Three-time Grammy winner Sherrill Milnes may be retired from singing, but the world-renowned baritone hasn’t stopped sharing his love, or his knowledge of his craft. Milnes, a professor emeritus of music at Northwestern University, teaches masterclasses and workshops around the world. For the past several years, he has been the artistic director of V.O.I.C.Experience!, which offers several vocal training programs throughout the year. He is also the Artistic Advisor of Opera Tampa. Recognized as the leading Verdi baritone of his time, Milnes recently shared his thoughts on how this main pursuit late in his career is helping form the next generation of singers.
You grew up on a farm in Downers Grove, Ill.?
Yes, in northern Illinois, but it was suburbia. It was not a rural town. It was not farm country as in Iowa, Kansas, or Nebraska. It was 30 miles west of Chicago. We were outside the city limits, but a small family dairy farm, down and dirty. I think if I had been in Downers Grove, Kansas or Downers Grove, Iowa, in a town of 2,000 or something, or if I hadn’t lived in a musical area, we probably wouldn’t be talking now. I wouldn’t have had a career.
There was a lot of music going on in that town, and I was a violin player as well. My mother was a piano teacher and choir director at church. There were fine church choirs that did big works, so that was a huge influence on me. Downers Grove had a music club, and they would put on various operatic scenes—which they still do—and I would be involved.
What kind of influence did growing up in that area and on a farm have on your future musical career?
My mother’s musical influence and the Met broadcasts. We would have the Met on Saturday afternoons. This was before earphones and Walkmans and all that. We’d have the radio on in the barn, listening. Church music was another influence: the Messiah, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Mendelssohn, etc.
Work ethic would be the other thing [I got] from farming. You can have the flu and it’s too bad, but it doesn’t matter—cows have to be milked. So there was no such thing as [the idea that] the sun went down and your work was over, or 5 [p.m.] came and you punched out. If there was going to be a storm . . . [and] you were combining soybeans, you’d get out there at 5 a.m. and go for 14 or 16 hours and get it done, because the rain could beat it down and you might lose [it all].
You played several instruments as a child.
Violin, piano (but not well), tuba—sousaphone in marching band, tuba in concert band.
What made you choose voice as your primary instrument?
I suppose part of it was the choral harmony, being part of that rich vertical sonority of a choir. Playing in an orchestra. I knew that I was never going to be a hotshot fiddle player. My voice kept going, kept improving, and I suppose, little by little, I received more joy from singing.
Tell us about V.O.I.C.Experience! Why did you start it?
I suppose the most noble philosophical reason for me is that the industry gave me a huge career. I feel that I should give back to it. I have teaching in my DNA. My mother was a music teacher and church choir director. I have music education degrees. I didn’t study to get teaching degrees in case I didn’t end up singing for a living. I wanted to teach. That was it.
In addition, my wife is a fine singer, a great teacher, and a great organizer. She’s really the engine behind our program. We have taught for a lot of vocal training programs, and we want to give singers a little more personal care. We want to give the singers what they need. The emerging famous singers of tomorrow deserve the best.
What makes your program different from other vocal training programs?
Our program is a lot of hands-on. We spend time finding out where the singers think their needs are. We even have them write them out: “What do you think we can do for you?” We force them to think objectively about themselves. Sometimes we have to tell them, “You need to think of something else. There are so many vocal and visual issues, it’s never going to happen.” That’s the toughest part.
V.O.I.C.Experience! has many different levels of opportunities.
Yes, we have an under-21 program we call “Gen X,” with appropriate faculty and age-appropriate music. We do lighter-weight music, a lot of Broadway. We have our bigger program in terms of more singers here in Tampa [Fla.] in August. That is the over-21 program and includes master’s candidates up to whatever age. We don’t have a higher age limit. If there is someone who is 45, we’ll say, “C’mon! Let’s see what we can do,” especially for women whose careers may have been sidetracked. It’s very difficult for women to maintain a career in this business. Careers can be sidetracked by having children or a divorce. We’ll try to determine how we can get a career back on track.
