Learning to sing again

One summer afternoon not long ago, alone in a medieval chapel in central France, I began to sing. Tentatively at first, testing the acoustics, as well as my voice, which, after 71 years of use, wavers in song. Would it reverberate pleasingly against the ancient stone?

It did. I relaxed my throat and sang louder, steadying the soprano notes of a Vivaldi fugue as they rose on a column of air and thrummed through my slightly scaly lips. I sang fully conscious of the pure physical joy of it — a pleasure beyond the flowing endorphins that singing releases. I tightened my abdominal muscles to support deeper breaths and marveled at the sound that vibrated in my vocal cords and finally resounded in the chambers of my skull. For me, this was a late-blooming pleasure. Over the years I had retreated from my body. I did not believe it could make beauty or give delight.

I have lamellar ichthyosis, a genetic skin disorder that manifests in dry scaling. My skin peels perpetually and my face is abnormally red. For many years, I coped with my body by divorcing my mind from it. Denial can be a useful strategy — it has helped me get up in the morning, ignore the persistent itching and walk out into the world each day. But obviously there’s a downside: It’s hard to feel pleasure in your arms and breasts and lips when you are estranged from them.

Many a wise therapist will encourage people with a disability to find a way to love their own body. Mine has. But we both recognize that because I had neglected mine for so long, I needed to find something beautiful in my body to negotiate terms of endearment with it. Singing ultimately revealed that beauty.

As a child, I sang in church. In fact, families in my small Catholic parish chanted the same melodies — the haunting “Tantum Ergo,” for example — that medieval French families sang in Romanesque cathedrals. Standing next to my father, who sang with a musician’s poise, I chimed in. At home, we had a Chickering baby grand on which Dad played show tunes every night. I often sat next to him, singing along lustily but imperfectly, thinking that my notes, which came in bursts, would never equal his smooth tenor.

The real damper on my musical instincts arrived in the form of piano practice. Every afternoon in elementary school, I plunked my fingers in the cracks between the keys, not because I didn’t know the score, but because the thickened skin on the tips of my fingers prevented me from feeling the keys.

As a child, I never let myself recognize what was wrong. I just drew back, in my mind, from a body whose imperfections I didn’t understand. My parents, deep in denial that my skin problem was anything but a medical matter, didn’t recognize how ill-suited for the piano my taut hands were. Finally, when I was about 13, distressed by my bungling, I convinced my mother that it was time to stop. I left the piano with relief and a dimly felt regret.

In high school, my musical tendencies suffered another blow. The inexperienced nun who conducted the choir asked me to sing alto, below my natural range. I couldn’t drive my voice down to find the low notes; worse, I kept hearing the higher soprano line and so I sang it somewhere in the middle — like a mezzo-soprano would — fine for my body, but not in the score as written. The choir director tried to work with me and warned me that if I didn’t improve, I would be asked to leave the group. Increasingly miserable, I finally just mumbled in the back row until the inevitable dismissal.

So at 15, I was convinced that my body could not make powerful music. I didn’t even try to sing again until I was 35, when a friend gave me some smart advice.

One raw spring afternoon, Mary Heilberger and I walked down Spruce Street near the University of Pennsylvania, where we worked as career counselors. A musician herself, Mary remarked that I had a pleasant speaking voice and asked me if I sang with a group. We’d had this conversation before. I’d always demurred, but this time she persisted. She must have sensed something brimming in me. My father had recently died, and I was heartbroken, but I also sensed I might feel freer to open my voice now that I didn’t have to compete with his confident tenor.

“Look,” she said, “maybe you’re not an alto. Get your voice tested. Take a few lessons.” In the coming weeks, I thought about it.

About the same time, I began to see a therapist for the first time. Very gradually, I started to talk about my skin disorder and how it had influenced my life. All my confused and conflicted feelings about my body began to surface.

I began to think more clearly about its flaws and its potential. I certainly didn’t come to love my skin in any triumphant way, but as I thought about what my body offered me, I began to mull Mary’s advice. Was it possible, I wondered, that I too could sing the choral music I’d loved in medieval chapels in Oxford when I had been a graduate student there? Perhaps. I consulted Mary again; she recommended a teacher.

So one April day I stood before a Steinway grand in a room out of an Edith Wharton novel, with palm trees and overstuffed chairs. I sang “America the Beautiful” twice — once in the lower register and once in the higher. “You are a soprano,” the teacher said, decisively, “and you have a big voice.”

That changed everything. I took lessons, improved my tone and joined a community choir that performs for the public every winter and spring. At the first rehearsal, I trailed behind the other sopranos. I hadn’t sight-read music for 20 years. Nevertheless, I felt exhilarated. I am singing Beethoven, I said to myself, even as my back itched as if it were aflame. By the middle of that rehearsal, I felt my lungs expand and notes begin to resonate in the hollows of my head. For a while I merely glanced at this physical pleasure, but as my voice gained power over the weeks of rehearsal, I began to trust my body to do what I asked it to do. I started to feel confident enough to sing fortissimo measures with the full power of my big voice and to enjoy that act profoundly.

In truth, I sometimes still cringe at the sight of my scaly hands and bright red face. But I love singing. With all my flaws as a singer — the wrong notes, the wavering in the higher octaves as I age — I know that when I am singing at my best I make beauty and feel powerful physical pleasure. I am a singer; my body is my instrument. Anne Kaier is at work on a memoir about her two years at Oxford University in the 1960s.

I had ceased to believe my body could make beauty or give delight. I was wrong