The 16th of April is designated – although I’m not sure exactly by whom – as World Voice Day. I had actually never heard of such a thing until several years ago when all of us who are regular contributors to the Journal of Singing were sent an email by our esteemed editor, Dr. Richard Sjoerdsma, asking us what we as voice teachers and/or singers were planning on doing to commemorate World Voice Day. (He wanted the information for his Editor’s Commentary.) I suppose the most honest answer to the question would have been “absolutely nothing,” since I didn’t even know that World Voice Day existed. But as I thought about the question, all kinds of very exciting possibilities came to mind for getting my voice students to think about what a precious gift one’s voice is, and World Voice Day for me became an occasion very much worth celebrating.
But this year? Thanks to the triple-decker craziness of Les Miserables, Cosi fan Tutte, and Holy Week, I went through the entire day without giving World Voice Day a single thought. Even when my department chair, Corinne Ness, sent out an email to the entire music department to remind us of the occasion, it just didn’t penetrate my thinking at all- so crazy was the day from start to finish.
As I’m writing this, it’s 8:10 p.m. and I’m sitting in the green room of the Racine Theater Guild, watching a staging rehearsal of Les Miserables. Tonight has been mostly devoted to the stirring music sung by the young revolutionaries …. to the powerful opening scene (“Look down!”) …. and a couple of scenes featuring the young boy Gavroche. It was actually as I was listening to the lovely singing of Benjamin Kindchen, our Gavroche, that it finally dawned on me that today is/was World Voice Day. For a moment, I felt some regret that I had let the occasion go by without so much as a passing thought. And then it occurred to me that there could not have been a better way to celebrate the unique beauty of the human voice than to listen to the exquisite voice of young Benjamin.
And that got to thinking about all of the young men who comprise our magnificent corps of revolutionaries – Zach and Zach, Carrius, Rob, Wesley, Eric, Patrick, Carter, Conner, Noah, Nick – and how unique and irreplaceable each voice is. That’s one of those facts that we all know, but it’s very easy to take that completely granted … but not when you’re in the presence of this incredible cast and hearing them give their all in such magnificent music.
And that, it hit me- that I may not have consciously celebrated World Voice Day …. but I did something even better. I lived it! Working backwards from Les Miserables rehearsal: 4:00- I had the great pleasure of working with the men of the Carthage Choir, introducing them to one of the great classics of Russian choral music, “Salvation is Created” by Tschesnekoff. We may have been stuck in the theory room – one of the ugliest rooms on the face of the earth, with a broken-down old piano to match – but those guys made a mighty sound, complete with rumbling low D’s! (Thank you, Steve Hobe!) And taking them through this magnificent music was nothing less than a privilege. 2:45- I played for opera workshop as Peg Cleveland, my wonderful colleague, staged the act one finale of Cosi fan Tutte. This score is Mozart at his transcendent best, and the finale is especially fun because of the way the various voices are combined in ever-more intricate ways. And I may have had my hands full playing the accompaniment, but listening to those fine young voices in that spectacular music was all the inspiration I needed to get my fingers moving. And on top of its musical beauty, it’s funny!
2:00- I gave a voice lesson to Mike Anderle, who is a junior at Carthage. But Mike and I actually go back much farther than his first day of college. I’ve been Mike’s voice teacher since just before his freshman year of high school, and I have to say that shepherding a gifted student like Mike over the course of so many years is the sort of pleasure that most voice teachers never get to experience in their entire career. I feel incredibly blessed to have had that experience more than once. 1:15- I had the great fun of working with a high school senior from Burlington who was visiting various music classes all day long in an effort to get to know Carthage a little better. Matt is a fine young man with a lovely baritone voice and the kind of profound love of singing that you can’t teach. But what was so exciting and fun was to see his complete open-heartedness ….. his tremendous eagerness to try each and every suggestion I had for him. As fun as it is for me to teach a veteran student like Mike, whose voice I know almost as well as I know my own, there is also something incredibly fun about giving that very first voice lesson to a new student, where every discovery and insight is brand new. (And if Matt ends up at Carthage in the fall, then I’m’ hoping that today was just the first of many voice lessons for the two of us.)
12:15- It was great fun to be in the audience for today’s Departmental Recital and hear an array of very fine performances, including some lovely singing by three of our singers – one of whom was a student of mine, Tyler, singing Handel’s “Bel Piacere.” In all of my years of teaching, I have never ever heard a guy sing this aria – and to be fair, it was written to be sung by a female character in the opera “Agrippina.” But the words talk about how faithful love is the most beautiful of all pleasures- and there is absolutely no reason why a guy with an agile voice shouldn’t be able to sing this delightful aria. So that’s why I gave it to Tyler, and I’m so glad I did. He sang it beautifully, plus the sound of a male voice in an aria so thoroughly associated with female singers was exciting in and of itself. 11:00- My first lesson of the day was with Fletcher Paulsen, one of my junior music majors, and I spent most of the lesson introducing him to some new pieces, including an aria from Bach’s Magnificat and one of the Mystical Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams. But the best fun of the lesson came at the end, when he sang through two absolutely gorgeous Vaughan Williams songs: “Silent Noon” and “Tired” while trying to decide which would work best for his jury. There’s nothing quite so inspiring as when one hears a singer singing songs that he or she absolutely loves. Is there anything more magical than that?
10:00- When I first arrived at Carthage, I was anxious to get my studio cleaned up a little bit in anticipation of the visit from Matt, the prospective student from Burlington. So I went to shelf of opera videos and selected one of my all-time favorite documentaries, “The Golden Ring,” which talks about the making of the first stereo recording of Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods.” There’s nothing like the laser beam brilliance of Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson to get one’s pulse racing, and the dramatic singing of this legendary opera supertar and her cast mates was a thrilling way for me to start my day at Carthage.
So there you have it….. a day filled to the brim with wonderful singing and beautiful voices. It was a pretty darned good way to celebrate World Voice Day. Then again, I get to say that when it comes to my life, every day is Voice Day. And for that, I am incredibly grateful. (And I know a whole lot of voice teachers and choir directors who are blessed to say the same thing.)
pictured above: This photo is actually from a few days ago, when the cast of Les Miserables was running through the entire score. This is Benjamin Kindchen, the gifted young boy who is our Gavroche, singing one of his solos for the rest of the cast. I just love the look on many of their faces as they listen admiringly to Benjamin singing his music SO well – and without the score!