Josephine Mongiardo-Cooper: So You Want to Be a Singer
Josephine Mongiardo-Cooper: It depends upon the child. Some youngsters like to start early. I have taught young people, but my feeling is that teenage is a better time, because for women, the voice is starting to grow and change. If you’re going to teach men, that’s also when their change happens.
GR: When did you start lessons?
JMC: I asked for voice lessons when I was six, and my parents agreed. I was on The Arthur Godfrey Show when I was in public school. I sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”
I sang in choirs all through elementary school and junior high—where I discovered that I was a soprano and started singing a different repertoire. In high school I sang in Carousel and Oklahoma, always playing the matronly roles. When I got to college, my knowledge of repertoire began to change, and I realized I really loved singing opera.
I had studied French for a long time, so that was a language I was happy to sing in. My family spoke Italian at home, so I was also happy singing in Italian. Then I studied German. Essentially, it was Schumann and Heine poetry that took me to singing lieder (art songs) because the poetry was so beautiful. I had grown up with no understanding of the fluidity that German could have. But singing lieder in German was extraordinary.
GR: Is the German language a better language for singing than Italian?
JMC: Italian vowels are open. In German, the vowels are not as open. So Italian is better for training. But I love singing in German; I sang the Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” at Barnard for my graduation recital.
GR: The Schumann has an important piano accompaniment. Who played the piano?
JMC: One of my classmates; she became angry with me, because she dated Kenneth, my husband, before me, and they broke up, and then I dated him. And then, of course, we ended up getting married and she never forgave me.
GR: Opera in real life!
JMC: I had never sung in an opera until Kenneth cast me in Acis and Galatea by Handel. That experience made me fall in love with the Baroque period, and Baroque music was my specialty for a long time. My graduate degree in musicology from Columbia was about eighteenth-century music.
My thesis was about Christoph Willibald Gluck but not about him as a composer; it was actually about his choreographer, Jean-Georges Noverre. Noverre had a platform for dancing that went beyond athletics; he believed that dancing should tell a story. He choreographed Gluck’s operas after Gluck arrived in Paris. Since many of the stories those operas told hadn’t been translated, I translated them for my thesis. After all the French education I had, it was fun.
I made a decision early on that I would not go to Germany, because that’s what you were supposed to do after graduating college in music. You went to Germany and got a contract in an opera house, sang there, and then came back to the States. By that time, I was married to Kenneth. I knew couples who spent nine months away from one another. I didn’t want that. There were small companies here in the U.S. where I sang operas, and I got to sing all the operas I wanted to do. I got to sing Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, and Barber of Seville. My roles in those operas were the ones I wanted to sing!
Still, it was so much easier to do chamber music, to have a life where the work is collegial. You make music in a group where everyone is paying attention. You get to change — you get to choose your own repertoire. You get to choose your colleagues. It made my life wonderful. The rest of my career was singing chamber music in festivals. My Vivaldi recording was done at the Grand Canyon chamber music festival in 1989. I’m always impressed, because I sang at 6,700 feet above sea level! I used to go a week early to get my breath right.
George Frideric Handel: Cantata Nel dolce dell’ oblio. Josephine Mongiardo vocalist. Grand Canyon Chamber Music Festival (AZ) 1989. Clare Hoffman, flute; Kenneth Cooper, harpsichord.
GR: When did you start teaching?
JMC: When I was in graduate school. I didn’t have the knowledge then that I have now. I used my own experience with teachers to teach other people, which I think is what most people do when they start teaching.
Over the years, we developed a whole set of principles. I was on the board of the New York Singing Teachers Association with Oren Brown, who was an incredible pedagogue and wrote the book Discovering Your Voice. He taught us so much. One of the things we learned is there’s a science to teaching voice. I also did an intensive internship at the Grabscheid Voice and Swallowing Center at Mount Sinai, where we studied the treatment of singers in particular and I learned to diagnose medical vocal issues.
To learn that a person can control their anatomy and actually get the voice to live for a lifetime is fascinating. The core of your body is what does all the work. The larynx, as long as it’s comfortable, will do anything. But if you think that’s where the work is, you get into trouble. It’s not as if I didn’t get into trouble once or twice in my career; I did, and I learned new lessons every time.
