MAY, 2009
After a lovely
birthday dinner for his daughter-in-law,
with his wife and son, Charles said to her,
“I’m going to sing a song, for you now!” The
others exchanged looks and then his daughter-in
-law said,
“Dad ... uh ... you can’t
sing!”
He sat up straight in his chair, took a
technical “pop-rest” for air and began,
“I love Shauna, in the springtime
I love Shauna in the fall
I love Shauna in the winter when it drizzles
I love Shauna in the Summer when it sizzles ...”
... to the tune of I Love Paris ... as
though I need to tell you that ....
When he finished ... there was an appreciative,
but somewhat bewildered silence. Then Charles,
not to be deterred, announced,
“I’m going to sing another song!” and began,
There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow
There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye
An’ it looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the
sky "...
... singing all three of the verses of "Oh
What a Beautiful Morning!”
Shauna looked at him, her eyes brimming with
tears ...and said,
“Dad ... when you were singing, there was a
wonderful aura about you. I don’t ever remember
you smiling as much as you have been, lately.”
Let’s go back about a month ago,
when I had occasion to call my good friend
Charles Schatz, who is a Pre-eminent
Radiologist, a Past President of the Los Angeles
Radiological Society and The American Society of
Head and Neck Radiology and present Director of
Head and Neck Imaging of Beverly Tower Wilshire
Advanced Imaging facilities here in Beverly
Hills (uh huh uh huh… I did that all in one
breath!). We met, professionally, when Charles
Schneider, my ENT sent me to him, some fourteen
years aga, he was a great guy and really nice to
me ... so I gave him some of my performance
tapes of operas and some TV appearances. In my
current call, I told him that, in appreciation
for his kindnesses to me in the past, I wanted
to do something really special for him ... and
he stopped me mid-sentence with,
“I know what I want, I know what I want.
I want you to teach me how to sing!”
“Is that all,” I asked. “Now, let me tell you
what I had in mind ...”
“All my life I wanted to sing, but I never had
the voice.”
“How do you know that, if you never tried.”
Apparently he had, but the voice just didn’t
seem to want to cooperate, so he never tried
again.
“Now I’d like to try it, with you!”
“You gotta deal.”
We set a date for the following
Thursday, at noon. He told me he had never been
able to sing on pitch and I told him, it was
because he didn’t know how ... yet ... but
“…give me fifteen minutes.” I spent that first
fifteen minutes unscrambling his concept of how
to get a singing breath; typically, he was
breathing backwards, as most singers and regular
people do as well. The hard part was–since
Charles is so brilliant and knows the complete
anatomy–to get him to stop thinking so much and
just get him mechanically to the coordination, I
was demonstrating. He had it fairly workable, in
about seven or eight minutes. Then, I taught him
how to “tighten” his lips (only for this
demonstration of B-P), to give the diaphragm a
resistance, against which to work, which is what
the vocal cords do when you sing. That only took
a few minutes, since he had essentially done the
same technique, years before, when he played the
trumpet.
Now ... having shown him how to get
breath-pressure flowing across a resistance and
how much it takes to make a solid sound, I had
him open his mouth and throat, long and narrow
and imitate the full-out, operatic baritone
sound I make. With the minor exception of his
lacking the total commitment and focus I use,
our sounds were very comparable!
We sang it together, a number of
times and then I played them back on the tape
recorder. He had trouble processing the fact
that his voice was almost as full as mine ...
and our relative volumes were comparable. Within
the next fifteen minutes, I had taught him his
first five-note scale, down, up, down and taken
him to a mostly rotated high F! He really didn’t
find any of this too difficult ... Why …because,
I had just shown a “natural singer” … how to
sing!
I ‘ve done virtually the same thing
with several other singers, so far this year,
but Charles is in a class by himself. He is
soooo damn smart and he has a great “ear,” as
well as his innately, picking up the physical
subtleties he sees me doing.
He went out, the first lesson–I gave
him an extra half hour–singing the first verse
and chorus of Oh What a Beautiful
Morning!!! I sent him on his way, telling
him to pop out his belly for air (Visit: August,
Sept, 2007, bottom of this page.) ... and then
just give the belly-button a kick in, to start
the breath-pressure flowing... and just keep
feeding the tone.
His second lesson was a blast. He
hadn’t quite mastered my breathing technique yet
... but, he had managed to double the size of
his voice, all by himself! He sang his first
high G ... several times. He’s a bloody natural!
We worked on calming down his mouth and letting
the tongue make the words, not the mouth ... top
lip down.
The third lesson, just better and
better!
Yesterday he came in, all bouncy with a big
smile on his face and said,
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?”
I told him that I had an idea and he said,
“The first thing I’m doing when I get out of bed
... is sing!
I sing all day long!”
That was when he told me about his
daughter-in-law’s birthday dinner. His fourth
lesson, yesterday, was focus in the honk,
squared! Line, line, line, the vowels flowing
one into the other, in the honk ... and lo and
behold … TA DA!!! I have another singer, in my
stable.
Charles will probably start singing
O du mein holder Abendstern, from
Tannhäuser in a month or two. Yesterday, just by
watching and listening to me sing the phrases
... he had already begun thinking less about how
to make the sound, than what he is saying
with the sound! Now, that’s phrasing!
And ...oh ... uh …did I forget to mention that
Dr. Charles Schatz is … sixty-six years old!!!!
Now, always ask yourself the
question, “What am I saying ...not what
am I singing?”