Then there’s our “Opera as Drama” program at the Players Club in New York. That’s our higher-end program. There are only about 12 singers in that program, mostly career singers. During that program they will be auditioning for Anton Coppola of Opera Tampa, of which I am now artistic advisor and my wife is the associate general director.
In your programs, do you focus on vocal technique or focus more on the business side of singing? Do you have a particular aim or emphasis?
We’re a fairly large program, with about 15-18 faculty, so every facet is dealt with. In the bigger program we have voice teachers, so it’s a lot of technique, as well as style and language. Our faculty are among the best in New York.
We do a lot of crossover as well. Singers, especially American singers, now have to sing everything. Opera companies do South Pacific or Sweeney Todd. Singers have to be able to sing operetta, or Broadway, or traditional opera. American singers are expected to be able to do all of that, and so we cover it all.
While I’m not a pianist, I coach. I bring a lot to the table, given the people I’ve worked with throughout my life. I’m old enough to have sung with Bernstein, Solti, Von Karajan, Boehm, Leinsdorf and others of that age, so I bring a lot of their musicality and traditions. I also spent much time with James Levine, and learned a great deal from him. So I try to pass on his musicality and knowledge as well.
You have done hundreds of masterclasses all over the world and will soon be giving some at the Classical Singer Convention. Describe a typical masterclass with Sherrill Milnes.
I say, “OK, audience, you’re going to get a performance. A singer is going to walk out and show you what they’ve got and at the same time, show me.” And while they’re singing a performance, I judge all kinds of things. When I hear somebody sing a few bars of something, I immediately know from whence they’re coming and know what I can do to make them better. The better the singer is the more I can dig in. I think, “What can I make better the quickest? What will have the most effect in the next 30 minutes?”
I may say, “Kathy, you have it memorized, but remember the character does not. The character is making it up. I want to see you have a new emotion.”
It’s your job to engage the audience. Do they like you? They have to care about you on stage: “You want to say, hey folks, let me tell you this story.”
Another thing: We English speakers, especially we Americans, have a huge disadvantage because we mainly sing in languages that are not our own. I mean, there are art songs in English and a few English [language] American operas, yes, but the vast majority are French, German, or Italian. What do you do with that?
We all talk about diction. Yes, you’ve got to have clear words. But more to the point, the audience must think that the singer really knows what he or she is saying and that they believe what they are saying. “Oh yeah, that singer really hit it and I can tell they know what they’re doing.” If an audience thinks that, then you’re home free.
You also judge many vocal competitions. What do you look for?
If I’m a judge picking a winner or casting an opera, I try not to analyze their [singers’] vocal flaws or strengths. It’s a different kind of listening. I think, “What hits me?” They may have vocal flaws, but does it work?
Audiences aren’t interested in analyzing. Singers are there for entertainment. They’re communicating a message, telling a story, interesting the audience, keeping the audience with them. Whatever it is they’re singing—a profound Schubert song, a song from Beauty and the Beast, Elijah, the Messiah, or any genre of music—they’re still telling a story.
As I tell the singers, audiences should not be privy to your vocal and personal insecurities. It’s none of their business. Your job is to hide those insecurities. Another thing I say is: the character doesn’t have vocal problems. I mean, the character isn’t singing. The character is talking. So, if you’ve got some issues, then you make it part of the character. There can be character flaws. There can be personality securities and insecurities, but not vocal issues.
What do you find are the top vocal issues with young singers today?
We tend to blow too hard. We often sing loud, louder, and loudest and it’s wrong. The human ear is a wonderful organ, but an odd organ. It tends to take the average volume of an aria and adjusts it.
Let’s say the volume is at fortissimo—the ear shuts down its own receivers so that that person’s fortissimo becomes mezzo forte. Well, there’s never a crescendo because to the ear the singers are always at their peak. So the ear perceives that as boring. It sounds monochromatic. It sounds loud, louder, and loudest. It’s all the same volume.
