Voice teacher whose pupils included pair of Broadway stars
Florence Birdwell, an inspiring voice teacher whose many students included the Tony Award-winning musical stars Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth, died Feb. 15 in Yukon, Okla. She was 96.
Her death, in an assistedliving facility, was confirmed by her son Brian.
Ms. Birdwell taught voice from 1946 to 2013 at Oklahoma City University, establishing herself as a dramatic, no-nonsense mentor. She helped aspiring musical theater and opera singers unlock the mysteries of captivating an audience, but she could also make her students weep with her candid feedback on their progress.
“That’s life,” she told The
New York Times in 2015. “If they can’t take the criticism they’ve asked for — don’t come.”
During a visit to Manhattan in 2015 to see the Tonynominated performances of Ms. O’Hara in “The King and I” and Ms. Chenoweth in “On the Twentieth Century” — Ms. O’Hara would win (Ms. Chenoweth had already won a Tony in 1999, for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”) — Ms. Birdwell conducted a master class of about a dozen former students.
“At 90, she is girlish and soft one minute, fearsome and sharp the next,” Sarah Lyall wrote in The New York Times, “and she commands all the attention in the room.”
After Scott Guthrie performed “It All Fades Away,” from “The Bridges of Madison County,” for the class, Ms. Birdwell cheered, then ticked off his imperfections: He was tensing his shoulders, forcing his vowels and doing something wrong with his breathing.
He sang the song several more times. She pointed to a spot where his neck met his shoulder and said: “You’re putting a strain on that muscle. I don’t want it to get worse.”
Ms. Birdwell emphasized that singers must memorize the words of a song before learning the melody, so that the lyrics are not only in their vocabularies but also in their hearts.
“You have to open up a little bit of your insides,” she told The Times. “You have to learn about yourself as a person.”
Florence Gillam Hobin was born on Sept. 3, 1924, in Douglas, Ariz., on the border of Mexico, and raised in Santa Fe, N.M., and Lawton, Okla. Her mother, Grace (Gillam) Hobin, was a legal secretary; her father, Warner, was not a part of Florence’s life from the time she was young.
Florence’s operatic soprano helped her earn a scholarship to Oklahoma City University after a music professor heard her sing with her high school orchestra. Before she graduated in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in voice, her plans to perform on Broadway were derailed by an infection in her throat that damaged her larynx.
Recalling the critical moment for The Oklahoman in 2015, she said that she tearfully told her teacher, Inez Silberg, who advised her, “You cannot sing now, maybe, but you can certainly talk.” She suggested that Florence teach and sent her three students.
“Each one of them was terribly lost in one way or another,” Ms. Birdwell said. “And what I learned was warmth and caring and love.
And it stayed with me all my teaching life.”
In 1985 Ms. Birdwell received the Governor’s Arts Award, the state of Oklahoma’s highest arts honor. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Heritage Society’s Hall of Fame in 2012.
And in the late 1950s she recovered her voice, if at a slightly lower register, and performed regularly, most notably in an annual onewoman show in Oklahoma City during the 1980s and ’90s, in which she sang music from various genres and recited poetry and short stories.
“People have so much inside of them that just has to come out,” she told The Oklahoman in 1990 before her 11th annual show. “This is my coming-out party.”