Jan DeGaetani, née Janice Ruetz, was born in Massillon, Ohio in July 1933. In addition to her vocal studies at Juilliard with Sergius Kagen, she also credited her weekly music-reading lessons of part-songs and Madrigals from the Renaissance and Baroque eras with Norman Lloyd for expanding her musical range. She retained a fondness all her life for songs, particularly lieder, of the past—she even recorded an album of Cole Porter songs and made them works of art—yet she quickly became noted for her mastery of modern and avant-garde music. Since she didn’t have perfect pitch, she gave new scores a thorough going-over to make sure she had each and every note in place.
After graduating, she worked with such groups as the Waverly Consort, but soon became involved with the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble directed by Arthur Weisberg, and especially with their pianist Gilbert Kalish, and this was the fulcrum by which she had a jump-start into the world of contemporary music. Her breakthrough recital came in 1960 when she performed Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire at Carnegie Recital Hall with Robert Cole and the Gramercy Chamber Ensemble. Although Bethany Beardslee had recorded this work for Columbia (under the direction of Robert Craft), it was DeGaetani who became known for singing this challenging sprechstimme work in public. She made a famous recording of it in 1970, her first album for the Nonesuch label.
Yet it was another Nonesuch recording, of George Crumb’s avant-garde song cycle Ancient Voices of Children, that catapulted DeGaetani into superstardom as a leading singer of the modern idiom. Crumb’s work was scarcely considered musical by many listeners, a masterpiece by others, yet the combination of the generally quiet mood of the piece, the almost shocking “reverb” effects that DeGaetani created with her voice, and the ambience of the recorded sound made the LP a classic. Retail sales astonished both the artists and the record label, and the LP became a sort of underground “hit” in the classical world.
She briefly taught voice at the State College of New York at Purchase and Bennington College before joining the Eastman School of Music in 1973. By the late 1970s she was also teaching voice and giving annual performances at the Aspen summer Music Festivals, and this is where I caught up with her in 1979.
Already a legend for her perfect voice placement, superb phrasing and meticulously detailed performances, I approached her with a degree of reverence that I seldom felt towards “opera singers.” I couldn’t help asking her how on earth she managed to sing such strange music without stretching her voice out of shape. Her answer, though simple on the surface, was enlightening and lit up the light bulb in my head: “The trick is to never sing anything that’s outside your range. As long as all the notes in the score are within your range, you’ll make it somehow. Step outside of your range, and you’re in big trouble.”
I heard her sing a song recital that summer, but the big deal of the festival was the American premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’ latest opera, The Martyrdom of St. Magnus. I had gone over the score with New York Times and Opera News critic David Hamilton, who also showed me the score of Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King—without question one of the weirdest scores I’ve ever seen, laid out like a birdcage with music staves all over the place and notes reaching above and below the staff like a bunch of crazy wildflowers. But I had liked Eight Songs for a Mad King (yet another surprising modern-music “hit” for Nonesuch, this one featuring baritone Julius Eastman and the Fires of London ensemble), so I figured I would like Martyrdom. No such luck. The score was just as zany as the Eight Songs but not as concise; nor did it contain tonal or rhythmic “signposts” that the listener could hold on to. In short, it was a load of bull. And the stage production was cutting edge minimalism, with soldiers searching for Magnus suddenly running through the auditorium with flashlights, as if the burgeoning saint were hiding under one of our chairs. The only image that sticks in my mind from the whole performance is that of DeGaetani, as “Blind Mary,” lying flat on her back in the middle of the stage and singing a soliloquy. As much as I admired her, I couldn’t help but find the scene more than a bit ludicrous.
A couple of years later, back in Cincinnati, the music director of the local Chamber Orchestra wanted to perform Benjamin Britten’s wonderful late Phaedra cantata but couldn’t find an adequate local mezzo who could sing it. Out of the blue, I recommended that he ask DeGaetani. He wondered if she had sung it before; I told him probably not, but she was such a good musician that I was sure she could learn it in less than a week. He took a chance and contacted her; much to his relief, she agreed to learn and perform it. Her performance of it was one of the most moving I’ve ever heard after Janet Baker’s great 1976 recording of the work, but unfortunately the performance was neither broadcast nor recorded, so it only exists in my memory.
