Who inspires you? A tribute

This one's from my work blog (In the Spotlight, at www.burnabynow.com), but I kinda liked it so I wanted to share it here too.

In the course of blogging about an old musical coming to the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby, I recalled my old singing teacher and her love of Broadway musicals. Which made me remember just how much that teacher had inspired me, in music and in life. Which caused me to sit down and compose the piece below.

This is in memory of Joyce Langford, who was a voice and piano teacher in Barrie, Ontario – where, as many of you know, I grew up – and one of the founders of what is now the Barrie Kiwanis Music Festival.

This piece is long, but I beg your indulgence. And I invite you to respond with your comments. Who inspired you as a child? Who taught you lessons early in life that have stuck with you to this day? Who inspires you now? Who's your muse?

Here's my story. I look forward to yours.



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She sits on my shoulder still.

She doesn’t sit quietly, either. She’s not the kind of guardian angel who just gently nudges you in the right direction or the muse who whispers ever-so-softly in your ear.

She’s more of a full-on, high-energy, go-get-’em sort of angel.

Joyce Langford was my singing teacher.

I was nine years old when I started taking lessons from her.

I remember from those first few lessons how much time she spent talking about learning how to breathe. I never thought before then that breathing was anything special. Everybody did it, after all.

I soon learned how wrong I was. I learned the word “diaphragm” long before I could have spelled it. And I learned how to use mine. For awhile, I didn’t spend much time singing. I spent more time lying down on the piano bench, with a hardcover book on my stomach, practising breathing in and out until I could watch that book rise and fall oh-so-smoothly.

It was the first of many lessons Mrs. Langford would teach me – and not just about singing.

Oh, I learned plenty about how to sing: about the mechanics of voice production, about the importance of proper diction, about shaping and phrasing lines of music, about colour and tone and pitch.

But she taught me a lot more than that.

Mrs. Langford taught me that the biggest factor in making anything a success isn’t natural talent so much as determination and effort.

Over our years of weekly lessons, she developed a habit of pulling pieces of music out of her overflowing cabinets that I’d look at and think, “Really? She expects me to sing that?”

But she’d work with me, and it would slowly start to make sense. I would find notes I didn’t know I could sing. I remember one particular Christmas song in which the climactic phrase crested at a glorious high A-flat. (Now, for a soprano, a glorious high A-flat is a walk in a park. But I’ve always been a mezzo, and the words “glorious” and “A-flat” don’t go together for me.) I didn’t hit it every time. Probably not even half the time. But when I did – on those rare moments when it all came together, when everything she taught me just coalesced and it all worked – there was nothing like the feeling of hearing the sound that I wouldn’t have believed I was capable of making.

It’s a lesson that’s stuck with me. Whatever I may lack in natural talent (and trust me when I tell you a great deal is lacking), I know I can go a great distance to making up for it with stubbornness and sheer pigheaded hard work.

Mrs. Langford taught me that excuses are just that: excuses.

She never let me get away with missing my practice for something so trivial as illness or with hiding behind a sore throat or a cough if my performance wasn’t up to snuff.

Her lessons in rising to the occasion in the face of physical adversity still come back to me those times when I’m under the weather and tempted to miss a choir rehearsal – or, for that matter, any other task that requires dedication. When I whine about having a cold or the flu, when I’m feeling sick and tired and just want to curl up under the covers and go back to bed, I hear her.

“You can sing a whole opera with a cold!” she’d proclaim in her best impersonation of the Italian operatic diva who had been her own teacher once upon a time.

It always gets me up.

I’m not always happy about rolling out of bed. But some part of me smiles, every time, because I can see Mrs. Langford beaming at me.

Mrs. Langford taught me confidence.

Her encouragement was sometimes gentle and sometimes had the subtlety of a cattle prod. But, under her watchful eye, a shy, skinny kid who was too timid to raise her hand in class learned that she had the ability to stand in front of a room full of people and sing to them with a straight spine, a broad smile and a clear, ringing sound.

That lesson has stood me well many times in life – in school, in personal interactions, in the professional world, in my creative projects. It pretty much boils down to: Believe you can, and you will.

It’s a creed that stems in large part from those weekly lessons in Mrs. Langford’s small basement studio.

Mrs. Langford got sick when I was in university. She fought cancer the same way she lived the rest of her life, with a laugh and a smile and a song.

I saw her once then, and her smile was as big as ever.

“Don’t worry, only the good die young,” she said, with her hearty laugh. “I’m going to live forever.”

God, it turns out, had other plans.

Mrs. Langford is still there for me.

She sits on my shoulder at choir practice and nods approvingly when I draw little faces in my score – to remind myself to smile or to open my mouth wider or to watch the director during a particular passage. She hovers over my laptop when I’m writing at home, frowning when I give up on myself because I think something’s not going well. She stands beside me and reminds me to breathe properly when I’m about to go on stage or walk in to a room full of strangers or when I’m facing a confrontation I don’t want to have.

I always smile when I think of Mrs. Langford.

Without her, I never would have learned how much difference music can make and how much joy singing can bring to the world. And I never would have known how many life lessons could be learned by one small girl in one small music studio.

I know there’s lots of music in heaven these days.

You can bet those angel choirs don’t get away with any lazy singing. And they sure don’t make excuses when the Hallelujah Chorus falls flat.

They just get back up and try and try and try until they get it right – so right that Mrs. Langford beams.

Then they sing some more.