Singing at 74

This essay respects my musical upbringing and celebrates the human voice. In the words of great William Byrd: ”Since singing is so good a thing, I wish all men would learn to sing”. (Hopefully that can be interpreted to include everyone!) There is no doubt that contemporary styles of vocal production sound quite different to the voices of early twentieth century. Despite her global superstardom and the sparkling beauty of her voice, smidgens of the higher realms of Dame Nellie Melba”s coloratura probably wouldn’t cut the mustard today. Fans had to adjust when heavy smoking Joni Mitchell’s voice morphed from her delightfully folky sound into a completely different deep moody voice. Abusing the voice with lack of healthy living or over use can result in developing vocal nodes. But some resilient voices will just go on and on. The physical changes in the larynx, vocal folds, and respiratory system do age a voice, which may manifest sometimes in excessive vibrato or loss of flexibility. I am not advising older people to give up singing, by the way. I am simply plotting out my own pathway in that direction. As, Google has informed me that the Swiss tenor, Hugues Cuénod, made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York when he was 84 years old and lived on to 108. Our voice is an internal instrument. We can’t see it, so we have to work by connecting feeling and hearing, and taking notice of constructive feedback, of course. Just as with any instrument, care of our vocal instrument with a commitment to warming up, effective breath control and a good regime of practise will protect and can develop potential.

I have been a musician all my life, but recently had to admit that I have only now, in my 70s, reached some sort of musical prime. With our trio of musical friends, Dust, I have been inspired to step up to work very hard on my voice, my piano playing and also to compose music. Dust has given all three of us the chance to explore our favourite composers and styles. For me, this has turned out to be the Iberian influences on composers of Fin de Siècle Paris. This includes the lesser performed music of Eric Satie and music of lesser known composers such as Gabriel Grovlez and Alfredo Cassella. 

It seems to me that although singing is becoming less important to me, my choice of piano music reflects a desire to “sing out” with my hands! I love to think of Eric Satie trotting off to play piano in the famous Paris Montmartre nightclub, "Le Chat Noir" of an evening. Sometimes the tune tells he was preoccupied in deep reflections, and at other times we may hear him trotting along, whistling to himself and swinging his ever present umbrella. 

Born into a house of song, it was inevitable that I would become a singer myself. Actually, I became a singer, pianist and very bad oboist. I have no idea how I could have passed Grade 5 oboe, as all I remember was that I made a horrible sound, kept splitting my reeds and had to mime in school concerts. 

My parents’ high expectations had my life mapped out to follow on from the line of fine English contraltos:

Kathleen Ferrier: a true contralto with great expressive qualities, sadly departed too soon

Janet Baker: the rich mezzo soprano revered for the 30 years of her career

So, destined to be a world famous opera singer, I started with very early promise, being able to precociously recognise “Mr. Handel”, Mr Haydn”, “Mr. Mozart” and “Mr Beethoven” on Radio 3 when I was extremely young. I gained distinction in Grade 1 piano at 5 years old. Just to name drop a tiny bit, my first piano teacher was teenage Jane Manning, who went on to work with Harrison Birtwhistle and had a very long and distinguished career in contemporary music.

As a child, the words of my parents’ songs created a story telling world. My mother’s rendition of the tragic “The Sea Wrack” or the mysterious nightingale in “King David” linger. But many arias were sung in English and, as I realised later, with awesome liberties taken in translations. Most unfortunately, meaning was frequently held hostage to rhyming! One such offender was the famous aria, “Verdi Prati”, from Handel’s opera Alcina, a complex story full of deceptions. My mother’s version was the reductive English translation “Verdant Meadows”. This gave a much more straightforward narrative about the lovely countryside and trees and streams, as contained in her good old Boosey and Hawkes Contralto Album. I thought it was all about autumn.

My parents were renowned in the amateur music making scene in Norfolk, and sang in nearly every church in Norfolk at one time or another. They were chosen as local soloists to join highly regarded professionals coming to perform in Norwich. My father had a magnificent bass baritone voice. His hero was Deitrich Fischer Diskau. His own voice somewhat like Thomas Allen. As a child, the day might often start with the sound of my father racing through strenuous arias at the top of his voice. “The Song of the Flea” with its manic laughing section, the gothic tales  “Edward” or “The Erl King” or in a lighter mood, the lively “Non più andrai” perhaps. This was his vocal warm up. My parents had a singing teacher but I don’t think, unlike my mother, that my father ever took any advice. He had that rare natural voice that simply needed to clear out the passages to wake it up. My mother had a very fine contralto voice but at about the age of 45 her contralto began to have a very wide beat and her hearing degenerated. This was tragic for her, but she became a singing teacher herself and formed her own female song group which she very happily led for many years.

