Composing a Further Life

was in college, Dan began to be offered scholarships and jobs using his music. After he graduated from college in Denver, his first job was in Kansas, running a chorus and teaching elementary school music. He was conjuring music from the children in the chorus and the band, which no one had imagined they’d hear, but at the same time he was feeling that, although he could work with what he had, he didn’t have “the knowledge to build it.” So he went back to school to find out what he’d missed, starting graduate school in Grand Forks, North Dakota, then switching to the University of Iowa.
    As Dan told the story of his decision to go to graduate school, I realized that he had become able to critique his own training and was determined to do better with anyone he would teach. “So I’m there at the University of Iowa,” he recounted. “I’m studying all this stuff and none of it makes much sense and I realize that I had started college in Denver with a fairly good, clear voice—I had a good, clear high A—and by the time I’d graduated I couldn’t sing F sharp. The vocal training was just bad. My range had dropped, and it had come up from the bottom, too. I wasn’t breathing right. It wasn’t good.
    “So I go to Imperial, Nebraska, and get away from that teacher. I do a few church solos, and the voice starts coming back. When I got back to just, quote,
singing
, rather than
trying
to sing, it worked. I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I thought, Well, I’m really not a singer. Are you seeing that there’s no real mentor in this whole thing? Just me sort of playing around with this. If somebody had grabbed me in freshman year and said, ‘My God, what a voice, here let me do this,’ I could probably have been a really good opera singer, a Mozart tenor, as they call it. I wouldn’t have been a Pavarotti, but I would have been one of those people who could have done Donizetti or … But I didn’t know and nobody told me and there was no mentor and I had this god-awful teacher who everybody said was okay who was destroying my voice. There’s a lot of that out there. One of the people I knew had some recording equipment, and he recorded me and I listened to my voice and realized what was happening. Somehow after I got out of Iowa, when this guy had almost destroyed my voice, I suddenly had an interesting, good voice. This doesn’t fit the picture, you know, because singers never know what they sound like. I had been taught to sing in a certain way, but it hurt. And ‘just singing’ was okay. And it sounds better.
    “The other thing that I got into was suddenly realizing that I could carry emotion in the music, which nobody had taught me in Denver or in Iowa, nobody ever focused on What are you singing
about?
I know more about teaching now from having been abused and disabused and then abused again with my voice. Okay, so here I am in Imperial, Nebraska, and my voice comes back, and one of the things I did was the opening to the
Messiah
, you know, ‘Comfort Ye,’ and I could get through that really nicely, and I thought, That’s odd, I couldn’t sing this earlier and now I can sing it.”
    Ever since I was a dean at Amherst College, I have been intrigued by the process of teaching subjects that cannot be learned from books. These are the subjects for which teaching is hardest to evaluate, least understood by traditional academics, and most vulnerable to the assumption that, if you can do something, you can teach someone else how to do it. Teaching someone how to
do
something, to sing or to act or to play tennis, at a level of excellence is very different from teaching someone
about
a subject.
    In the meantime, Dan had started directing plays at the little theater in town “at a thousand dollars a pop.” He was also director of the choir at the Episcopal church.
    Switching again to his sexual development, Dan described some of his early encounters with peers or with older men coming on to him, and the continuing difficulty of understanding what it all meant. The need for guidance, for good mentoring, was a theme that connected his remarks about sexuality with his accounts of his musical development. There is a widespread belief that homosexuality is a result of negative influences, but Dan was telling the opposite story, the story of a child born with orientations or potentials that don’t match the models offered by an environment that neither refines nor develops them. “I’m