My illustrious singing career

Often purely by accident of fate, I have been fortunate to have crossed paths with a number of superb mentors; people who either directly or by example gave me wise and judicious advice, with the only reward being to see a keen youngster learn and grow. But you have to take the good with the bad...

I’d grown up in a home that was always alive with music: And not the music the kids at school or their parents were hearing on Radio Good Hope. During the day, it was often cacophonic or strangely lilting exotic tunes on crackly 78 singles gleaned from my Mother’s latest seasonal escape in Turkey, Greece, Iran, played ad nauseam with a tinny crackly sound quality we would today associate with a third-world taxi or bazaar.

Then, once my father got home, out came the classics. My paternal Grandmother had been a bastion of culture, arranging soirees in her home in Königsberg. This left my father and uncle with a keen ear and catholic tastes in classical music. Neither was a great musician – in spite of some apparently excruciating violin lessons Dad was subjected to as a child – but both retained their love for music, and in the 1930s Dad’s singing voice had his resonant tones live on the radio – quite a novelty in those days.

So with a mix of Kenneth McKellar, Charles Aznavour, Achmed Ben Whatever, the Israel Song Festival and a trickling of Beatles and Rolling Stones by day, and the disciplined tones of Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven and their ilk by night, my parents soon noticed that I had a sweet little boy soprano voice of the kind I later grew to hate (today, I cannot abide boys’ choirs – they have the effect on me of fingernails over a chalk board).

My sweet singing was also noticed by teachers, starting at kindergarten, so I was soon being trotted out to perform for Mother’s friends at any appropriate (and knowing Mom, inappropriate) occasion. By the time I was casting the pearls of Schubert’s Ave Maria (which might have been at least worthy of an audition to the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir if the now wowing and fluttering old cassettes are anything to go by) at the delightful Cape Town City Bowl Government Primary School, I was no stranger to singing in public. Hans Kramer, the doyen of Cape Town’s legendary and then only descent classical music record store that bore his name was the secretary of Green Point Reform Synagogue, whose pre-service job it was to find a suitably angelic and hopefully articulate child to recite the Kiddush (Sabbath blessing for the wine) at the end of the service.

With a quick question to Dad on whether I could, just over an hour later, after the curtain to the Ark closed after Aleinu, I was ushered up onto the Bimah, given a chalice of wine, and asked to “say” Kiddush. Well, I’d never said Kiddush. Kiddush was something I’d learned to sing by the time I was three. By five, it had already been trotted-out if we went anywhere for Shabbat. Nobody said Kiddush (except for one friend’s grandfather who did all devotions in a monotone). So in a clear and apparently pitch-perfect boy soprano, I sang Kiddush. The Cantor who had descended from the choir stalls On High to sing the blessing after the token child had recited it was a little taken aback. After a silence had fallen over the entire synagogue, which waited for his response, he reached over, took my hand with a sincere “shakeach”, and signalled the Rabbi to go on with the service.

It was only after the concluding hymns of Yigdal and Adon Olam that I first realised the power my voice (now warmly lubricated with sweet wine from the becher) gave me. I was the centre of attention of the entire synagogue. My mother was in her element. With a voice like that, butter couldn’t melt in my mouth. I could do no wrong. I could be the naughtiest devil imaginable, and when caught, smile sweetly, speak politely using “pretty words” like “responsibility” and frequently “yes Sir/Madam, I also heard the bang and came to see what caused it”.

I don’t know which misguided one of Dad’s old army comrades taught me “desert rat drill” but it worked 99% of the time: When you do something bad that’s going to make a noise (or cause a fire) and bring people running, the strategy is simple: After lighting the fuse, put as much distance between yourself and the scene of the crime as possible, at a casual walk, so you don’t attract attention. Never look behind you. Then, when all hell breaks loose, don’t run away, because it will only make you suspect. Follow the crowd, run TOWARD the scene, and become part of it. Even if the local constabulary are looking for “two schoolboys”, I was far too tall for anyone to judge my age correctly, and I’d turn on “butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth” mode if spoken to.

The happy years at Hebrew Nursery School (with similarly-privileged City Bowl Jewish, and a surprising number of non-Jewish kids) under veteran educator Channa Zebenewitch, were followed by a less happy three years at Herzlia, the Jewish day school where I (with 20-20 hindsight) first encountered materialism, snobbery and got any notion that there were people of “different kinds” in the world.