Dreaming of drama college, I was dragooned into music college at the end of the sixties, to study voice and piano in the early days of the Colchester Institute, under the very benign governance of Dr. Swinburne. There I must have been an extremely confusing music student, as I started singing the blues, writing my own pop songs and dancing to avant-garde improvised music in a sort of Isadora Duncan fashion. As part of the decadent set, we followed Stockhausen, Peter Maxwell Davis and Soft Machine everywhere. We scoffed at contemporary composers who wrote tunes! It was all Penderecki, Berio and Ligeti or Terry Riley. None of these interests would help me to fulfil my parents’ plan for me to become a famous classical singer. 

I had began to write instrumental music, but it seems I did not have the capacity at that time to follow through with the threads I had scribed. So these little pieces remained tucked away on manuscript scraps in a folder. Very recently, I found that I did have the capacity to develop them and they formed the basis of my February Suite and the random rock number, “Now or Never” that a group of friends and my grand children joined Dust in the studio last year to record. From mid teens I had created songs as a sort of musical wallpaper, sometimes entering into partnerships and much later, in the nineties, forming bands. Now I am making new compositions and arrangements.

Just a little break here to lead you to two of the singers I have loved:

Suzanne Danco had such a pure voice. Here she is singing Amarilli, a song that we included in our Dust repertoire arranged for voice and bass clarinet.

Suzanne Danco sings Amarilli

Next is a fabulous singer who never shows a sign to taking much of a breath and that very last note is magical:

Harylon Blackwell sings Green Finch and Linnet Bird from Sweeney Todd.

After a career in special education I became a singing teaching. From earliest times, I had absorbed a great deal of knowledge about the singing voice. My tutors had included Norman Tattersall and Nancy Evans. I had experienced the process of recovering my own voice from scratch, after an operation. I found I could inspire pupils with my careful structured approach to their practice. I believe that diaphragmatic breathing, for instance,

should be taught as a mechanical process and I developed isolation exercises to support this. 

The apparatus of the musical instrument we call our voice is internal and to a great extent a mechanical process with body parts. We cannot see those parts and often cannot feel them. It is when we can feel things happening in our throat, for instance, that we know things aren’t quite right. Making this process of singing feel natural by extending it in an athletic way is an incredibly intense study. Over that 20 years as a singing teacher I insisted that everyone needed at least one classical song and to agree to avoid Country and Western, Death Metal, Don’t Cry for Me Argentina and Belting. In musical service to others in Coventry, my own music making was very much in the back seat. But eventually I did find the space to focus on my own classical singing voice. This was when Sarah and I formed Dust and also, for a while, a chamber Baroque wind group. I began to sing everything I fancied.

Earlier in life I had sung in a medieval band based in Bridgewater. I had particular favourites stashed away from that era and one beloved piece was Worldes Blis, an early medieval sung sermon, which Sarah and I arranged for voice, accordion drone and bass clarinet. I also loved to sing renaissance and baroque arias. So, given the chance to sing with the Baroque wind ensemble, I plunged into a fiercely disciplined approach to my own voice, realising that in teaching others, I had taught myself a great deal, but neglected to actually recognise my own classical voice! 

Although I worked to blend and overcome it, there remains a significant change between my lower chest register and my classical singing voice. I love the YouTube videos of hugely talented young singers performing Handel.

Another little break here to refer you to the sort of spectacular performances I allude to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXmF6h3Yd_A&list=RDrXmF6h3Yd_A&start_radio=1

My personal choice was to retire from performing with my classical solo voice.

(My father sang as a soloist till nearly eighty, although my mother didn’t think he should have!) Myself, about a year ago I happily returned to my singer song writer chest register and I revived, updated and recorded my Nighthawks songs.  

I am sensing that enough will fairly soon be enough for me with regard to performing as any sort of solo vocalist. I will stand my voice down to focus on composing and playing the keyboard.

Adapting my creativity is my own best chance to carry on growing old happily enough. 

Lizzie Holyoak 30/11/2025