Photo by Joshua Hoehne/Unsplash.

My father of blessed memory was not the most emotional guy in the world. Nevertheless, he would almost invariably cry at hearing a beautiful piece of music. I think I learned from watching him (and hearing him play the piano, which he did with exquisite care) that there is something powerful in music that can melt our hearts even when we try to guard them, as I think he often did with his heart. Still, when we finished playing the Schumann “Grand Duo” for four-hand piano, our favorite piece to play together, there was a way he would look at me, with a tender smile and a tear in the corner of his eye and a sort of gobsmacked look on his face, that I cherish in my memory. He would often put his arms around my shoulders and give me a hug. This was a sign that we had spoken to one another’s hearts, through the vehicle of that glorious music—even if, as was usually the case, I had played many wrong notes!

We are now at that time in our Spring 2023 session when we’ve begun performances with our choirs for older adults. It’s a truly exciting time, one that happens for our organization three times a year. Singers get charged up, dressed up, and geared up to perform the music that we’ve been learning for the past many months. Time for a “really big shew,” as Ed Sullivan might say.

I’ve been talking about feelings quite a bit in rehearsals lately. One of the reasons I do this is that I acutely perceive the need—one might go so far as to call it the obligation—to connect with audiences at the level of feeling, of emotion. Every piece of music carries feeling; we just have to find the feeling and then make it our own, so that we can give it away. Doing so helps us to grow as singers. I’ll often say, “This is our fundamental job as singers—to transmit emotion.” This mission, if you will, moves to the front and center of my awareness at concert time.

If I’ve learned anything in my 50 years as a performing musician, it’s this: all the technique you can learn—whether it’s vocal technique, conducting technique, breathing technique, or how to count rhythms and sing the right notes and words, is simply a vehicle to help you optimally deliver—for lack of a better word—the emotion behind or inside the music that you’re performing. This is just as true for our choirs with no audition as it is for the Chicago Symphony Chorus! We are all bound, one might say, by this common demand made on each of us individually and in our singing groups collectively.

Back in the early 2000s I was surprised to find a classical-music journalist say about my singing (with Chicago a cappella at the time) that my voice was “a sturdy, eloquent bass that seems to deepen the emotion in any piece.” What was so gratifying about this was not that he was saying that my voice was particularly beautiful—indeed, I have heard so many voices more beautiful than my own—but that somehow, in a way that still eludes my rational understanding, someone else truly understood and appreciated what I have been trying to do as a musician for my whole life. And what I have been trying to do is exactly this – to succeed in the intention to communicate feeling, with whatever equipment one has at hand to do so. If I can deepen the emotion in any piece I’m a part of, whether as a singer or a conductor, then I have succeeded in my task as a musician. Of course I’ll make it as beautiful as my equipment and technique allow. But the fundamental assignment hasn’t changed.

I hear stories from our older adult choral singers all the time about teachers from their childhood who humiliated them with statements like, “Well, you can be in the concert, but you should just mouth the words.” A sense of rage rises up in me every time I hear such a tale. How dare a teacher deprive a young singer of the joy and thrill of getting inside a piece of music and of communicating the feelings to others!  Grrrr!  I feel tender and protective of every singer who tells me a story like that. My instinct is to march up to that classroom from decades past and knock down a music stand or two in frustration at the supposedly well-meaning teacher’s completely missing the point. Singers bear those emotional scars 50, 60, 70 years later. This may have been a generational thing, since I hear it so often in our singers’ age group and less sp in younger singers… our older adults seem to have been in school during a time when the teacher’s ego was far more important than the teacher’s understanding of what participating fully in a choir could do for a kid. (I’d be curious to hear more stories, by the way, not only to give you empathy but to try to understand better what it was like.)

There are all sorts of ways to transmit feeling. Think about Bob Dylan’s voice for a moment. It’s not a voice that one normally associates with great beauty. But so what? Feeling is what Dylan is all about. The guy can write a lyric and a melody that go right inside your heart. And he delivers it in a way that’s totally clear (and sometimes in your face). It doesn’t have to be exquisitely beautiful to be deeply communicative. My ear prefers James Taylor, another great balladeer of the heart. Don’t get me wrong: I love a perfectly tuned chord as much as the next person. Still, if I had to pick one, I’d pick splendidly communicated emotion over flawless technique or pristine sound any day. You can sing to your friends, children, or grandchildren with emotion in a way that will touch their hearts, and that’s what matters the most—that your voice carries love.

A few weeks ago, I was nerding out on this topic. I was talking in one of our daytime rehearsals about Leo Tolstoy’s definition of art and why we need to pay attention to it. The quote that I love is here, from his essay “What is Art?” (1904 edition, page 50, boldface added) It’s formal and admittedly male-centric language, but please see if you can get past that and into the kernel of the idea. Tolstoy writes:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling—this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”

When I read this essay in graduate school, it changed me, because it confirmed for me what had been a sense of my mission as a performer about which I had had intuition for years but not a good description… and it excited me, because it was something I somehow knew I could do. I’ve been practicing it consciously, with Tolstoy’s inspiration, for thirty years now.

I love working with choirs for older adults because we all have the lived experience of emotions, decades of them! I can ask anyone in a Sounds Good Choir or the Good Memories Choir, “Sing like you are completely in love,” and I know that virtually everyone in the room will have had that experience at least once. The same is true for joy, heartbreak, awe, betrayal, redemption, disappointment, encouragement, loss, and other feelings. We can dig deep because we’ve lived deeply. It’s what makes Sondheim so gratifying to hear and to perform, because he goes right to the real stuff.

Our 269 singers in eight choirs have been doing this hard work to get inside each of our songs this session. It’s a stretch to communicate depth of feeling in Ukrainian for most of us, but we’re doing it! For some, Latin or Hebrew may be a stretch. But the important thing is that we are going for it, putting all of our mental and emotional (and physical and spiritual) energy into getting that feeling across the room and into the hearts of the people who come to hear us.

What a joy! What an honor! What a privilege! All of this is the sacred trust, or highest calling, of the singer. To every one of our singers, I wish for you the satisfaction of connecting your heart to those of others through the miraculous vehicle of song. Happy singing!