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Back to Music, Part 4: Mr. B

I am 16 and I'm all muscle and a cocky swoop of ginger hair and I am terrified of this music. I don't learn music easily and I'm not even sure I'm a tenor and what am I doing in one of the best audition-only choirs in one of the finest high school vocal music programs in the state of Tennessee?

Bob Binkley--Mr. B--is a stocky vision in polyester pants, a suit coat, a golf shirt and a graying fringe of frizzy hair. Bright blue eyes sparkling, he walks the semi-circle of singing teens, gesturing, conducting, listening, throwing in part of the alto line, vocally cueing the basses with an authentic bass thunder, though his natural sound is a thrilling, Met-worthy tenor.

We are plowing through a trilling pre-baroque masterpiece, "Già torna a rallegrar l'aria e la terra" by Luca Marenzio. It's tonal painting to match the words about Spring, rising lines in every part including the tenors, who end our opening "rallegrar l'aria e la terra" on high Gs. When we rehearse with music in hand I gaze at those Gs floating above the topmost line on the staff like a floundering swimmer trying to keep up with his water-treading friends; I can stay afloat through force of will for a moment, then I tire and slip beneath the notes with a weak, barely audible falsetto, drowned by the effort.

Mr. B bellows in his trumpeting voice, correcting this sharp note, correcting that flat, we start again and he is standing in front of me. He is looking me in the eye and singing the big opening tenor line along with my section. I can feel his powerful voice in my own chest and we reach those high Gs and his bright sound is rattling my ears and he shuts his mouth and the sound continues.

It's me. I'm singing now, my voice ringing away up there. The McGavock Madrigal Singers continue on through the piece and he thumps my chest as I look at him wide-eyed, surprised. "You're a tenor," he barks over us, "be a tenor."

****

The McGavock Madrigals are on tour in Virginia. We've just arrived at our hotel in Hampton Roads when someone tells me to go see Mr. Binkley and his wife Phoebe in their room.

Phoebe, always kind to a fault, ushers me gently in and when I see Mr B's face I know something is wrong. His blue eyes are dim and his expression downcast. He tells me my best friend died the night before, victim of a drunk driver. I will later learn my friend Mark was struck by a garbageman on a bender. Mark, also a tenor, was thrown the length of the car that struck him. He died gurgling in the road.

In that Virginia hotel I am utterly unprepared to hear that a guy I treated like a brother is gone. I go blank. I return to my room and put my forearm through the wall. There's no pain, just a forearm-sized hole in the plaster.

Mr. B and Phoebe deal with the hotel and no one says anything about it to me later.

****

Like most of Mr. B's students, I come back sometimes to his and Phoebe's home around Christmas. We gather in the front room where many of us would come to take voice lessons for just $16 a pop when we were teens and we sing all the old songs he drummed into our heads. Over the years some of us get more training, some of us stop singing all together, but the opera singers and voice teachers still gather with the truck drivers and soldiers on leave at the Binkleys' house and we're equal, we're hanging out with our old section, drinking cider and singing the Winter cold outside away.

And Mr. B gets older but his voice still rings above us all sometimes. The kind of tenor that was always meant to soar over everything, the sort of sound that makes other tenors shiver with envy and admiration. But Bob's just at home with his students, wearing his golf shirt, polyester pants, penny loafers and a terrycloth bathrobe instead of a suit coat.

We all like seeing each other, but we may like seeing Mr. B even more. As for me, hearing his voice again is often its own reward. I am reminded that this is what a tenor sounds like. This is how you sing beautifully, musically. Joyfully.

****

I last see Mr. B in 2006. A mass of Madrigalians going back to his students at Donelson High School--which became a middle school in 1970 or so--gather at his long-time church, Vine Street Christian, and sit through a classic Binkley rehearsal before we perform. We're all grownups with kids, some of us with grandkids. Some of us are professors, some music teachers like Mr. B, creating new legacies. Some of us haven't sung a note in decades.

It's just like old times. When we sing together, a group three times the size of a typical Madrigal contingent of 19 or so, we still sound like Mr B's choir--round, full, warm.

He cajoles and fusses the whole time. He loves it.

I have to leave early to go back to Atlanta to be on TV, talk about some murder I've written about.

****
Bob Binkley died yesterday. He'd been ill for years. Not too long ago he decided he was tired of chemo and wanted to just live the life he had left. He spent it planning another reunion concert of his old students. Another alumni, posting the news of Bob's death on Facebook, says he planned the concert till the end.

He was my first real voice teacher. He was one of my few true mentors, in the best sense of that word. He taught me to love and treasure a kind of music that nothing in my family history or upbringing prepared me to perform. Along with his wife he coached me for my auditions for various universities--the auditions that netted me scholarship offers from every school.

Our teachers can't help but shape us. Teachers like Bob Binkley set us on fire and re-mold us. They open up horizons we didn't know existed before we entered their classrooms. They change lives for the better without even trying to do anything but their jobs, the best way they see fit.