I must have been insufferable. The liberal Americanised “free education” model favoured by the Zionist educators of the 1960s (and which would become increasingly liberal over subsequent decades as they strove to raise more Olim) just didn’t cater for the son of a Prussian disciplinarian who, like his ilk, was more Germanic than Jewish in many aspects of his culture.

At home, the boundaries were clear. Cross them once and expect an admonition, twice, a stern warning, and the third time the business end of Prussian discipline, enforced sternly but fairly by a cowhide sjambok after being banished to your room to consider your crime. There just wasn’t anything that the liberal Herzlia regime had in its punitive arsenal that scared me. And they knew it. And I’m sure I drove more than one young teacher to tears.

It was the first time I heard the term Jekke. The concept of “classes” didn’t cross my mind until a lecture from my father some time near the end of my third and final year there. He’d been called to the school and this time (he was always fair) he stood up for me. He promptly booked me into a government school where the regime closer matched his idea of what school discipline should be like. Luckily, there were no Jesuits nearby…

I flourished. Certainly the happiest of my pre-adolescent years. Superb teachers in a small, homely school in a leafy middle-class suburb on the slopes of Table Mountain. And there was plenty of singing. Different to the twice-weekly visits to Herzlia by the blind Cantor Immelman, confined to Jewish devotional music. This was a government school in a Protestant Christian country. We were all issued with a hymn book, and part of my Anglo-Saxon education was to be completed. All People that On Earth Do Dwell, Oh God Our Help in Ages Past, Abide with Me and other classics from the Anglican/Congregational hymnal soon flowed from my throat as easily as Avinu Malkeinu. The odd mention of “Jesus” and “Saviour” didn’t bother me, but I did find Onward Christian Solders a tad cheesy, even then. Wonderful school musicals produced by dedicated educators, keen to give every child a part according to their ability.

Then, a culture shock. The small, cosy primary schools of the City Bowl would feed to a few larger High Schools in the area. Cape Town High was sprawling by comparison and growing. It was a building site, with brand new wings leading off the archetypal Victorian academic edifices that still formed the administrative core. Every day, adolescents streamed in from across the Peninsula. Many familiar faces from primary school, but many more strange ones too, with strange customs learned in tougher neighbourhoods where sweetly singing choirboys were not fashionable. A veritable jungle after the protected (yet not overly candy-coated) world of primary school.

And between hiding from a senior whose nose I’d broken, dodging Prefects after cutting class, evading teachers after stealing from the tuck shop or performing dangerously incendiary “experiments” in the brand new but now slightly scorched physics laboratory, one place of escapist calm was at choir practice, ironically held in the same science lab – except for a few weeks while the windows were replaced after being blown out by a mysterious Bunsen gas explosion which (my accomplice and I alone know) was the explosive result of an attempt to make whiskey by distilling flat beer. (Initially, everything went smoothly, but then things happened very fast. The apparatus began to whistle and shudder. We fled. In the nick of time. Apart from leaving the lab windowlessly exposed to the full force of the Cape South-Easter - the ensuing explosion vaporised our contraption of glass tubes, flasks and condensers, leaving no incriminating evidence except some charred remnants of an indestructible SAB "dumpy" beer bottle pointing to “seniors” as suspect.)

The beleaguered young music teacher who was destined to become a respected composer within a very few years was charged with the school choir. I’d come from a primary school that had fewer than 450 pupils and a choir of around 50. More than 10% of the school. This was a school of 1,700 and the choir hardly attracted 17.

But changes were happening. By the time the Games Master pointed out that I “should stand closer to my razor when it comes past in the morning”, the down on my upper lip and chin (and other regions) was starting to look more like the shock of sandy blonde hair on my head. A trip to Clicks, and a lesson in shaving from my Dad was the beginning of a lifelong loathing for the activity what I saw as a pointless waste of time. And my crystal-clear tones as a boy soprano were all too often cracking from the upper registers into the pitiful hee-haw of the breaking adolescent voice.

Mercifully, by the time of my Bar Mitzvah (where much was expected of me) I had got some measure of it and I chanted my Parsha in the register of a Tenor. It was about that time I heard the “T” word (or fathomed its import and devastating power) for the first time. Then, at the encouragement of the music teacher, I explored the resonance of the new lower registers I was discovering, finding that I did not need a gas/alcohol explosion to make the lab windows shake. I should have taken note then that my vocal destiny lay more in the rich resonance of the baritone that the high timbre of a tenor. I didn’t.

