Read Online Stand Up Straight and Sing! by Jessye Norman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jessye Norman
Tags: nonfiction, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Retail, music, Opera, singer, Composers & Musicians
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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!
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
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!
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
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