Dispatch from “The Monster I Am Today: Leontyne Price and a Life in Verse”

She became afterimage, overlay upon everything evermore.

Her voice exceeded all sound, and I was bound to it in praise.


____



The first time my friend Brian called her “Pri-ce” (Pre-chay), I hollered. Dizzied by her wallop, queens are wont to add a second syllable to rev.


____



Whenever I hear someone’s voice, I appraise its elements and the forces that likely shaped it

      the teenager at the concession stand with her disinterested vocal fry

      the bookseller who hoots recommendations breathlessly between drags

      the Safeway checker with her high-pitched “Thank-you!”


I overhear what they’ve created with their body—an instrument anxious to sound itself out

      our elderly upstairs neighbors whose Brooklyn tones pierce the
      ceiling

      the young couple downstairs who rein the ringing vowels of Cantonese
      as an act of courtesy (or fear)


____



After years of vocal study and a lifetime of listening—more to how someone sounds than what they say—I’ve honed my diagnoses

      the collapsed soft palate of the white tech entrepreneur who despises
      the “whiny” way he sounds on conference calls

      the constricted neck of the Korean immigrant who deepens her voice to
      sound less “Asian”

      the Black Southerner who upspeaks to cinch her thick, dark-skinned
      body she’s afraid intimidates her white colleagues


____



Each voice shapeshifts.

Rarely does anyone listen closely enough to cultivate the stunning bloom of their voice, much less wonder why it sounds as it does.

Most cringe at their recorded voice—sound so evidently dislodged from the sanctum of their inner ear.

Not me.

I love the sound of my voice. I learned this from her.


____



              her face & chest
              low-lit

              black gown
              square-necked & sequined

              sleeves
              of beaded fringe


The United Negro College Fund commercial
where she sang

              We’re not asking  for a handout, just a hand!

1984


____



I discovered in her whirling howl my human noise
my instrument eye


____



The operatic voice exits the body a procession of elemental sonances: hard, liquid, gauzy, molten. Winged with vowel, words glint, irradiated.

This particular human sound dazzles and falters. Even a single note can waver in stature. Beyond the beauty of tone and shapeliness of phrase, there’s an understanding of material, architecture and weather.


____



An aria is a weather event. The singer and listener experience how the voice creates the conditions and withstands its forces. Together they determine the weather.

Before any human, wooden, or metal vibration, they consent to a being-there. To contract and enlarge, to vanish and return.

The pressures and temperatures of expectation also vary. Thus, the primordial weather, the  frisson.


____



Whenever Michael Jackson appeared on TV or in a magazine, my cousin Cherie, believing he’d become incarnate for her, became hysterical. And never more than when Thriller premiered on MTV (December 2, 1983).

With her convulsing on its edge, Momma’s bed collapsed, spilling all us (Aunt Trina, Cousin Lauren and me) onto the floor. Face red and swollen, Cherie laugh-wept without once taking her eyes off of Michael transforming into a monster.

Right then, I swore off teenage idolatry. I’d remain as solemn as when the priests raised the Host and, on my knees, I rang the bells—altar boy full of shame.


____



When Ms. Bragg asked our 7th grade Life Science class if we knew about AIDS, Wilbert Gilmore shouted, “That’s the disease fags get!”

His certainty was a relief: there were others like me whose nature was killing them.

I’d always thought I needed to grow an extremity so magnificent I’d be forgiven my nature, redeemed for being Black and gay, neither rich nor poor. Ordinary.


____



I grew up with only braggadocio and brawn to measure against the treble of my quivering and wide-eyed softness. Weighed down down with the same fear the men and boys of my neighborhood inherited from kin

—and skin—

so I emptied emptied to fill with unbelonging and dread—enough to deform me

      Kevin, you’re hungry because you’ve never been fed.


Wilbert had given me a name and brotherhood of the dead and dying, so I fixated on his veined forearms and biceps, his quarterback thighs and calves, as I rubbed against the underside of my desk, emptying emptying to make room enough for the virus and its prognosis and whatever else he’d feed me.

After I whispered, “I think I’m gay,” to Mrs. Stewart, the school counselor, she smiled, led me to her office and handed me a tape collection of Dr. Leo Buscaglia. I didn’t know what to make of this middle-aged Italian man whose cheery admonitions convinced throngs of PBS subscribers to love themselves, but I knew Mrs. Stewart had shown me a tremendous kindness.


____



Trapped in the terror of Mississippi segregation, Price’s family and community nurtured her voice (and pianistic talents) as both a calling and means to a stable life as a teacher. Making family and community proud was indistinguishable from uplifting the race.

Neither family nor community saw my talent as a divine calling. It held promise—that was it. Absent their enthusiasm and certainty about my future in classical music, my self-edict was to epitomize excellence, which seemed to require disavowing and overcoming Blackness to achieve it.

      Kevin, you’re sick because you’re so hungry.


____



From freshman year in high school, I was a standout, a soloist. Pimply and insecure whenever I wasn’t grasping a score and sounding my tremulous tones, my voice commanding attention because it asserted that striking, girth-giving oscillation: vibrato.

Its bombastic shake and naked shimmer, its self-congratulating excess. My gay adolescent dream: a voice that gave me character, or allowed me to play a character. Operatic.


____



The opera singer conceals, much like a ballerina, the work it takes to appear effortless. Yet she is without a floor to absorb any misstep. She must make the floor—her body is the floor.


____



The famed Italian singing teacher Francesco Lamperti proclaimed, “Chi sa respirare ... saprá ben cantare” (“One who breathes well, sings well”). Singers must master breath. Without it, there’s no voice.