A year later, having been moved to a country boarding school, probably to pre-empt Cape Town High from asking my father (who by now could only respond to my various escapades and summonses to headmasters’ offices and police stations with episodes of discrete yet powerless tears) to remove me, I used the golden “tenor” key for the first time, and soon after arrival, gained precocious access to the rights, status and privileges (which included exemption from study hall and getting to meet girls) afforded a member of the school choir.

No longer Hebrew or Anglican, but straight from the FAK Bundel: Die Magaliesbergse Aandlied, Die Lied Van Jong Suid Afrika. Many to the tunes of old German marching songs – to the horror of my father! But I could lead, hold and if necessary carry the tenor line and could hit the dramatic notes. Of course I could. I was 15. I could switch from plaintive traditional Jewish that made a Yiddishe Momma cry to stirring anthems that could Elgar the Union Jack off the old South African Flag, and in the next breath, throw back a shock of blonde hair, gaze at my audience with piercing blue eyes, and sing Die Stem with a fervour to bring a lump to the Dominee’s throat. The voice that I’d first learned to use as a little Jewish boy had given me a key that (helped by confusingly Aryan looks) had allowed me to penetrate far deeper into the realms of both the WASP and Afrikaner circles than the average Jood. Gilbert & Sullivan’s quintessential “wandering minstrel”. A musical chameleon.

Throughout my school career, the “tenor” key neither faltered nor tarnished. My misdeeds that, while nothing more serious than being seen at the centre of a cloud of smoke wielding an obscenely thick cigar, as well as “removing” occasional bars of chocolate from the local supermarket, might have landed another kid on the road to a reformatory, were endured with a certain impunity. The school musical had to go on, and its star “tenor” couldn’t go to jail… and my housemaster played for the same rugby club as the arresting officer, and so things went away, save for several strokes of the Master’s cane (which was a well-deserved punishment far more befitting the crime anyway).

Having been born in the first half of the year, I had started school at five and always been one year younger than many of my classmates. The vagaries of South African compulsory conscription would iron that out discrepancy by calling me up for a midyear intake. Six months to do noting – it's not what you know but who you know. And then when you get to that door in the bowels of the Nico Malan Opera House, a veritable Temple of Europhile Culture, knowing you are approaching the Sanctum Sanctorum, but before getting there, ushered into the office of one of the lesser High Priests who had the manner, castrato timbre and frame of a globular Ottoman eunuch.

“What have you done?” “Just finished school, Sir. Sang tenor in the school choir, Sir”. I had used the “T” word. The key was turning. Deliberately pacing over to a piano and looking over his glasses more at my crotch than my face, he hit Middle C, which I easily echoed. By the time he had me straining said scrutinised crotch, yet still managing a clear Top-C, the sweating old queen beamed (with a combination of artistic anticipation and unvarnished lechery for “new meat”) “a Tenor”. The on-looking queenlets squeaked. The ageing mezzo cooed and gushed huskily like a not-so-maiden aunt.

I was “in”. Six months of uninterrupted culture, opera, operetta, theatre, and appropriate debauchery. Straight boys were a rarity backstage and while my presence was a delight to some of the girls (the feeling was mutual), several squeaking queens were a little disappointed. Not enough to be too bitchy. It was good for my social education. It debunked a lot of preconceptions, stereotypes and prejudices an Apartheid South African education had been at pains to instil in me. It didn’t take me long to find out that gay people were ok. If you’re straight, the gay guys will only flirt with you until they find out. Then, once you’ve reached the “I’m ok, you’re ok” stage, you flirt back, ‘cause everyone knows the score and nobody feels threatened. Also, I soon discovered that having gay friends was a babe magnet, and there are old queens all over Cape Town I’m still allowed to call “sweetie” without being slapped.

It was about this time when I got some good advice that, had I taken it, things might have turned out differently. Ever since he’d been “dumbstruck” by hearing me – aged six or seven – sing Kiddush in the synagogue, the eminent late Prof Lionel Bowman, whose final academic post before retirement was as Director of the Stellenbosch Conservatoire, had followed my career with interest. He advised me that my voice needed to be trained and that I should make an appointment with a friend and colleague of his, a renowned Cape Town singing teacher.

