I met voice teacher Braeden Harris in April of 2008 at an all-Verdi concert where his wife and pupil, soprano Brenda Harris, was featured in various operatic excerpts. I have made it my business to follow this extraordinary soprano around the country, and part of me anticipated Harris to begin our dialogue by asking, “Why exactly are you stalking my wife?” Our resulting conversation convinced me that a formal interview was in order.
And so a year later, we found ourselves sitting on a bench facing Lincoln Center for a five hour discussion of that most impossible subject: the role teachers play in the art of great singing. Here was an extraordinary person, whose calm yet sparkling operatic soul proved an unlikely match to my spastic sensibilities. Afterward, walking back toward the subway, I felt that terrible sense of responsibility one gets when trying to explain a great event to somebody else. What I would give for everything in my life to be that brand of terrible.
For starters, you are married to your prize student, the spectacular Brenda Harris. Where did you meet and how did you become her teacher?
We met in the chorus program at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis when we were still in school. We fell madly in love, and I knew that we were going to make a life together. But back then Brenda didn’t sing very well, so I would make suggestions that appeared to help her. We ended up working together every day of that summer until she couldn’t stand it anymore. When that happened, we’d go out to eat and then come back. In retrospect, it was kind of old-style training. In the fall, she won the Met district auditions.
And you had to teach her everything, from the ground up?
People ask Brenda all the time, “Did you learn the pianissimo? Did you learn the trill?” They don’t believe her when she says, “Yes.” But she did! At the beginning, she already had all these crazy messages in her head. One day she said, “I will never sing piano. I will never trill. I will never sing above a high C. I can’t do those things, so don’t think about trying to get me to do them.” [Laughs.] Of course, these are the very things that she’s known for today!
Singers can’t be trained based on their limitations. Furthermore, trainers shouldn’t impose even more limitations on the singer. “It must sound this way. You can only sing these roles. Your eventuality is ‘this.’” But we don’t know. We may become something totally different in the next 10 years. That’s happened over and over again. Take Ramón Vinay. He was a baritone, then he was a dramatic tenor, and then he was a bass.
Brenda did a lot of Donna Annas in her twenties, but on the side she was singing several difficult Bel Canto assignments. Some people told me that we were crazy. In the end, that cross training helped her. Now her repertoire is significantly different.
Most people don’t see a “Mozart voice” growing into what’s deemed as dramatic soprano repertoire.
Let me use a horticultural model: I grew four varieties of chili pepper plants last year. The seeds looked identical, yet the results were significantly different. Still, they’re all incredibly hot and delicious. What happened between seed and fruit (genetics, environment, fertilizer, soil, etc.) was crucial to each result.
I had a math teacher in high school who, when explaining variables, employed a similar analogy.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about, the variability concept!
She’d say, “I like cats. Now, imagine that there’s a box in front of me. I put my hand in the box and I feel a furry animal inside. But I can’t assume it’s a cat. It could be a rabbit; it could be a dog.”
That is all you’re hearing when you hear an unrevealed voice. You have no idea what it may be. In this case, the cat could turn into a saber-toothed tiger later. People say today that we don’t have saber-toothed tigers! But if it’s a baby saber-toothed in the box, it won’t weigh 500 pounds, and its fangs won’t be so long. What we’re asking here is “Are exceptional voices extinct?”
No, they’re out there!
Yes! But are the saber-toothed tigers being killed off because they aren’t fed the right food or allowed to run wild? Are they driven crazy by a system that is not giving them habitat? Your math teacher was a great awareness-maker. People seem to affirm present limitations as if they were the only possibilities. Intelligent and well meaning people can get it wrong. Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer, wrote a mathematical proof that heavier-than-air flight was impossible—and published it a day before the Wright brothers took to the sky. So, what about being free from even the “known”? You have to be, or magic and art aren’t possible. Great art only exists because it’s beyond what is presently known. We all feel it, and that’s why we can’t talk about it.
How did you change your track from one of performance to that of teacher?
When I was a pupil, I would sit in the anteroom of my teacher’s studio and try to listen to everybody until my own lesson was scheduled. One day, during one of my lessons, my teacher said to me, “You understand this!” Even though I didn’t know what she meant at the time, it was a significant moment for me.
Later on, when Brenda and I first came to New York to pursue our careers as singers, I broke my leg. I couldn’t fulfill my assignments, so I started teaching various people that we had met along the way. When I recovered, I continued my singing career, but also kept teaching. I remember this guy started coming in to see me singing Italian lyric tenor roles, and Brenda warned, “Oh, don’t even try it. It’s the most awful sound!” After hearing him, I said, “I think he’s a heldentenor!” And he turned out to be. He ended up getting management and major people involved in his career.
You don’t teach at the university level to a great extent. How you do assess the results of the university model from your perspective?