One of the best things about singing for Mr. B, though, wasn't his wit or wisdom, though he had surpluses of both. It was simply learning the music he loved.

"E'en So, Lord Jesus," the choral work in the video below, was our concert closer when I was in high school. It is a soaring yet reverent piece of music and it carries a great deal of emotional weight for me and, I'm certain, a great many other Binkley students. It's been all I could think of since I heard he was dead.

Among his students, Mr. B will always be a legend. He was a true force of nature.

I am grateful I got to know Mr. B, got to learn from him.

His clarion sound will always echo inside me. His voice will continue ringing in my chest as it did when I was 16, inspiring me to make my own joyful noise, for decades to come.

This is Art Garfunkel, Dammit

All I Know, live - Art Garfunkel - YouTube

I fucking like Art Garfunkel songs. You got a problem with that? We can step outside.

Yeah, that's what I thought. And it don't even matter, cuz Art Garfunkel would have my back if I needed him. My boy would be all krav maga and sensitive poetic wistfulness all up in your eye. See if that ain't true. Art don't play. He can sing in gentle and crystalline tones of Emily, wherever he may find her and break your damn neck in the same breath.

Art Garfunkel don't even play.

Believe it.

That's all I know.

Back to Music, Part 2: I audition

Hosted by Kiwi6 file hosting. Download mp3 - Free Music Hosting.

Me, singing "Ev'ry Valley Shall be Exalted" for conductor Christopher Shepard

In the end I felt like an idiot. I was nervous before the audition, all the old audition scenarios--some I'd actually experienced in some form--running through my head:

-- I'll botch every measure of this aria
-- I'll look like an idiot doing it
-- Everything is awful and everything will hurt

The list is actually much longer than the above, but it's not worth bothering.

I got there early and was welcomed by some of the chorus's stalwart members, setting up for coffee time, which would come mid-rehearsal later. I sat nervously mulling over my music until the conductor arrived and his friendliness and energy immediately put me at ease.

We chatted for a minute about why the hell a guy with a vocal resume like mine (which I haven't gone through in detail here, but it's not that shabby) would want to go back to doing chorus work. And I told him in short form much of what I wrote here.

Without further preamble, I sang the opening tenor aria from Handel's Messiah, minus the recitative, in a big empty room with the conductor accompanying me on a slightly out-of-tune Baby Grand.

As you can hear if you play the sound file above, there are a couple of goofs (I enter too early at one point; he hits a sour note later) and to my own hypercritical ear I sound inelegant, but nothing truly shitty happened and everything went fine. Went well, even.

That was why I felt like an idiot, when the night was done. I was just being a ninny.

I even made it through the whole 2 hours and change of sight-reading Broadway choral arrangements with my voice intact.

Maybe I have a clue as to what I'm doing when I sing, after all.

Back to Music Part 1: There Once Was a Tenor From Tennessee

 Nicolai Gedda - Comfort Ye My People . Ev'ry Valley Shall Be Exalted - Messiah G.F. Handel

(This is the first in a randomly-posted series of entries I think I'll do about returning to singing classical music after a long break. I plan to talk more about the music, the preparation, the experience in the future instead of the "me, me, me" stuff below, but an introduction seems necessary.)

Soon after my voice changed my middle school chorus teacher told me she'd never heard anyone like me. It was true that subjectively I knew I could do things with my voice few others around me could do. Mainly be really, really loud.

That loudness is pure physiology and genetics. My Dad is 5'9" with a barrel chest, large head and preternaturally penetrating, powerful voice. My wry, soft-spoken mother's laconic ways didn't pass on to her kids, either. We're a loud family, mostly because we all have big, high voices and being heard in family conversations was a matter of who could best blast over the fray.

Make no mistake--from age 7 on I wanted to be a writer. The attention I began receiving for my big voice and perhaps a certain ease with being in front of crowds (another trait I inherited from my Dad) was too satisfying to ignore. My voice led me into the theater and chorus.

I found out it didn't matter if you were as weak a musician as I was if a director or teacher liked your voice.

So I fell into singing because, well, I could sing.

By the time I was in high school my chorus teacher was a Juilliard-trained tenor. He blew my mind in a voice lesson one day by telling me not only did I have a voice for opera, I should sing opera.

I said, "Uh, okay."

To my everlasting shock, I auditioned for four music programs and four universities offered me, a mostly C student, voice scholarships. Two were full rides. I took the best deal. Even though I could barely sight-read and was terrible at counting rhythm, I was a voice major. It probably helped tremendously that I was a real tenor and could easily sing up to a high A at the time (I still have a C, even though I'm pretty rusty).

I continued being a so-so academic student in college but did very well as a performer. Eventually I sang in multiple churches as a paid soloist, performed with professional opera companies as a chorus member and in secondary tenor roles, and in 1997 won the first round (combined Middle and East Tennessee Districts) of the Metropolitan Opera auditions.