At inhalation, the ribcage, abdomen and back enlarge to create a vacuum that rushes oxygen into the lungs. With their sternums held unnaturally erect, singers ride upon a cushion of breath. (Hence, the caricature of the ballooning and barrel-chested opera singer.) The exhaled air passes through the vocal folds to produce the sound we call singing.


____



Southerners—as if inebriated by the gaping languor of our own vowels—echo the sound of our forebears, the British. Our elongated vowels lend themselves to operatic sound. Think of the character Blanche in The Golden Girls. Her exaggerated vowels pulled like taffy.

Pure vowels, like those spoken in Italian, root the singing voice more deeply within the body, automatically amplifying its volume and beauty. This is true for anyone, but particularly for Americans, who find themselves suddenly disclosing more voice than they thought possible.

For a dispossessed gay Black kid like me, this was how I came to understand the voice as metaphor—something to seek out, excavate, polish and display. Throat already dilated by the patois of New Orleans, mine was a treasure to be heard, infinitely exponential and loud.


____



Apart from Black people (who speak with more depthful sonority than most in this republic), Americans often relegate their voice to the nasal passages, where it flattens into a tinny, unmelodious sound. These voices emerge from bodies but sound disembodied. What their sound lacks in tonal beauty, nuance and moral authority, they make up for through volume, repetition, conviction.


____



The voice I had then was a composite produced amid repression and resignation, but also through the radiant stamina of Momma and Aunt Trina, teachers and the various castes of my all-Black community. It was irreducible. They claimed my voice, its lineage and elemental belonging to them—even if it sounded “proper” like that “opera music.”

Singled out and praised for my voice. Solace in the blight. Because I could abide in Price’s voice and worship not just the god-object of her voice, but what it enacted inside and materialized around me.

Solace because I’d never possess such immensity, and that, thankfully, provided a measure and contour of my otherwise half-lit and indiscernible self.


____



Despite acceptances from Peabody Conservatory and my first choice, Oberlin, after the head of the voice department called to reassure Mr. Baptiste (“We’re a small school. Kevin can receive a lot of personal attention here”), the scholarships and aid from what had been a “safety school” decided it: 
I would attend Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.

Like Price, my teachers, family and community had nestled me inside a Black continuum. I lived close to the materials, the source. I felt it.

When I left New Orleans and arrived at Vanderbilt, the major forms and figures of the source immediately became minor or absent. But Ms. Seals and Mr. Baptiste had warned me:

      Don’t let them change your voice. It’s a naturally dark sound. Like Price.


____



Seldom do people ask how it feels
to be on fire and feed it

Stand there a valve
a filter a veil

and contain what should bust me
wide open

as I swim the depths
breath imperceptible


____



A monstre sacré, formed and deformed by her monstrous business, what did it cost her, a Black woman who traveled uncountable distances—from a Southern family without much education or financial resources to the world’s most coveted stages? On the wing of a European art form never before so closely associated with a Black singer?


____



Self-Portrait as LP

Pressed
labeled and spun
A needle rides
the pitch-dark
of passage
the immortal black
of memory


____



We’re taught the correct past tense of sing isn’t singed, that it’s another word altogether. But to sing is to singe, to scorch. What must that mean for a singer pushed to such extremes—in their singeing—as an opera singer?


____



Price’s artistry is her only absolute. Watch her interviews to witness a remarkable singer—thoroughly guarded and self-conscious—twist into 
cliché, incomprehensibility and aloofness.

The rolled r s, the European words and phrases dropped whole into a homespun molasses sound accented as if she’d never left Laurel, Mississippi, as if imitating an impersonation of a diva. It’s full-on drag.

Every answer, every gesture, painstakingly manufactured—self-deprecation, 
pretension, warmth and the delirium of her own mythology. She’s oblivious to how she needn’t work at the charade. Her voice—alive in memory, on vinyl, plastic or digital file—had long ago sealed our devotion. We come for the voice but also for the fevered delirium of her own mythology. She knows this.

For us, she plays the turban-helmeted, wooden and ceremoniously repellent diva who’s also disarmingly self-deprecating, warm, bracing.

As soprano Grace Bumbry put it to me about Price’s carrying-on decades ago: “That voice excused everything.”


____



Dear, this wasn’t no Chitlin’ Circuit
not Ella’s or Lena’s crowd

This was box seats passed
from one generation

of Vanderbilts Carnegies Astors and Guggenheims
to the next

Dynasties with ledgers and holdings:
Conquerors

I wasn’t singing some slave strain
collected with asterisked note

This is an approximation
because the Negro never

sang it the same or kept
to key or rhythm

I mastered the fixed notes
of Mozart Puccini Verdi and Strauss

I had to kill their phantoms with poise
and a swallowing silence

Do you hear?
I had to clear

my
throat


____



I saw Price as a template of how to abdicate the burden of my own life, to correct my misalignment, to evacuate my child self, my teen self, my young adult self, my middle-aged self to safety.


____



I seldom practice yet I sing in public on occasion—my vibrato unwieldy, a wobble. But the color remains.

“Why didn’t you sing more?” They always ask this.


____


With the way things turned out, regret became my most reflexive and muscular emotion, the focusing instrument to know what someone or something means in relation to me, and me to the world.

Whenever I hear or think of her, I regret that I’ll never make sound others can hardly bear, which is an agony and a consolation.


____
 

America,
I couldn’t have sounded like this
anywhere else

Grooves cut down to bone
a terror
                        a reprieve

I constitute an order
through sound men imagine
but could never make

What you hear
is an other matter yes
technique as ladder

but already
the summit
of my sound