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Jessye Norman
Legendary Opera Soprano
It could be very easy to ruin a young voice by having training in singing too soon, particularly for women. Those muscles on the middle of our bodies that actually support singing are still very much developing when we are teenagers. And if we go to those classes, which, of course, are proliferating all over the world now, because kids think if they can just sing on television and be heard by the right person they'll have a record deal, as it were, sort of overnight. That isn't the way life works. Not real life. That's the way life works on television. It really is so important not to try to use those muscles before they are fully developed, because if you do that, the tendency is to use muscles in the neck, and muscles that are not there for that. Those muscles are there for chewing, absolutely. And I'm sure that you have noticed, as well, that one can see rather young singers that participate and the jaw shakes. That's because the emphasis is being put on the wrong muscles, and they probably started doing it much too early, because these muscles were not developed so the body uses whatever there is.
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Jessye Norman
Legendary Opera Soprano
Jessye Norman: The thing that I say to young singers, to try to frighten them into not sort of taking themselves too seriously before the body is really ready for it, is that these vocal chords are unforgiving. If we abuse them, if we use them in the wrong way too early, they stretch, and like any ligament they don't go back. They don't go back. So it's not a matter of having sort of ruined your voice at age 16, if you can just be quiet for two years everything is going to be all right. That isn't the way it works. It's not like a muscle that you can massage, or you can give it an injection or something, or you can rest it, and have it be all right in a matter of time. The vocal chords don't work like that. So I was very lucky to work with Carolyn Grant to begin to understand how the voice is produced. She was a great vocal pedagogue, what one calls the study of vocal anatomy. So I understood how all of this works: where the diaphragm is in the body, and what part of the body sort of pushes the air out of the lungs and through the trachea and past the vocal chord, and how this all works. So that it's not some sort of mysterious thing that happens to my body, that maybe it's good one day and maybe it's not good the next day. At least I know how it's meant to function, scientifically.
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Jessye Norman
Legendary Opera Soprano
They have a new production of The Trojans at Covent Garden which is wonderful, and some of the singers, I was visiting with them backstage, and one of the singers came up to me and said, "My agent told me he was at the Met when you did both parts. How in the world could you do both parts? I'm exhausted after singing Cassandra." I said, "Well, you have to carbo load the night before. You have to prepare for that the way a marathon runner would prepare to run for 26 miles. Why anybody would want to run for 26 miles is beyond my understanding, but that's something else again! So you have to prepare your body to have enough stored energy upon which you can call, once the day arrives that you've got to do this. So I eat in a completely different manner when preparing for something that's going to happen like that the next day.
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Antonia Novello
Former Surgeon General of the United States
I always remembered coming down a stairway once when I got an "A" in Spanish 12 by a teacher who never had given an "A" to anyone. And, as I came down through the steps running to tell my peers, which were five, they were talking without them knowing that I was listening, and they said, "I bet you that Tonia is going to have an 'A' because (her mother) Miss Flores talked to Mr. Hernandez." That really put it into the perspective. That was junior year. It only motivated me to be better. So, what I did is I studied so hard from there on that I took the entry examination to college in my junior year rather than my senior year, with the hope that, if I failed, I still had one year to catch up. And, to my surprise, I was the highest grade in the school.
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Antonia Novello
Former Surgeon General of the United States
When the call came, I said, "But I am not interested. I'm not looking for a job." He said, "Well, the Secretary of Health will call you, and you have an appointment on Monday." Grudgingly, I went and I thought I knew the agency, so I took the budget, the people who work in it, the mission, and I read it over the weekend because, I was going to tell him no. But the thing that I learned, too -- even when you say no, be prepared for them to want you because you're good.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
Later on, when I was trying to justify having an academic education, and wanting to apply the performance gift, whatever it was -- then I did study. I did think very carefully about the role of the director. I read a great deal of director's memoirs. I read a book by Tyrone Guthrie that hugely influenced me, inspired me. And, I have done ever since because I really enjoy discovering how other people deal with the contradictions. The thing is, there is very little formal training for being a theatre director. There's a little bit more for being a movie director. There are film schools. Most theatre studies places don't actually accommodate directors or have a program for them. Certainly not in England they don't. In a way, I sympathize with that because there is something unteachable about it. Really, what you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to anything. It's to do with listening. It's to do with humility and a sense of yourself.
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Sir Trevor Nunn
Theatrical Director
The first theater that I went to was a vaudeville house, and the great experience was hearing the band striking up. I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera. I've never wanted to categorize them, or to feel that they should be done by different people, different specialists. I've never believed in that. So, when I was at university, I suppose this was expressed through the fact that there were two famous societies at Cambridge. One of them was called the Marlowe Society that did all the classical plays. And the other was called the Footlights, and they did the musicals and the revues. And in my last term at Cambridge I did both productions. I did the Marlowe Society and the Footlights. I directed both of them.
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