I followed DeGaetani’s career sporadically over the next several years but, aside from her performances at the Aspen Festival, she seemed to be teaching more than singing. Then, suddenly, it was all over. She died in 1989 of leukemia, a shock to all of us who admired her.
It’s difficult to think of too many other singers of her time who were as important in a number of ways that didn’t relate to conventional opera. She was, like Bethany Beardslee, Cathy Berberian and Dora Orenstein, one of those singers who stamped her art and her personality on everything she sang and, in return, drew a much larger audience into her circle. She was sorely missed and, in many ways, never replaced.
— © 2016 Lynn René Bayley
Listen to Jan DeGaetani here:
Ancient Voices of Children, part 1
Ancient Voices of Children, part 2
Ravel: Les Chansons Madécasses
When one discusses the great trumpet and cornet players in jazz, a long list of names come to mind, but when restricted to the late 1920s-early ‘30s only four names come up with any regularity: Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Bubber Miley and Red Nichols. There are strong, valid reasons why each of them are still remembered, particularly for this period of jazz, but one name that is seldom brought up except by serious collectors is that of Cladys “Jabbo” Smith.
impromptu cadenza that sounds a bit like Armstrong’s on West End Blues but played at warp speed. Like Armstrong, Smith utilizes initial note and terminal vibrato—something he held back from in his earlier recordings—but he also plays much more wild solos, staying up almost consistently in the top third of his range and building his solos around rather wild triplet figures. In his early sessions he was lucky enough to obtain the services of the great Omer Simeon, Jelly Roll Morton’s favorite clarinetist, a superb technician with a fine ear and first-class reading skills who could weave appropriate counterpoint around Smith’s sometimes Baroque fantasies. In the later recordings made from March 30 on, Simeon was replaced by the so-so alto saxist George James, but the trade-off was that the merely competent pianist Cassino Simpson was replaced by an excellent, underrated player named Earl Frazier.
The Rhythm Aces records swung, but in an odd sort of way. Although it took Dizzy Gillespie to fully break the mold between the jazz rhythm of Armstrong and that of future jazz, on these 1929 recordings Jabbo Smith is already pushing the envelope. Small wonder that, despite Williams’ promotion for them in the black newspaper The Chicago Defender, they sold fairly poorly and were soon forgotten…except by a handful of musicians, among them young Roy Eldridge. Eventually the younger Eldridge met his idol in person, but that first encounter wasn’t a very happy one for him. By Eldridge’s own account, “Jabbo Smith caught me one night and turned me every way but loose…he wore me out …He knew a lot of music and changes.”
As it is, I can’t recommend it over the mid-1990s recording on Arts Music with Delores Ziegler (Orfeo), Cecilia Gasdia (Euridice) and Bruce Ford (Imeneo) with the Solisti Veneti—a sort of mid-period HIP orchestra, not as whiny-sounding as the Ensemble Lorenzo da Ponte—conducted by Claudio Scimone, who actually, really uses legato phrasing. In addition, Ziegler presents us with a real, complex character, not just a nice singing job—although sheerly in terms of singing, she has it all over Genaux. Her voice is richer, her tone coloring vastly superior, and she sings the trills that Genaux simply skips over. (The presence of the great Bruce Ford as Imeneo speaks for itself…here was a master tenor in a nice piece of luxury casting for a throwaway role.) Even the little bridge passages for the strings sound better in Scimone’s version, and overall the opera just sounds more Italian, if you know what I mean. This new recording is, quite simply, wrong-headed in execution and hard to listen to, a real disaster.