I pass those lessons on to my students. Singers use both the left and right brain. When we’re learning a score, that’s all left brain. Counting is left brain. Singing is right brain, because it’s sensory. We teach our students, no matter what kind of learners they are, that singing is kinesthetic. That is, memorizing and letting your body memorize certain experiences, so that you can replicate voice production over and over again.
When I am teaching, the first thing I say after someone’s finished singing a phrase is, how did that feel? Because if they can identify what it feels like when it’s right, then they can replicate that. They have something to go home with and practice.
GR: How do you integrate the Alexander technique and Yoga? It seems all musicians who live in New York City practice the Alexander Technique. It’s taught in all the conservatories now.
JMC: I did Alexander technique for 15 years. It’s about opening the body up, freeing the body. In fact, I have some of my students lie on the floor so gravity can release their tension. They’re always surprised they can sing lying flat on the floor.
GR: I’m surprised when I go to the Metropolitan Opera and singers are on the floor in a dying scene. I’m thinking, how can they be singing while they’re dying?
JMC: When I did the last act of Traviata, I was on a raked stage with my head downstage and my feet upstage.
GR: It is possible?
JMC: Yes. There were all kinds of things I found that were possible over the years. When I was a young singer, we didn’t talk about the core. We talked about diaphragmatic breathing. The diaphragm doesn’t breathe; it sits like an upside down cup, and when you breathe, it’s attached to your ribs, so it contracts, and it’s that contraction that controls breath flow.You need the muscular work of your core to help you keep it going. When people don’t use the core, they say, “Gee, that was hard.” I say, “Put your hands on your ribs,” and when they do, they get it. The ribs do the work and for women the obliques, which are much stronger than men’s. Those are our birthing muscles.
It’s very complicated when you teach a dancer to sing, which I’m doing at the moment, because it’s counterintuitive to a dancer to expand. They contract. I have to teach dancers to understand these are very different systems of body use. When I began I was controlling my tummy all the time. When my teacher said, “Stop doing that,” I thought, what do you mean, stop doing that? Then I learned a whole new way to use my body. I think that contributes to the fact that I’ve had a long career.
GR: Are the voice students at Barnard going for careers?
JMC: It is an amalgam. Anyone who wants to have voice lessons can come to auditions. There are five of us on the faculty, and we listen to everyone, and then we divide up the people who we want to teach. Maybe 30 to 50 percent are interested in careers, but not necessarily careers in classical music. We have a whole world now of pop, jazz, and musical theater.
I find myself teaching techniques so that the students don’t hurt themselves. When I have young students, and the voices aren’t developed, and they want to sing a blues or jazz piece, I say, “Not yet.” It’s complicated to explain to someone who wants to sing in chest voice that you have to learn to sing in head voice. The head voice frequencies, which are higher, eventually make their way into the middle voice, and that’s what allows you to have what we call a mix, meaning neither chest nor head voice, but a balance of the two.
People think you’re belting, but you’re not, because you get a brightness in the voice, but you don’t lose the space. The acoustical space for a singer is the soft palate and the back of the pharyngeal wall, because that’s the only thing that is malleable. So how to decide how you’re going to shape it? And by the way, every vowel has a different shape. You teach someone how to find that space by yawning, which creates a cool spot back there. That’s your soft palate, and yawning gives it a little kick to say, please stretch. We want to create a dome in the back of the throat. It takes time for people to get used to creating a dome.
I like taking first-year students, because I know if I teach them for four years, they will be very different singers when they finish. When there’s a breakthrough, it’s amazing.
GR: I’m beginning to understand the complications just from listening to your explanations! Give me an example of a breakthrough.
JMC: I have a first-year student who is terrified and whose singing is breathy. We talk about how to get rid of the breathiness; you don’t want breath coming out of your mouth to sing. There are two types of onset: how you start a sound. There’s a glottal, aspirated way which is breathy. There’s a modal way, which is a flow. For instance, if I say ah, that’s glottal. If I say ha, that’s modal. You want a beginning of a sound that isn’t aggressive.
