Unleashing the beast within: An old lady’s mystical musical memoir
A holiday grinch would likely feel like pasting duct tape over my mouth these days.
No, I’m not counting down shopping days
until Christmas. Instead, I’m a melody in motion. Either I have an
ear worm singing lyrics, “The most fabulous, most marvelous, most
joyously wonderful time, wonderful time… of the year” or I’m
belting out that I’ll be home for Christmas.
Much to the chagrin of my husband, I’ve
discovered the latent musical beast that has resided in my heart and
gut since I was a child. It first came out when I discovered an old
piano abandoned in an outbuilding on the 20-acre Kansas farm I lived
on while a pre-schooler. I made up music for hours and sang nonsense
while the dust in that old boat house swirled around, stirred up by
the worn felt hammers striking the soundboard.
The day the music died
The muse got fed a little more when I
took piano lessons in the private pre-school my mother put me in when
my dad died. But my musical gremlin went to sleep a few years later
on a family trip when the front seat occupants screamed at me to stop
singing “The Star Spangled Banner.” There was an added postscript
about my not being able to sing anyway. My poor music monster
sniveled and moped to sleep that day.
Music muse did make a few guest
appearances during my adult life. It whispered encouragement to buy
that spinet piano for $25 a month and take lessons from a
Juliard-trained teacher in Columbia, MO. It sneaked out again just
before son Michael was born, when I took piano and organ lessons from
my church’s music director. I learned to play easy piano tunes to my
precious baby bump on an out-of-tune upright. In a few years I could
play enough to get by as a substitute organist at church. But the
singing side of the lurking music monster had to be content with hymn
singing for decades.
Now I’m a bass/baritone
The “It” came out of hibernation
when my second husband died and I funneled energies into a new church
family, including signing up for the choir. There I learned the finer
points of Gregorian chant and four-part harmony from two gifted
teachers. When I remarried last year and moved back to the Kansas I
left as a child, it was a given that my voice would join the small
church choir. By then I had accepted the fact that my late-life range
now fell in the baritone section. When my choir friends kept telling
me I had a beautiful voice, I just looked at them in cross-eyed
disbelief, figuring they were just glad to have another body in the
choir pew. That old music beast must have been smirking all that
time. Especially when two friends (they shall remain nameless for
now) got me to join the Topeka Acapella Unlimited group. I questioned
that decision every Monday night as my legs cramped while standing on
risers way too long for the barbershop tune rehearsals.
But the music monster had it planned
all along. He finally came alive and rose out of this 70-year-old
body last weekend during a Sweet Adeline’s retreat. Actually, he came
out shouting “Alleluia!”
About 25 of us mostly-mature-aged-wine barbershop women gathered in the great room of a lodge that normally greets wedding guests to practice music for our December 14 holiday show. Of course, the overriding goal was to improve our technique. Our coach for the weekend was Debra Lynn, a professional singer and voice coach, who uses a technique called Bel Canto. It originated centuries ago in Italian opera and allowed singers to belt out notes for hours without fatiguing their voices.
Debra and Bel Canto turned our former notions of singing upside down. We learned to forget about our vocal chords and forcing air through them. We tossed aside belly breathing, or tried to. We learned that 70-year-old voices can sound like 30 or 40-year old ones if you learn to plaster on a fake smile and thus open up your soft palette. The way I remember to set my face is by recalling the long-lost Sesame Street characters, those outers space dudes that went around going “Woop woop woop, Unh huh, unh huh!”
We also found out that if you alliterate or pop the consonants in the lyrics and think about resonating the sound up through your head and into the ceiling, magic happens.
[image error]Instructor Debra Lyn does Reiki as well as teaching the Bel Canto technique. The resident canine wanted her to scratch his belly.
The Bel Canto Technique
Of course, there’s a lot more to it
than that. But as the bass section sat together on the front row
Saturday, we tried to incorporate what we were learning in singing
our sole melody line in “Some Children See Him.” As we crooned
this beautiful lullaby about how little ones in different countries
see the baby Jesus according to their own ethnicities, that’s when it
suddenly happened. We heard a resonance coming from our vocal
cavities that we never dreamed possible. The resulting emoting gave
us goosebumps and made our hearts soar. We accomplished, for a brief
moment, what my recruiting friends had promised: that instant when
you are one sound, one unit. It sounded like the music was coming
from angels above our heads.
[image error]Members of the Topeka Acapella Unlimited group at last weekend’s retreat.
Our job is to share
Now my danged music monster is skipping around, dancing on my head and the ceiling. He’s telling me, “I told you so.” At the same time he’s reminding me that I’m nothing special. Yes, I may have music in my soul, but so do many other people. Our job is to share it. If music is our thing, if it makes us happy, if it allows us to express joy and other emotions we’ve kept mostly to ourselves, it’s high time to join it with others and spread the love.
And now I no longer have the excuse of being too old to sing. I have found my voice and it ain’t half bad. I can even sing the Star-Spangled Banner in barbershop harmony now, as long as I have other voices to prop me up.
