Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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How can I keep from singing?
The above was the question asked in the final offering from the Monday Morning Singers in their concert last Sunday at St. Paul’s. To actually quote from the song, a traditional American tune:
“No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that rock I'm clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing? Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear the music ringing. It sounds and echoes in my soul. How can I keep from singing?”
Before I discuss these questions, let me just say how marvellous the concert was. Great singing from the choir and from young guest soprano Stephanie Laderman of Pickering, but also some fabulous instrumental work from cellist Brenda Muller, oboist Aimee Foster of Port Perry (how often do we get to hear that instrument?), and the dazzling fingerwork (and brainwork) of accompanist Dorothy Jovkovic, who tackled numerous styles and periods with seeming ease. If you know what Dorothy’s been through over the last several months, then you’ll know how much a refuge music has been for her, and how generously she shares that gift with the audience and her fellow performers.
Altogether, a Sunday afternoon delight, and thanks to Anne Mizen for putting it all together.
And as I listened to that last tune, it set me to thinking of the “tumult and strife” that singing has rescued me from, of how many times over the years “while to that rock I was clinging”, I found a handhold and scrambled to safety while whistling, humming or downright bellowing some tune out loud.
I have trouble remembering last week, so it would be impossible to say exactly when and how I first developed a love for singing. But before I was even in elementary school, I was already in the junior choir at Knox United in south Edmonton. And when I moved to a new neighbourhood and a new school for Grade Six, I joined a new choir, too, and got promoted to principal soprano soloist!
Of course, I didn’t stay a soprano very much longer. And I laid low while my voice was changing. But by my second year of high school, I was emerging from my geekish shell, and even though I wasn’t taking music in school, I had the colossal nerve to audition for the city-wide student choir.
This was 1966, and the choir had re-named itself the Centennial Singers, making plans for a trip the following summer to Expo 67 in Montreal. With that in the wind, competition for a spot in the choir was fierce, with the returning singers having an obvious advantage. But I somehow convinced the director that I could do the job, even though I couldn’t read a note (I listened really well...).
So I got to participate in the Expo adventure that summer, and that was only the beginning of the exotic places my singing voice took me: to South America with a concert version of “Jesus Christ Superstar”, to the American South with a tourism promotion show, to the Yukon in a vaudeville revue.
In university, I sang in every choir that would have me - the Male Chorus, the Edmonton Symphony Chorus, the Opera Chorus (my favourites were the Italians), not to mention a local version of “Up With People” and the campus musical theatre group.
All this time (I’m ashamed to confess to my office neighbour, voice teacher Jennifer Neveu-Cook), I never took a single voice lesson. I just sang and sang and sang, and learned by doing. I sang every style imaginable, classical and rock, musical theatre and folk (while tree planting in the Rocky Mountain foothills for a couple of summers, a group of us toured the bars as the Dibblers Four).
Remarkably, my voice survived without the seemingly indispensible tool of the modern singer, the plastic water bottle. As I aged, my range gradually crept upward, until I was as comfortable singing the tenor parts in the Messiah as I was with the bass. Indeed, it was hard for me to imagine being able to sing a low part like Caiaphas in Superstar any more. I had become a tenori profundo.
The crowning accomplishment of my singing career came with my emigration to Ontario in 1995. Within a few days of my arrival in Sutton, I found myself at the Uxbridge Fall Fair, where (in the Fair program) I read about auditions for the Uxbridge Chamber Choir, and after my very first rehearsal for that group, I found myself conducting the Uxbridge Youth Choir, and I fell in love with one of the kid’s moms, and married her, and the rest is history.
So if I didn’t love to sing, I wouldn’t be here. But here I am, and... How can I keep from singing?
