The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer Read Online Free PDF Page A

pick another choral director. What he expected of other people was the same thing he expected of himself: to go out there and try. He didn’t look at anyone—not his students, not his children—and think, Well, you’re just not up to this . It was his higher expectations that pulled all of us up.

    Regardless of whether performing frightened me or I enjoyed it, or whether I was any good at it, one thing was certain: I kept doing it. In high school I was cast in yet another production of My Fair Lady, this time by the music teacher, Rob Goodling. In retrospect, I have to say it is nothing short of amazing that I had such talented teachers to work with early on, especially since we were not exactly in the heart of a booming metropolis. Rob was a man with big ideas who later toured groups of talented students through Europe. He cannily populated his musicals with handsome basketball players and track stars, which in turn made our after-school rehearsals the place to be. Suddenly, the popular kids were the ones onstage, and having a good voice made me even more popular. (I’m sure I have Rob to thank for later being chosen prom queen.)
    I only wish that all children had the luxury of the arts education I enjoyed. In inner-city schools, for example, where financial challenges are serious and relentless, music programs are considerably less widely available. Conversely, in Texas, music education has achieved a high level of importance, comparable to athletics. In New York State, many public schools operate robust music programs, and some assign them a priority that rivals more traditional academic subjects. This lack of uniformity makes it difficult to generalize about the state of music education, though there is clearly a relationship between the availability of financial resources and the existence of school music programs.
    When I was growing up, we crowded onto the school bus with our violin cases, flutes, and trombones and practiced “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and Chopin’s nocturnes as studiously as we drilled our multiplication tables and memorized our spelling words. Everyone knew that we weren’t all going to grow up to be musicians, but educators appreciated that the discipline of music, not to mention the joy that understanding it can bring, is both a deepening and a broadening experience in any life. Fostering creativity in children is as important as any other part of the school curriculum because it feeds the soul. A daily dose of creativity helps children imagine a better world and then create it.
    About that time I was accepted into a special weekly composition program offered to just a handful of students throughout Rochester. I had written songs and poetry since junior high school, and “Stargazer,” the first song I wrote, had become a veritable hit among my friends and family, a favorite at talent shows and holiday functions. I followed with many pieces composed on piano and guitar until my second year in college, when I learned to actually communicate through speech. There’s no doubt that composition provided me with an expressive outlet I genuinely needed to compensate for the shyness that kept me painfully bottled up. It was when I started writing music rather than just performing it that I first began to develop a sense of who I was as a person. Composition wasn’t about pleasing; it was about expressing. Not surprisingly in those days, my hero was Joni Mitchell, and I listened to her soulful lyrics until I nearly wore the grooves off the records. I thought that I had personally discovered The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira . Her unique poetic and music voice so perfectly expressed the world I wanted to inhabit.
    William Harper, a doctoral candidate at Eastman, taught the composition class and completely opened up my ideas about music. I’ll never forget that first session, when we listened to Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima . I couldn’t believe that these