I booked my ticket for Hong Kong with three intentions. First, to experience an authentic yum cha tasting session; second, to see the view from the famed Victoria Peak; and finally, to rest my voice after a strenuous contract in South Korea teaching a class of vivacious 7-year-olds.
In my quest for the perfect jasmine tea, I underestimated the cosmopolitan nature of this city. I had expected to spend my time perusing boutiques reserved exclusively for the Condé Nast set. Instead I found myself perched attentively on a seat in the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Art’s concert hall, listening to masterclasses delivered by Edith Bers, the Juilliard School’s head of voice. My arrival—call it fortuitous or providence—coincided with the 10th anniversary of the reunification of Hong Kong and China, and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts (HKAPA) was celebrating in style.
For three weeks in June, voice, piano, and string students were privy to masterclasses with leading faculty from the Juilliard School. HKAPA extended an invitation to students from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music to join in commemorating the occasion.
“This is an occasion when we celebrate one music world, one music dream,” said Dr. Patrick Ho, China’s secretary for Home Affairs.
Hong Kong bears testament to its dynamic history of cross-cultural experience, but Mainland China, not so long ago, stifled musical prodigies who favored classical music from the West. It was interesting to sit and listen to the glorious voices of students currently attending China’s first conservatory of music, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, which opened in 1927, and ponder that students of this caliber, and indeed this conservatory, were rendered voiceless but 30 years ago, under the maxims of Chairman Mao’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
Despite this decade of repression, Mainland China is emerging as a rising force in western classical music. The voice sessions, open to the public, spanned four days and culminated in two evening performances.
Bers was quick to compliment the Chinese voice students. “They are all very well prepared and very open, very easy to teach. They’re willing to try new things. I’m finding it quite a high level, actually.”
This was Bers’ first visit to Asia.
“I’m actually having a wonderful time with them [the Chinese students] because I like them all. It is very interesting, the difference between the southern Chinese and the northern. Linguistically, there’s a big difference. With the Mandarin [northern] singers—I don’t know whether it’s just the language—it’s so Italianate. I think there are more tongue issues here from the Cantonese pronunciation. The tongue is very depressed and there is a lot of ‘rr,’ very far back. It’s a huge issue. The vowels generally are good, so I will devise exercises that help with the tongue tension.”
Phoebe Tam, a HKAPA student from Hong Kong, found the sessions, “very useful, because our department is very small. Just listening to other singers from the mainland gave me the chance to learn a lot. The mainland singers are different. Some are very beautiful singers, and it is good to mingle.”
I spoke with Bers about this first visit to Asia, her teaching, and her performing career.
What are the challenges, perhaps on a cultural level, facing singers of this region who are integrating within a Western professional environment? How is the international community responding to singers from Asia? Is it promising for them?
First of all, we’ve had a number of major women, Asian, who have been at the top. What we always want to have is the complete singer who is able to act well, to be very expressive, and that’s a cultural thing that takes time, to really be out and expressive. Well, I think that the Chinese singers . . . I don’t think there is going to be much of a problem integrating them into anything. . . . It depends [on] what a director wants, but you cannot argue with these voices. They’re just gorgeous, simply gorgeous. So I hope [it is promising for them]. I vote for them.
You have been in the teaching profession for a long time. What do you see as the essential components in educating singers? What is crucial for a singer to acquire?
We have to have technique, obviously, and that’s what we spend the hours, and hours, and hours doing. Singers have to be very good stage animals: they have to study acting and character study. They need coaching to learn style. They need a little bit of everything, and especially now.
The demands with opera now are such that singers have to look very much the part. With all of the televised opera, and opera in the movie theaters, everything is close up now, so you have to have very believable characters.
In terms of musical tradition and understanding the heritage that they are entering, singers should dedicate time to listening to recordings and having quality coaching with leading specialists, where possible. We have wonderful coaches at Juilliard—many who are very good in all styles—and some are even specialists in certain styles.
Singers must learn to be fabulous musicians, to analyze scores, and comprehend harmony, sight-singing, and ear training. It’s rigorous, very rigorous. And languages . . . It’s imperative that they learn not only diction. In years past, we placed a lot of emphasis on diction, but we need to teach them a language so that they can speak and understand.
Amongst my peers there is this hysteria about getting too old to make the career. What age do you think is too late for a singer?
Well, that depends. It depends on what kind of voice you are. The bigger voices develop a little bit later . . . if I am going to make a statement I could say that somewhere around 27 you should be ready to go. It takes about 10 years to develop all of the skills. Some people are ready earlier, some a little bit later.
It’s a hard question to answer so definitely, because it’s so very individual. Sometimes you find someone who is coming into their own and ready to come out at 35. If the singer is really strong and ready to go but needs more experience, needs more connections, that’s one thing. However, sometimes you hear people at 23 or 24 who you know are on a very bad track, and you can almost say that it’s too late for them then. So, we will say, typically 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 . . . and if you get much older than that, unless you are a big voice, it’s getting to the edges.