After college, life happened. I got into a full-time ("fall-back") career I liked in the tech end of TV. That and having a family took my time and attention and I never really pushed myself to become more than a good local soloist--the guy who got calls from big churches doing their first Mozart Requiem or Messiah with full orchestra or was sometimes invited to come sing arias for free dinner and $50 in some Italian restaurant with a little community theater-level opera company.

Still, I loved it, most of the time. I love performing in general and do love being the lead soloist when the opportunity arises. It's hard to describe the thrill of singing a solo with a chorus and lofting your voice over the group with a bravura ending high note. Yes, there's ego and vanity involved--music and theater couldn't exist without them--but the joy is more universal than simply salving the psychic wounds left over from some insecure dude's family issues (the aforementioned blasting over the fray).

Singing softly and in tune with 40 other singers can fill a room with a single presence that feels greater than the assembled parts. Singing with the choir, a voice in the blend, was what really kept me going to churches from age 16 on, even though my faith has never been more than shaky, at best. The closest I could ever come to reverence was when I was in the choir loft, singing.

About seven years ago my dumb blogging about crimes with Internet or social media elements led to freelance writing. At the time I was also a paid tenor section leader and soloist at a lovely Presbyterian church in Roswell, Georgia.

I found that the more I received calls to do TV appearances and invitations to write for this or that, the more I neglected singing.

I didn't mean to quit. Didn't think of it as quitting. But by 2007 I was running a blog for Village Voice Media and had backed completely away from the church job. People with whom I'd sung in small local concerts would call me to come do one and I would back out.

Singing receded from my everyday life. I still thought about it. Still listened to stuff I've always loved, including certain tenors, operas and pieces of sacred music. Still let loose sometimes in the shower or being silly around the house. But I had essentially retired as an active, performing tenor.

And I don't think these things are truly connected, but I also got fatter and fatter, which was ironic considering how often I'd joked about me being the prototypical Fat Opera Singer. I'd morphed into the prototypical (in the public's mind, not reality) Fat (Basement-dwelling, Cheeto-eating) Blogger, which didn't seem nearly as funny. Or fun.

Just over a year ago I got sick of the fat part. I began working on that and today I've dropped about 100 lbs and 14 inches from my waistline. I'm about to turn 45 and in the best health of my adult life.

Since we moved to Massachusetts, I have realized how much I miss music. Singing is no longer something I think about at random or with a twinge of jealousy when I watch other classical singers on a YouTube video or on TV. It creeps into dreams. I find myself alone in the car and singing arias full-blast again, like I used to. On Spotify I seek out choral pieces I haven't though about in years, just to hum along with the tenor part.

So... last week I arranged an audition with the director of the Worcester Chorus, which is the closest thing locally (as far as I can tell) to a symphonic choir. The group has gone overseas and sung with the Boston Pops. The audition is at 6:30 next Wednesday.

I decided I would go big or go home and perform the tenor recitative and somewhat aria that opens Handel's Messiah--"Comfort Ye, My People" and "Ev'ry Valley Shall be Exalted." In the video at the top of this post you can hear one of the finest tenors of the late 20th Century, Nicolai Gedda, performing the pieces (at an excruciatingly slow tempo that few but Gedda--a true master of breath control--could manage).

My voice isn't really suited to the spritely, trilling sound many maestros require of tenors singing Baroque music (neither was Gedda's, for that matter). I could probably present myself as a lyric baritone and the director of the Worcester Chorus might think "sounds tenor-y, but okay." My voice is more suited to Puccini, Verdi and Wagner. But I also haven't sung an aria for any kind of real reason in years and am realistic: in spite of all my training and experience, the only sensible way for any singer who's been out of the game for a solid six years to start over is to return to basics. And the basics, in my mind, are singing with a chorus. You network, meet other singers, learn of other opportunities to sing. Chorus work also presents an opportunity to flex musical muscles again, to exert fine control over your instrument. If you're a tenor with a voice suited to blaring over an 80-piece orchestra you can bet you learn fine-grained control of that voice when you have to sing a soft high note in some Bach chorale with five other tenors around you.

Singing the Handel is perhaps symbolic, too--it was the first recitative and aria I ever learned for any reason. I've come back to it time and again, in spite of not being vocally suited, because it's a beautiful exercise, enforcing clear, healthy vocalism in the middle of the voice and something I badly need, flexibility.

To some degree my need to return to music is a way to find a sense of home. I may have fallen stupidly into singing as a teen because I had a needy ego and a big voice, but it eventually became very much an integral part of me. How I see myself, and how I look at life.

I don't like exercising in groups. I can see doing something like a Tough Mudder with a team, where the going is very tough and the urging of a teammate can be just the thing that pushes you over that next obstacle, but I usually prefer to train alone. I need the time in my head, it helps center me.

Singing, though--as much as I prefer to solo, I admit after this many years it's always best done with others. The others can be instrumentalists or fellow vocalists, it doesn't matter. Two or three get together and make noise. Whether the noise is a barbaric yawp or silken baroque tapestry of sound doesn't matter--I always feel like it is lit from within by a spark of joy. The space around the performers is transformed with immanence.

Something invisible. Something great.