Susan’s Singing Wisdom
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“Life is too short to sing a song you don’t love.”
“An important part of learning technique is verbalizing it … I have a singer’s class once a month where I have the students work with each other. Somebody gets up to sing, the others are allowed to make criticism, but only if they have a solution. If they have a solution then they need to work with the student to make it happen.”
- An interview with Susan Fisher Clickner
“I have only, only one thing to say. No wrinkles or frowns and your sound will abound and bad posture will get in your way.”
The day before my first recital, after I had sung through a good chunk of it, Susan said, “Well this will be ready in about three weeks.”
“When we talk of improvisation, I think of ornamentation, only.”
Susan was wonderfully honest and hilarious. I remember asking her if I should learn The Queen of the Night aria and she replied, “You could learn it, but nobody would want to hear it!”
“It becomes very important that you know what you are doing all the time and the more you understand, the better chance that you’re going to be able to do it in a consistent way. If someone has a God-given instrument, they’re going to sing quite well on days when the sun is shining and they’ve had plenty of sleep, but the technique really comes into play on those days when they’re feeling a lot of stress or when they’re dealing with a brand new piece … where they’ve got to know how to approach it. It’s not going to just happen for them.”
- An interview with Susan Fisher Clickner
“Keep the breath low. Keep the sound spinning forward.”
“One Saturday we were having a lesson in her studio and whatever I was singing was a mess. Susan finally stopped it with a loud “No, no, no! I could get somebody off the street to sing it better than that!””
From a 1986 interview with Susan -
Q: Do you feel that the voice will eventually be replaced or will it remain a primary form of expression?
Susan: “Never! What do you think all those instruments are? They are copies of the human voice. Every instrumentalist I know wishes they could sing. They took up their instruments because they couldn’t sing, because they couldn’t do it themselves - they had to do it on something. No, nothing will ever replace this. How else would we be able to continually attract singers when the statistics of the drop in the number of people going into music are somewhere around 25%? It’s because everyone wants to sing. There is a little place in everyone that wants to sing.”
Q. What kinds of skills do you feel are necessary to sing 20th century music ?
Susan: Now that’s a whole other story. Because there are definite ways of approaching music that is notated without lines, without all the standard notational devices. The big thing is that you practice to get ready to sing that kind of music by testing your instrument and by thinking of using it in different ways, trying out sprechstimme, trying to see what kinds of imitations of sounds you can do and how diverse they can be pitch-wise, color-wise and all of that. But it has to be something that is able to be approached within your technique, and if it can’t be, then you’ve got to learn to say “that’s not a piece for voice”, or “it’s for a different voice”. That’s the most difficult thing to do.
Susan’s program from her performance of the Mass in B Minor
“Don’t press!”
Susan in her studio at New England Conservatory
Susan famously said upon her retirement from singing: “A singer should always know when to shut their mouth!”
Q. Do you feel that all composers interested in writing for voice should be exposed to singing more than just in a choral setting?
Susan: “Absolutely! If they’re going to be composers for voice, they should take a semester of voice and learn what the limitations of the human voice are. It’s as ridiculous as me writing music at Indiana University for organ and trumpet. What in heaven’s name did I know about those instruments ? Nothing. If it looked good on paper, I put it down. Only when I got to Curtis was I required to hear what I was writing and it didn’t matter what it looked like on paper – it mattered how it sounded. We still have all kinds of composers who learn to compose without really having an understanding of what they are composing for. That’s important especially with the human voice; each instrument is unique and that’s why it’s so exciting to teach.
“What language is THAT!!!”
Susan loved jazz … and she especially loved singing with jazz musician, Allan Mueller and his trio.
“They’re writing a lot more chamber music for voice now. I would say a good 50% of chamber pieces have a voice involved. And I love the idea of voices working with instruments in a small group because then you’re learning how to use the voice as an instrument and how to imitate the colors in the instruments you’re working with. Listening to instrumental sounds is why so many jazz singers have become really good musicians. I think this is such an exciting trend and an important one for classical singers!”
- Taken from an interview with Susan Fisher Clickner
Here I am at age 20, pushing through my first Werther aria and I get to that triumphant “A” in the climax of Pour Quoi me Reveiller and Susan calls out in that unforgettable timbre “NOOOOOOOOOO nooooo noooo!!!!!” I stop singing… the pianist stops… and she says “And up until then it was going so well!”
“You don’t choose a singing career, it chooses you.”
She once told me after I had “suffered” through an aria I was preparing for a competition, looking over her glasses, “Well we’re in trouble with this one!”