I did. In a quaintly prissy Victorian teraced house in Cape Town. After the now familiar ritual of the slow, elegant Marlene Dietrich walk towards a piano, a look at my crotch, and a Middle-C, I saw him start to grimace as we ma-mi-ma’ed our way to Top-C.

“It’s only just there, you know?”

 “Yes, Sir, I know.”

“Won’t be for much longer. I can train a voice, but I can’t train the little boy not to leave the man.”

He’s saying I can’t sing? “Sir?”

“Go away, save your voice and come back in 10 years.”

“Sir?” (I was starting to repeat myself, but that’s not essentially a problem in the operatic world)…

“And the next time someone calls you a tenor, tell them to stop talking shit. You’re a high baritone, sweetheart. He said the word “baritone” with a little kind finesse, but failed to hide his disdain. Even if you are very very good… (a toss of the head and a tut).. can’t do anything with you till you’re 30. Then, we’ll fill the Nico with your voice, if you are VERY good…” he ran his hands, a little too gently over my upper chest that rugby and learning to centre my own weight in clay on a pottery wheel was slowly de-weeding.

He was right. By the time I returned to Cape Town after two years of military service, parade grounds and battle talk had left any vestiges of the boy soprano, or the weedy chest, wafting in the cordite smoke. Yet, on a good day, I could still hit the notes. The key still worked, but the lock was getting rusty. Not with nearly as much power as I could when unofficially “rehearsing” the baritone arias in the bath or yelling orders for men to keep their fucking heads down. Tenors were in short supply. The key was to work for the last time. In hindsight, once too many. I should have thrown it into the Angolan bush along with my razor before Clearing-Out Parade.

I didn’t. Back in Cape Town, I knocked on the stage door of the Nico Malan. Tenors were in shorter supply than ever. I managed the rehearsals in the relative confines of the chorus room. Maybe due to the repetition, I got away with things all through those rehearsals.

It was only once the enthusiasm of live performance clicked up the adrenaline pump that one of the principals (a not-too-mediocre but appropriately insecure baritone who had overheard me absent-mindedly “rehearsing” one of his arias in a resonant dressing room) was to accuse me of “shouting”.

In all fairness, I most probably was. I’d wormed my square way into a round hole by using time-honoured techniques that had served me well until now. Now, for the first time in my life, as my peers started to catch up to my height, my voice was settling at a lower timbre. But the damage was done. I had been something of a “one-eyed Prince in the land of the blind” at high school, in truth, the school had plenty of talented musicians but I had the edge when it came to attitude (or more accurately, chutzpah). My confidence – hitherto boosted by predictable adulation from family and friends – had taken a massive knock by this professional admonition that I instinctively knew to be accurate. As a “tenor”, pure biology had meant that I had inevitably reached my level of incompetence. There was not that much call for two-a-penny baritones.

I never sang professionally again. I followed a girlfriend to join the local symphony choir, but it’s made up of good amateurs who understandably need more rehearsal than a professional opera chorus. With the soloists (often Nico opera singers) greeting me by my first name I was neither fish nor fowl, and I was bored. I was a second-rate one-eyed Prince in the land of the blind and it only took one person to ask me why I’d quit a professional chorus to join an amateur choir. A week into rehearsals for Beethoven’s Choral Symphony (I think) I was gone, as were any vestiges of dreams of Covent Garden, Vienna or Bayreuth.

Since then, give me a few drinks and I’ll give you a song. I’ll cover Frankie or even Meatloaf if there’s Karaoke, (or a talent show on a cruise ship, or a hymn to be sung in Lodge) but that’s it. And other mentors have since crossed my path and subsequent dreams have come true.

No regrets. No sour grapes. Just a lesson I have learned from the experience: Consider well whose advice to follow

 –  AMB

My Way

What a Wonderful World

Story:

There was once a non-conforming sparrow who decided to fly north for the winter. It didn’t take long before ice formed on the sparrow’s wings, and he had to land. He came down hard on the icy ground but almost immediately, a passing cow dropped a load of dung onto him.

It was warm and cosy, so the sparrow started to sing. Before long, attracted by the song, a cat came along, lifted the sparrow out of the cow shit and ate him.

The moral of the story, especially if you are a non-conformist:

Sometimes the crowd DOES do the right thing;

Someone who shits on you is not always your enemy;

Someone who digs you out of the shit is not always your friend;

And finally,

If you’re in the shit and happy, don’t sing!