I had a couple of adjunct positions, and what I will say is that it wasn’t for me. Lately, I’ve been dealing with singers that have their master’s or doctorate degree in voice, yet many cannot sing well. They’re frustrated to discover that even though they achieved what they were assigned to achieve, this doesn’t allow them to have the kind of singing life they’d like to have. These students are often told, “You aren’t succeeding because the competition is so great.” In my opinion, that isn’t always true. In many cases, they simply haven’t gained the necessary skills.
When I send the high school kids out to audition for colleges and conservatories, many teachers tell them that “singing forward” (which means many different things to different people) equals great singing. There’s so much more to it than that. Caruso warned around the turn of the 20th century, “If the voice is placed in the nose, it indicates that one is singing too far forward, which is against the rules of song.” Yet you have so many students who spend years trying to move their voices into some particular position that may or may not be right for them.
I had a high school kid come to me whose voice had changed at 11. He couldn’t sing above B or C—couldn’t tell what voice it was. After working for a while, a remarkable voice appeared. He went to a high-profile music school (on full scholarship), and the process began: “This cannot be your voice.” “You must sing more in your nose and teeth.” “Your voice production is completely wrong.” We’ve reworked his voice several times a year. If you’re telling everybody that every note has to be placed in a predetermined fashion, then you’ve stopped discovering what makes this specific singer important.
You bring up another aspect of voice training: the mental and emotional frustration attached to learning how to sing.
Oh, that’s something! When Brenda was a freshman, she was an undeveloped raw talent. Therefore, she was assigned a non-high-profile teacher. This lady knew something about the art of singing and was not into over-producing young voices. After two years, that teacher retired, but Brenda’s improvement was so great that the head of the department started teaching her himself, with poor results. By the end of undergraduate school, she no longer sang well. Do you know what he said to her? “Well, I thought you had talent.”
That’s a terrible thing to say to a young person.
Well that’s the issue! I’ve heard similar stories many times. Recently, parents of a student of mine said to me, “We went to the school recital [at this major conservatory], and our child is the only truly talented person there!” And that’s so untrue. Every pupil was accepted into the program because they had talent. What I think these parents are hearing is often the result of misdirection or poor training, not a lack of talent.
If this one-sided approach runs rampant, how is it possible that we have so many singers onstage nowadays?
As an amateur gardener, I take it to mean this: Do you do the same thing for a tomato plant as an oak tree? I’m not saying that anyone’s trying to kill the plants, but you will kill one of them if you do the same thing for both. You may kill both of them if you do something that isn’t appropriate to either one. Yet, if they’re strong, young plants—like strong, young voices—maybe they will last for a while. I can put one of my plants in a very unnatural place, and it may appear healthy temporarily. But in the wrong environment, it will eventually wither and die. It’s still about paying attention to that specific singer.
I have a young man who’s now beginning his career as a low bass, but before he came to me, he had earned degrees as a high lyric tenor. And here he is talking to me in this Darth Vader voice. Curious, I asked him if his speaking voice had always been that low. “Yes,” he said, “but I was told it was all wrong.” Thankfully, he’s one of the strong plants that survived—let’s not mention the hundreds that were laid to waste.
In sum, you’re saying that teachers need to have a variety of tools/theories to determine what the pupil needs, and not just two or three that should work for everyone.
Yes. If a plant has to survive rain, cold, wind, and insects, does it require just one survival mechanism? You can have a set routine, a theory, do just about anything, if you’re using what you have as a teacher to access what they, the student, already has inside. Your use of the word “tools” is dead on. When you go out to prune a plant, you need tools and a lot of love. Only then can you really take risks. If I give too much fertilizer at one point, it may burn the plant—but if I don’t [use any], it won’t yield any fruit! That’s part of this process: we don’t want to go out and hear only non-risk/competent things. That’s not what this art form has ever been about. And if you’re trying to develop a no-risk behavior or training system, where’s the need to keep this as a living art form?
But it’s not only the trainer: the student has to commit. I was working with a singer that was having problems producing certain notes. Eventually, his voice responded to the exercises, but I could tell that he couldn’t really feel it. It wasn’t “his” yet. I was doing it. It was mine, and that doesn’t count.
What do you mean?
See, the trainer doesn’t do any learning. The trainer doesn’t do any teaching. The trainer trains and creates possibility and awareness. As a trainer, you give the pupil the skill and—by repetition, drill, and routine—the experience of what it is for them to succeed in that musical expression or skill. You facilitate that happening over and over again, until they realize they can do it. Teaching and learning are essentially done by the student.
After a couple of sessions, [a student] said to me: “How long will it take for me to be able to do this?” And I thought: “How can I answer that question?” I could guess two or three years? When I plant tomato plants, the package says that it will take 65 days to harvest. But it’s usually 95 or 50 days, or somewhere in between. Does it matter as long as the end result is a great tomato? The magic formula is always inherent within the seed.
For inquiries on Braeden Harris and his voice studio, contact bharrisvoice@gmail.com.