What prompted you to be a singer?
I think it started when I was in junior high school. I had a choral teacher who instilled such a love of music and singing in us and gave us fabulous music to sing, very sophisticated [music]. We conducted our own concerts and he didn’t treat us like children. He treated us as musicians, and just opened our eyes and ears to all sorts of new things.
When I was in college, I had another wonderful conductor. It was the choral conductors, actually, who just were so excited by the fact that I loved singing and I was good for my age.
Did you come from a musical family?
There was a lot of music and singing around the house. My mother had a very beautiful voice, actually. She did sing, although she was not a professional singer. She was actually a super at the Chicago Lyric Opera. She was also a docent and taught school children about the opera, preparing them for their trips to the opera.
I think she just came from the generation where her parents did not know what to do with this young girl who had a beautiful voice. They just knew that you go to college and you go and get a job. They did not know what to do with an artist.
You had some wonderful exposure to phenomenal artists when you were young?
Yes, I studied with Jenny Tourel the summer of my freshman year in college. She was just quite amazing—to be around such an incredible musician. She was a phenomenal artist, a fantastic musician and coach and linguist—absolutely marvelous.
She was a not a wonderful singing teacher. I was only 18 when I went to her, and she did not quite know how to develop a technique in a young person—but just being around her was marvelous. She would teach from her own sensations, from a person who was already at the end of her own career. She would say, “Oh, sing like this and feel this,” and all of us young things thought: “But how?” Now I understand what she was saying!
When did you start to teach?
When I was very young. I was about 23 or 24 when I became an assistant to my own teacher at the time. I learned how to teach, and I loved it! I just loved it. It was my first job out of college.
I had had the choice of working for Columbia Records—being an assistant to the director of classical music—or to teach in a college. I thought: “I can probably always get a job with a record company, but I can’t always get a job teaching singing in or near New York City when I am just young and learning how to sing myself.” So I decided to assist my teacher, and it was wonderful—and I learned from the bottom up. My first students were so elementary that many of them didn’t really have voices at all, and I had to learn how to build a voice, which was terrific experience.
Maria Callas—you probably get asked about this a lot. Can you tell us something?
Oh, well this is a phenomenon, you know—somebody who definitely was bigger than life, and she gave masterclasses at Juilliard. A fellow schoolmate of mine (who was a violinist) and I went to her classes. We didn’t miss one or a part of one.
It was so phenomenal, just watching her—and the question was, would she be able to get into the skin of a student? How would she be able to communicate? Would she be distant and haughty in any way? But she wasn’t. She was very articulate, very helpful. She would sing any repertoire. There were students of every voice type in this class and she would just sing along with them, whether they were basses, sopranos, or anything.
I met with her a couple of times, and it was very interesting. We talked, and I sang for her, and she was very generous and specific. I really felt that I learned a tremendous amount just being in her presence. She was very unique.
Do you have any advice for fledgling singers?
You get bits and pieces from everybody, especially when you are so young. As I said to the students today, you hear so much from so many people. . . . One person says, “Well, this is what you have to do,” and another says, “Well, that is what you have to do,” and you kind of can be swimming. Just let all of these ideas swim around and then see what works for you. [You don’t] have to decide at the moment that you have to do this, that, or the other. You can do them all—just try it and see.
As a teacher and mentor, you no doubt are responsible for inspiring a large studio of singers. What inspires you?
I just love teaching. I absolutely love it. I take singers that I am very interested in, and they can be offbeat or they can be more traditional in terms of mainstream. I love the uniqueness of each person. And it is very important to me that they are able to keep their uniqueness and their unique voice—the sound of their voice and how they express themselves—so that we don’t just have a string of people who are all good but sound the same. . . . As singers, we have to find our unique voice and build on it.
I am very interested in the person, the singer as a person. Every singer should be a full human being: educated, broad, nice, inclusive of colleagues, helpful. It is a joy to encourage singers to grow as human beings.
Edith Bers is the current chair of voice at the Juilliard School. She has also taught at Bard College, the Manhattan School of Music, and New York University. Bers graduated from Columbia University and studied voice with such luminaries as Tourel, Callas, Popper, Hotter, and Stader. She was also an acting student of Stella Adler. Her performance credits include the U.S. premiere of Schumann’s Des Sangers Fluch and the television production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Bers has traveled extensively as a panelist, keynote speaker, and adjudicator for numerous masterclasses, seminars, and competitions, including the Symposium on the Care of the Professional Voice, the Metropolitan Opera Auditions, the Korean Broadcasting System, the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition (Brussels), and the Bel Canto Institute (Florence).