It was a high-pitched voice, very sweet in sound and completely unlike any other contemporary pop singer I had ever heard. I thought it was a woman singing…I was, in fact, quite surprised to learn that it was a man. I looked at the album cover and saw a faded black-and-white photo of a freckle-faced boy with the single word, Harry, next to it. That was my introduction to Harry Nilsson. I listened to the entire album in one sitting; each song seemed as good if not better than the last. When it was finished, I felt as if there was someone—this singer-songwriter, at least—who understood what it was like to feel alienated.
these. By this time I had seen the film Midnight Cowboy and heard the song Everybody’s Talkin’. Still in college, I heard the music from Nilsson’s animated film The Point, which I liked less, but was still a fan. I learned, by this time, that Nilsson had started out making demo records for songwriter Scott Turner in 1962, then wrote some songs (including one for Little Richard and three for Phil Spector) through which he met and befriended publisher Perry Botkin, Jr. All through this period he worked at a bank on computers—remember, these were the days when “computer” meant something six feet high and four feet across, with huge digital tape reels on them, set aside in a dustproof room (think of the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey), not something on a desk. But Nilsson had an office of his own. He sang just one live performance in tandem with another singer, was petrified and hated the experience, but Botkin was still able to promote Nilsson as a singer. He introduced him to composer-arranger George Tipton, who acted as Nilsson’s music director on his first three RCA Victor albums (including Harry). Tipton personally invested his life’s savings, $2,500, to record four songs with Nilsson which he was able to sell to Tower Records. Due to these demos, Tipton wangled a contract with RCA and history was made.
something indefinably beautiful about them; they have a certain timeless quality. At the time they were released, Time magazine referred to that genre of music as “salon rock.” I suppose that’s as good a definition as any, but to me the “rock” element is so gentle and innocuous that it isn’t even noticeable most of the time. When Nilsson died of heart failure in 1994, not quite aged 53, it came as a bit of a shock to me, but by this time he had become much more identified with the songs Without You and Coconut in the eyes of the public. I miss that early part of you, Harry, and I wish you hadn’t deserted your principles and style. It was what made you unique.
and Willie Cook replacing Bailey—who were able to play like him, at least when he wrote out the improvisations, scored them for five trumpets, and led the section himself. The effect was stunning if a little messy: the 1940s Gillespie band always seemed to have slight intonation problems, particularly in the reed section. But in the end it didn’t matter because their playing was just so exciting. I can still recall, as an 18-year-old, buying the RCA Victor Vintage LPs The Be-Bop Era and Dizzy Gillespie, and thrilling to such mind-boggling pieces as Ow!, Stay on It, Oop-Pop-A-Da and Cool Breeze (on the former) and many more on the latter (Lover Come Back to Me, Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid, Hey Pete! Let’s Eat Mo’ Meat, Woody’n You, Ool-Ya-Koo, Duff Capers, Guarachi Guaro and that well-known bebop fairy tale, In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee). For one raised on the more traditional swing bands of Ellington, Miller, Basie and Tommy Dorsey, the Gillespie band hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t get enough of them; they were febrile in a way that was almost beyond words, even on studio recordings, the band fairly exploding from the grooves of the records and Dizzy riding above the fray like some high, wailing banshee Lord of the Rings. It fairly blew my 18-year-old mind.
the musically meticulous Arturo Toscanini allowed him to do some things he would never have accepted a decade or so later. His only complaint was that Chaliapin was “marking” his part—singing sotto voce—in rehearsal. “Signor Chaliapin!” cried the Maestro. “Unfortunately, we have not had the pleasure of hearing you sing at the Imperial Russian Opera. Could you please sing in full voice so that we may judge how you will do this role?” Chaliapin sang out. Toscanini was bowled over. Years later, when the bass returned to the Metropolitan Opera after a 13-year hiatus, one of the tenors he sang with was Beniamino Gigli, noted for having the most beautiful and perfectly-placed voice of any Italian singer. Gigli later said that “Chaliapin’s singing was as great as his acting. His voice was beautiful in texture, perfectly produced, thrilling in range and power; his vocalism was an outstanding exhibition of breath control, tonal production and phrasing.” This can be easily borne out by his recording of Anton Rubinstein’s Persian Love Song No. 9, subtitled The Turbulent Waters of Kur. Made in 1931 when he was 58 years old and had been using his voice in a very hard way for at least 33 years, it features a final chorus sung entirely in a high, soft head voice, what voice teachers refer to as a fil di voce, and both his pitch and his breath control are perfect. It could easily ne held up as a model of bel canto singing from an artist who was, if anything, anti-bel canto in his general approach.
