Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
SATAN IN THE CONSERVATORY
Dominique-René de Lerma
My years at Morgan State University (1975-1990) had been a salvation; I
was rescued from an intolerable racist and political environment and
brought into one where the same musical potentials were present, where
being African American could be a source of great pride (Leontyne Price
called it "the luxury of being Black"), but only achieved often with
victories over sociological disadvantage and philosophical
misdirection. This was in Morgan's first really golden age, before
Eric Conway fell heir to the firm foundation established by Nathan
Carter, carrying the school to even greater international importance.
It has just been raised to university status when I arrived. While the
college's history included Shirley Graham DuBois, Eva Jessye, Lonnie
Liston Smith, and Anne Brown, it was the Choir, starting in the 1970s,
that shot the school's musical reputation from performances at
Baltimore's churches to concerts and recording sessions in London,
Copenhagen, Helsinski, and (almost) Leningrad -- why the Soviets
cancelled the concerts when we were all ready to be bussed to the event
was never explained.
Quite
soon I became sensitive to the perestroika between the singers and the
instrumentalists -- a division that has not been exceptional at other
music schools, where the jazzers are absent from the song recital and
the singer has no temptation to give notice to the other world. This
was brought home to be particularly when a bandsman made contrasting
reference to the "musicians and singers." My comment, as kindly as I
could express it, was that this instrumentalist would spend all of his
life trying to perform as a singer, but might never make it.
Instrumentalists,
very much a part of the written tradition, observe that singers usually
perform without music (but for choral performances, where the notation
has become irrelevant) and often need to be coached in their rhythms as
undergraduates, that they learn even more from the oral tradition than
their counterparts.
When
I studied with Marcel Tabuteau at the Curtis Institute, I was not alone
in being introduced to his concept of phrasing, rationally represented
by numbers. Had Tabuteau been more alert to singers, he would have been
aware of the natural phrasing that results from the text's rhetoric.
He insisted that all music had an upbeat which, in a text, would be an
article, perhaps with an adjective. When the theory teacher assigns s
strong beat to the start of a measure, he might notice this is where the
previous harmonic motion has reached a pause, however temporary, with a
consonance, but neglect to alert his class to the performance
implications; one always moves from dissonance to a resolution, just as
articles and adjectives must be followed by a noun. This can be
observed by looking at Beethoven's dynamics.
There
is more behind the instrumentalist-singer dichotomy, especially in a
Black school. The singer is found in church on Sunday mornings, while
the instrumentalist spends the previous night in the jazz club. There's
the rub.
Morgan
was loaded with vocal talent, certainly in equal proportion to that
found in the nation's most celebrated schools. It was from this
foundation that Morgan produced such stars from Betty Ridgeway's studio
as Kevin Short, Maysa Leak, Kishna Davis... These were among those
whose careers became possible, not only from talent, but from a
willingness to study all that the profession demanded -- requisites not
even imagined by the naively gifted. As I told Kishna after she
astonished the faculty at her freshman audition with a Puccini aria, her
talent was her cross. There were many others with an extraordinary
gift, but who lacked the courage to go the rest of the way, who felt
they were ready immediately, right then and there.
Most
painful during my stay was an exceptional and true contralto, one whose
voice was wonderfully rich, with a thrilling texture. When she sang
Schubert's Der Tod und das Mädchen, so she needed more work with
her diction, but the final low bass-clef D was as glorious as anything I
had ever heard. We met in my office, and she expressed a curiosity
about Marian Anderson, someone she had only heard about briefly. I told
her Mahler and Brahms were impatient for her, even if she never heard
of them. All this was totally new to her, and there is nothing more
exciting than a young person just finding out what a superb career in
the arts talent would make possible, if they met the demands.
I
left Morgan as she was to enter her second year, urgently called by
Samuel Floyd to become director of the Center for Black Music Research
in Chicago. I had little difficulty following the evolution of the
careers of Kevin, Maysa, Kishna (check the internet!), and the others
who had won my devotion and support, but what of the contralto? Alas,
her church convinced her that Schubert, Mahler, and Brahms wrote the
devil's music and, like Mahalia Jackson, she left the poorly identified
secular world behind. She could certainly have continued singing in
church, but her ill-informed advisors won with no compromise. How I
would have wished they knew music well enough to realize the godliness
of that music which also was so beneficial to the soul!.
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Dominique-René de Lerma
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