of the texts I sing were written by people with a deep, broad intelligence and understanding of mankind. I revel in being able to sing the words of a Virgil, a Racine, a Goethe, and other such masters of words.

Nothing pleased me more than when, after singing a recital in London recently—quite a few years after I had first stood in front of that candle with Professor Grant—some friends of mine told me they overheard an audience member say, “Isn’t this amazing? That woman’s breath control?” After singing for four decades, I found this comment, coming from someone in the audience, to be special indeed. I said silently to Professor Grant, whom we lost years ago,
Thank you for insisting that I should learn and appreciate the very basis of this craft.

Isolde’s Liebestod
, Tristan und Isolde • R
ICHARD
W
AGNER
 • Isolde’s Love-Death and Transfiguration

***

4

Church, Spirituals, and Spirit

“THERE IS A BALM IN GILEAD”

There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole,

There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.

Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain,

But then, the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.

If you cannot sing like angels,

If you cannot preach like Paul,

Go and tell the love of Jesus,

And say, He died for all.

There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole,

There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.

My faith informs my life. I consider myself to be religious, as I subscribe to a particular belief system, the Judeo-Christian doctrine, and consider its tenets to be the foundation of my philosophy for living. Even though I was raised in the Baptist Church, as a child I enjoyed attending services in other churches with my friends, Catholic churches, synagogues, as well as what I found to be one of the most beautiful small churches in Augusta, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.

I am also deeply spiritual in the sense that I revel in those things that make for good—the things that we can do to shed a little light, to help place an oft-dissonant universe back in tune with itself and with ourselves. There is spirituality in saying good morning to a stranger. There is spirituality in sending a daughter off to school with the words: “You are just the best little girl. I am so glad you are mine and I am yours.” Spirituality can be as simple as saying hello to the person who is cleaning the floor when you walk by in an office building. Spirituality is everywhere I turn, and it manifests itself in all ways—in performance, in my studying, and in the work that it is my privilege to offer to charitable organizations. It is present in my love of family, friends, and community. I have faith in the universe and in its goodness and believe that goodwill moves through space and time and comes into my life when I least expect it, and certainly when I need it most.

I have my parents to thank for introducing me to and guiding me to a place of faith and trust. So many things I remember about my childhood are rooted firmly in the foundation of their faith, gleaned from their parents and, surely, their parents’ parents, as well. My father was raised in the front pews of Twin Oaks Baptist Church, in Wilkes County, Georgia, a sanctuary founded by his grandparents that stands to this day. It is a perfectly beautiful church, the style of which can just as easily be found in any number of quaint New England towns. Today, there is a paved main road that fills in what was once a quiet country path, but it still looks exactly like the thing it should be: a white clapboard church with a little steeple. It is a wonderful sight and a joy for our family and the entire congregation that it serves. On the occasions when my family and I visit, I feel a beautiful surge of warmth as I enter the church, understanding the deep connection between my spirit and that of both my great-grandparents and my grandparents, whose images in the vestibule grace this proud, small, sacred space. The faith of my forefathers and foremothers sustains my own.

I learned early in life that God is somewhere beyond the sun and the clouds and the moon and the stars, looking after us. But I also had other ideas about God that stretched far beyond what was being taught as I understood it in Sunday school, namely that God was all around us down here, too. And at about age five, I found Him often in the backyard of our home, in a lovely tree that stood sentry over the garden. I loved that tree because some of its limbs were low to the ground and swingy and you could climb onto them easily and jump on and dangle from them and, with a bit of kindergarten imagination, you could turn those huge branches into a majestic leaping horse, or a fancy car full of magical people, or a train as real as the ones that made their way through our town on a regular basis, sounding their lonesome horns as they moved along the tracks.

One afternoon, while playing on this favorite tree as my father was busy taking care of something having to do with our house, I proclaimed, “When I come back to earth I would like to be a tree, because everyone has fun with trees. You can sit in trees, sometimes trees have fruits, and that would be a great thing to be.”

I do believe that just for a moment, the birds stopped chirping, the bees stopped buzzing, the wind stopped blowing, and the earth stopped on its rotational axis. Or maybe it was just that my father, a devout Christian who served as the chairman of the board of deacons at Mount Calvary as well as head of our Sunday school, became very, very quiet—and just a bit perplexed by my ideas and thoughts about the afterlife.

“I want you to understand that we are Christian people,” he said in a measured voice, “and when we die we go to Heaven if we have been good, and when we have not been good, we go to that other place.”

“But no, Daddy, we come back!” I insisted. “We come back as other things.”

My father shook his head in wonder. That was the end of this particular dialogue. My father did not go on to explain the holy doctrine that shaped the very foundation of his faith and belief system of the resurrected Christ and a place for believers in Heaven, after one’s earthly journey. Coming back to life in another form after death was not a part of the tradition. My father must have wondered how his five-year-old daughter, from a deeply religious Christian family, had come across, let alone chosen to believe in, the concept of reincarnation. Or maybe he convinced himself I had no idea of what I spoke, just youthful musings in the backyard on a beautiful day. I, on the other hand, stood firm in my belief that I could return to earth and be a tree if I wanted to, and that I could be that specific tree and this was a kind of secret that God and I shared. I guess that you can say that I found my version of faith in my own backyard!

Certainly, faith was the center of our familial visits to my maternal grandparents’ farm, which they worked themselves and of which my siblings and I are the grateful owners today. When we were children, about once a month, we would drive to Wilkes County, go to church with Grandma Mamie and Granddaddy, and then retire to their house for big Sunday dinners with them and my uncle Floyd and aunt Esther and my many cousins, whose land was contiguous to that of my grandparents.

Our cousins were our best pals. There could be as many as twenty people at these after-church dinners, prepared by the able hands of my grandmother, my mother, and various aunts and older cousins—each of them amazing cooks with the uncanny ability to prepare enough food for an army in an incredibly short amount of time. My sister, Elaine, has that magic touch: she can go into her kitchen and take things out of the fridge and freezer and assemble enough food for twelve, alongside the most delicious fresh biscuits one can find this side of the Mason-Dixon Line. I, on the other hand, can cook lots of things, but even with my full concentration, I cannot make a southern-style biscuit that anybody would want to eat. The ability Elaine possesses is in her DNA; it flows directly from my grandmother, our mother, and aunts, who made magic on those Sundays on the farm, where sharing food and laughter and play was a spiritual act. There would be baked ham and lots of chicken, whether roasted or pan-fried, and many serving bowls of vegetables, because they grew them right there on the farm, which, to this city child, was on a par, surely, with what the Garden of Eden must have been like. You could walk around the farm and see peaches and melons and collards and beans, all kinds of delicious things growing on shrubs and trees and on the ground, and you could pick them and eat them right off the vines. I remember my uncles bringing my grandmother milk, produced from the cows on the farm, and watching her seated with a tall wooden barrel between her strong knees and something that looked like a tall pole, as she churned the milk into cream and then butter, by hand. This deliciousness bore no resemblance to the same kind of products purchased at the grocery store. It was not until many years later, when I was invited to sing in Normandy, in northern France, that I tasted butter that pure and sweet again—truly a Proustian moment.