Sing for Your Life by Daniel Bergner

Author:Daniel Bergner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

In the audience, Valerie was weeping, as was Mrs. Hughes, who’d come to hear him. “There you go,” Mr. Brown said afterward. “There you go.” Then he and Ryan got back to work.

“Robert’s own training was much more in piano than voice,” Yvette Wyatt, his cousin, said. “He did sing in the Virginia Opera for a good little while, though. And anyway, he could teach opera like nobody’s business. He could fill those kids with that tremendous passion he had, and he knew how to bring out that operatic sound. But then the kids at Governor’s, they’re different from the kids I’m teaching. My school is what is considered an ‘urban’ school; we’re ninety-five percent African American. The students are poor. Lots of them come from where Ryan comes from, those kinds of family situations, that kind of hardship. At Governor’s, even the black kids, when they reach there, most of them, they’ve already been exposed somewhat to a mixture of music, because of the better environments they’ve grown up in. Robert used to tell me, ‘I don’t see how you do it. I couldn’t teach at your school.’”

As a teenager, Wyatt had been enchanted by a wide array of genres: pop, classical, gospel, spiritual. They had all beckoned, and she sang them all, bewitched by the beauty of each. But she subscribed to a controversial theory; in the world of music, it was rejected as often as it was accepted. “The African American voice is located lower down. It’s more about the throat area, less about the head tones. The difference is natural.” She had needed training, during college, to sing classical pieces in the intended style. “I had a teacher who helped me to develop, I won’t say a more European sound, but a more pure sound. More legato. Smoother and brighter and not so heavy and grainy. And more coming from the head, the face, the mask. So the sound comes out this way.” She gestured, her hand at her cheekbones, her nose, her brow, and moving forward, away from her face. “And less from here.” She moved her hand to her throat. “It was a challenge for me to learn. It was a struggle. But for my students it’s even more difficult; it’s harder than it was for me. That’s because for my kids, it’s not just the naturally heavier timbre of our African American voices; it’s that they’ve never had the exposure to that other music. And it’s another thing. It’s their lives. Certain brighter styles of singing don’t make sense to them. I have to do a lot of explaining.

“I have a small ensemble of girls, and I taught them, for competitions, ‘In These Delightful Pleasant Groves.’ It’s a Henry Purcell piece. It has a lot of ta ta ta ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. And they said, ‘I can’t sing like that, my voice is not like that.’ I said, ‘Y’all going to have to become little white girls.’” She laughed. “They were like, ‘All right, Miss Wyatt.

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