We got to the point where she could actually achieve enough brilliance to trust her voice, and enough of the backspace to have color in her voice and not be scared. She couldn’t believe the sound she was making; she had no idea that her voice could make such a robust sound.
GR: What pedagogical techniques did you use to get her there?
JMC: I start most lessons with humming twangy hums. This is not pretty, but it gets the chords to come together very tightly with very little air flow. And most people can hum much higher than they think they can. This kind of humming exposes the different transitions that happen in the voice and the placement.
We talk about chest and head, but the truth is, a transition happens almost every third note. Once you find where the changes are, you experience different sounds, and then you can meld them. We were playing with bringing the high voice into her middle voice. And it’s a gorgeous mezzo voice.
GR: Let’s do some myth-busting. It was said Frank Sinatra couldn’t read music. Is that true? Do you have to read music to be a professional?
JMC: Apparently not. It depends upon what repertoire you want to sing.The students who come from Barnard, many of them have no musical training, and they learn by listening. My job—and it keeps me up at night—is finding a piece for them that is appropriate for their skillset. Then I must find a recording they can listen to that’s in the key in which they’re singing the piece, and have my pianist create an accompaniment track for them.
GR: Do voices age out?
JMC: For many singers, their voice becomes their identity, and that’s dangerous. Your voice is not who you are—except, perhaps, on some level.
GR: You were married to Kenneth Cooper, who was one of the great Baroque artists of our time. Everyone learned how to ornament from Kenneth; he called you the ornament machine.
JMC: Even as a child I would find myself ornamenting, making things up as I was singing. Singing Baroque music, there is real license to have fun by adding notes and even making mistakes.
It’s important to understand that you can play with music, and you should feel free to do it, no matter what the genre is. One of the things about Kenneth was that he was fearless, and I think he taught me and everyone with whom he worked to be fearless.
Through her search for newfound purpose in her seventies, author Karen Roberts discovered that voices of encouragement were difficult to find among the popular paradigms of aging: decline, withdrawal, and disengagement, among them.
This workbook presents a remarkable opportunity to unlock a fulfilling and purposeful later life stage.
What’s Included:
- Thought-provoking discussions on aging, gender, and culture
- Interviews with eight inspiring women who overcame challenges and pursued their passions later in life
- Engaging questions to help you reflect and grow on your journey.
- Unique experiences and wisdom that women bring to the later years
Gena Raps, Persimmon Tree Music Editor, has performed internationally and across the United States. Her recordings of Mozart, Brahms, and Dvorak can be found on Musical Heritage Society, Arabesque, and Naxos among others. She has taught at the Juilliard School, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Mannes College of Music and has received numerous prizes and honors. She has been on the jury for competitions at the Juilliard School and the Fulbright Fellowship.
Soprano Josephine Mongiardo-Cooper has had a rich career as a singer in many genres from Baroque to Broadway. She received her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. in musicology from Columbia University. Ms. Mongiardo has always combined an active performing career with a passion for teaching and has maintained a private studio in New York for more than twenty-five years. Her credits include the New York stage premieres of several eighteenth-century operas, including Handel's Acis and Galatea and Esther and Susanna, as well as Lully's Acis et Galateé, and virtuosic pieces by Antonio Vivaldi as part of the Vivaldi’s Venice series at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Fascinated by how the body works, she integrates the knowledge of vocal technique with the body’s structure. Ms. Cooper was married to the great keyboard artist Kenneth Cooper (1941-2021), who included her in many of his musical productions.
I can’t get enough of Gena Raps’ contributions to PT. Does she have time to give us more? Including her own playing? As for this interview, I read it remembering the two things that put paid to my own freely done singing while playing for myself and to my chance to study voice with a fine teacher, and wishing that it weren’t too late for me to stand in Ms M-C’s studio and LEARN and finally enjoy what I missed out on years ago.
Enlightening article. Especially interesting in regard to the physicality of the voice, and the knowledge that Ms. Mongiardo-Cooper has acquired over a lifetime. And passes on to younger generations.
Brilliant writing about a brilliant talent!