Volume is no issue in the pop world. It’s how good your soundman is. It’s almost that simple. Our sound guy is in our resonators. It’s our body who is our sound guy. We must use more colors in the voice.
What about singers in general? What do you see as key to being a more engaging performer?
Let’s assume you are talking about good technical singers, and there are quite a few of them out there. The biggest problem is they often look like they are singing their technique and not the character or the mood.
In opera, we all have names. You’re Mimi, Di Luna, Onegin, or Godunov. You have a name and a character, and so you have history on which to hang your character. When you sing art songs, or even the Messiah, [you] don’t have a name. We don’t tend to think of it as a character, and we tend to be too sterile.
Everything has a point of view. Now, your name may not be Sam or Carol, but you are mother, father, daughter, son, angel, [or] God, with a point of view. You must have a point of view.
A point of view means you have to make decisions about what words you want to point up. Do you like the verb? Do you like the object or the preposition? You have choices. Do you like the green sky or the green sky? Blue water or blue water? You must make choices.
When people coach one-on-one they often practice the art of practicing. Nobody’s going to pay to see you practice. Practice the art of performing. They’ve sometimes got their hands in their pockets and they’re singing about, I don’t know, their son, [who] just died, and they’re scratching their face, or they’re pulling their nose, or putting their hands through their hair. A lot of singing is visual. For the audience, singing is many times more visual than aural. It’s what you look like.
Speaking of looks, you are a baritone and the baritone in most operas plays the bad guy. But you look more like the romantic lead. Has that been a challenge over the years?
Well, one looks the way they look and if your presence is more pleasing to the audience, all the better for you. We have primary characteristics and secondary characteristics. The primaries you really can’t change . . . Rigoletto was always hard for me because I’m 6’2”, and it was hard because Rigoletto has to be hunched over. My short colleagues could do it, physically, much easier than I could. It always hurt my back. Being too tall, for a guy, is almost non-existent. You can be too tall as a soprano—then the tenor’s nose is in your cleavage. It just doesn’t look right—but I suppose a very short baritone just doesn’t look right. A very short Scarpia or a very short Simone doesn’t work very well, but if you can present a handsome figure, all the better.
Is there one particular role that you identify with more than the others?
I would say Simone. Another role I really loved is Hamlet. There the baritone is the tragic, flawed hero about whom Shakespeare wrote a lot. He’s the love interest. There is no love scene in the play. In the opera there is a beautiful love duet. Their love is much more overt and declared in the opera than in the play. That part I loved. And you do die, also. I’m a big “die-er.” In an opera in which you die—Faust, Simone, Hamlet, Rodrigo—if you move someone to tears because they’re with you, you’ve succeeded.
You have published your memoirs in American Aria: Encore, in which you speak about your childhood as well as your career. What made you decide to write a book?
I suppose a lot of reasons, some less meaningful. All my colleagues had. Also, I had things that I wanted to say. I talk about ego. I talk about memory, and confidence, and reviews and what you do with them, recital programming, health, responsibility, conscientiousness, how to study, and so forth. In fact, I used a quote from Matthew Epstein from when he read the [first edition], which stopped in ’96. (I’ve added 11 years to [the second edition] and it’s been republished by Amadeus Press.) He said, “This should be required reading for every singer.”
Are you still singing? Do you still vocalize?
No, I did that for probably 50 years. If you want to add grade school [and] high school, we’re talking 60 years. It took a little while for that habit to ebb, you know, the sense that I have to vocalize. Now, I don’t mind not having to [sing].
As Christa Ludwig said, “I look forward to the time when I can welcome a cold.” You know, I don’t love a cold, but it’s not like, “O my, I don’t have any income.” And that part I like: If I get a little laryngitis, do I care? No. It doesn’t matter.
What advice can you leave us with?
Once you’re out of academia, sing pieces you love. There are hundreds of thousands of pieces of music. Never do anything you don’t love.