Chaliapin was not being willful, but had clearly and meticulously thought all of his effects out beforehand and was, as he was wont to say, a “serious artist.” When rehearsing the opera at La Scala, Toscanini tried to show Chaliapin how to stand on stage as the devil. “You fold your arms in front of you, you know, and look evil and menacing.” “Thank you for your suggestion, maestro,” Chaliapin replied, “but may I try it my way and see if you like it?” Toscanini agreed. Chaliapin transformed his body into a twisting, demonic thing, menacing even in the confines of the rehearsal area. Toscanini was convinced. Years later, when he went to see Chaliapin sing Boris Godunov, he told critic B.H. Haggin that he was perfection. “If I had been a woman, I would have kissed him!” said Toscanini. Rare praise indeed from a man thought of as an inflexible martinet, but chaliapin returned the compliment. In his memoir Man and Mask (1932), he claimed that there were only two truly great conductors in his opinion, Toscanini and Sergei Rachmaninov.
happy to sing Pimen and watch Chaliapin as Boris. He was a superlative actor, so compelling that only my professional experience and perfect knowledge of my role saved me time and again from missing cues, so absorbed was I in watching him act.” Lotte Lehmann, who sang Margherita opposite his Faust in Gounod’s opera, recalled that “The impression he made on me was indescribable. After the scene when Mephistopheles challenges nature to help him in the corruption of the innocent Marguerite, he stood like a tree, perfectly still against the background. He gave the impression of being a tree, and then quite suddenly, he had disappeared, as if blown away. I did not see him sneak off, and I have no idea how he managed it, but it was like black magic. At the end of the act, in the embrace, a tall figure appeared above me that twisted its way along the window like some frightful spider, seeming to encircle Faust and me. An indefinable terror made me go cold. This was no longer opera, this was turned into some terrible reality. And when the curtain came down, and Mephostipheles changed back into Chaliapin, I breathed a sigh of relief.”
But the best summary of this great and gifted artist came from the eminent Russian critic Alexander Amphiteatrov. “Chaliapin is the only one who, when I listen to him, never makes me feel that the impression I have of art suffers a painful comparison between past and present; on the contrary, the more I listen, the more convinced I become that this is new, fresh and infinitely more vigorous than anything that has gone before on the lyric stage. This is an artist such as has never been before, the begetter of a new force in art, a reformer creating a new school…when you go to hear Chaliapin, you don’t even remember that you have gone to hear ‘a bass.’ What you want is Chaliapin, not his ability to sing loud or soft notes in the order required by the part, but his extraordinary talent for thinking in sounds—a wonderful new revelation which the arrival of this strange man has brought to singers.”
excerpts from Gounod’s Faust, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, and his signature role, Boris Godunov. In 1931 he made two versions of the same film, Don Quixote, in French and English. The supporting casts were not the same. Although the print of the English version is in better condition and the supporting cast superior, I prefer hearing Chaliapin speak and sing in French which he is more comfortable with, but both versions show what a great actor he was. But why Don Quixote? Or, more to the point, why nothing from Boris Godunov? Yes, it’s nice to hear him do the role live—there’s an extra dimension to both the Clock Scene and the farewell, prayer and death of Boris that are missing from his commercial recordings—but do you mean to tell me that no one had the money or the willingness to film even a couple of scenes from Boris with him? I find that hard to believe. In the meantime he became one of the most famous and sought-after vocal recitalists in the world, promoted in the U.S. by Sol Hurok. Sometime in the early 1930s he developed kidney problems, for which he went annually to health spas to try to cure, but it eventually caught up with him. He died on April 12, 1938 at the age of 65.
THE ART MUSIC LOUNGE 