daron aric hagen

When a line of music and text is sung well by a gifted singer, the intricate interplay of training and technique, and the physical and emotional risk of live performance combine to shine a light on why all music must somehow arise from the composer's compulsion to sing.

The other evening I worked with some excellent young Chicago Conservatory musicians who were rehearsing 'The Picture Graved Into My Heart,' a song from my 1990 cycle Dear Youth, which is based on letters and diary entries written during the American civil war. I coached the final line ('Oh, the wondrous manly beauty') of it as follows:

The line should start low and soft as the singer sings the word 'oh' in a normal voice. She shouldn't try to project the low C# — it's a pillow-talk intimacy. She should only add volume as she pushes the voice into the chest while sliding upwards through the minor ninth in a moaning portamento to the fermata-lengthened D.

A full-voiced throb should enter the voice then, when the singer can feel the diaphragm beginning to tug because her air is running out. We should feel some risk there: the audience intuits that she's running out of air as she shifts the voice into her head with the last of her breath; her body and the audience's bodies share not just the reflexive response to the human moan, but the terror of running out of air.

The flute should enter just at that moment, matching the timbre of the singer's voice. The wail should pass without fuss, normal voice and diction taking over as a breath is taken and the words 'the wondrous manly' are clearly enunciated ('wondrous' is a word that speaks for itself; it doesn't need any help from the composer or the singer); there should be a slight stress, a little vibrato on the word 'beauty,' like the woody, thick vibrato you get high on the violin's G string, even a sob, before the last of the singer's air is gone and the line ends, not tapered off, but snuffed out.

Just as much and more is happening in eight good seconds of any well-wrought, well-performed piece of music.