Celebrate Singing

6/18/2020

With Mrs. Marshall at a Park Tudor Alumni event a decade ago.

“Stand up from the waist,” the tiny round-faced woman demanded. “Sit on the part of the body God gave you to sit on, and I don’t mean your back!” She always said it with a scowl that she could never hold without breaking into an infectious grin. For more than fifty years I have heard that voice in my head and scooted to the edge of my seat to comply every time. How can anyone pretend to sing slouched in an armchair?

Elise Marshall, my high school music teacher, formed me as a singer. She taught me to use my diaphragm, an open throat and a loose jaw.

She taught me German, French, Latin and Italian pronunciations, plus a smattering of old English for Benjamin Britten’s gorgeous Ceremony of Carols. She made me a life-long lover of serious choral music who more than fifty years after leaving her teaching feels compelled to drive an hour each way to rehearse weekly with a quality community choir. (Or at least, I did before Covid shut down our rehearsal hall at the community college.)

Mrs. Marshall, as she will ever be no matter how old I get, picked me to sing the part of Fiona in our high school production of Brigadoon. She pushed me to come out of my introverted shell and pretend I was someone else while a whole auditorium of people watched. I even had to kiss a boy on stage. Okay. Well…that year we did a really bad fake kiss that made my cousin on the first row throw his hands over his face and the rest of the audience laugh out loud. But the next year in Carousel I did kiss the boy (no fake!), and I don’t recall anyone laughing. All credit to Mrs. Marshall.

Everyone in our Tudor Singers ensemble hated one particular piece. We groaned every time Mrs. Marshall asked us to practice it. It was all tight harmonies and dissonances. But once we learned it, we couldn’t get enough of it. We would watch each other and delight in holding our own notes and making the audience wait for the resolution.

The summer after I graduated from high school, Mrs. Marshall organized a trip to Europe. We attended concerts and the Salzburg Music Festival and made some music of our own. It was not a Tudor Singers trip, but we had a nice balance of parts, and she got us singing in parks, the bus, and a boat ride on Lake Constance. (A good thing she had gotten this introvert to open up a bit.) People seemed to enjoy it. I dredged up the memory of one naughty little Italian girl we met in one of those parks for a character in my latest work-in-progress.

In 1972, several years after I graduated, she founded the Indianapolis Arts Chorale. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana became their signature piece with Dance Kaleidoscope, a modern dance company, expressing the music in body movement. She stretched my mind with both the music and the dance. I joined that community choir an hour away precisely because they were going to be doing Carmina Burana that spring.

I no longer live in Indianapolis, but I visited Mrs. Marshall two or three time in the last few years when I returned to Indy to see my father. Her mind was still sharp even if her hearing was not. Her smile was as impish as ever, and it was fun to hear stories of people we both remembered and the years between.

Elise Marshall passed away this week at age 92. I can’t help but wonder if she is now demanding that the angel choirs stand up from the waist when they sit to rehearse and sit on the part of the body God gave them to sit on. She doesn’t mean the back.

4 Comments

kay

6/19/2020 09:05:26 pm

What a wonderful tribute for your teacher, Mrs. Marshall. sounds like like all excellent teachers who teach us more than the subject!!

LeAnne Hardy

6/20/2020 08:06:49 am

Definitely!

Debbie Stuart Everett

6/30/2020 10:08:09 am

‘Small but mighty’ are the words that come to mind in describing Elise Marshall, the teacher who had a profound effect on how I regard the power and depth of music, particularly choral music. With Elise’s passing, LeAnne, my high school friend and fellow singer, has encouraged me to share my thoughts.

Elise Marshall, our choral director and music teacher at Tudor Hall School, a private girls school in Indianapolis, stood just a smidge over 5 feet tall yet her presence in front of the choir and in the classroom was indeed mighty.

While at Tudor and later when Tudor merged with male counterpart Park School, Elise elevated the music program by creating a madrigal style ensemble, forming classes in music theory and history, and exposing her students to a wide-ranging repertoire. With the introduction of Music Theory and Music History to our curriculum, she strengthened an already broad college preparatory curriculum for a school our size. I took both courses and call on them both to this day. But it was her elegant selection of music, her strength and precision in directing and her insistence on good singing posture, focus, enunciation and breathing that set my internal standard by which I have held myself and every director under whom I have sung.

Elise Marshall is the reason I have sung in my church choir for over 40 years, in our Chamber Ensemble for 10 years, some solo work on stage and in small groups through the years, and why I never miss an opportunity to sing along in the car!

I loved how she admonished our choir in German. While we didn’t know exactly what she was saying, we were all pretty sure we had done something counter to her expectations, causing us to laugh and to be terrified at the same time. She introduced me (and our choir) to Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, which I annually listen to at the beginning of Advent. Elise formed Tudor Singers a small ensemble focused on precision in blending and focus. Anytime my choir’s treble voices ‘get’ to sing alone, it sends me sailing back to our Tudor Singer performances, our state competitions where few female groups performed, and the recording of Tudor Singers we made (and still have). There is nothing quite like a chorus of treble voices.

Elise Marshall was a feisty, talented blessing to me and other singers. I will be eternally grateful and I will miss her every time I hear my alto choir buddies singing around me, or scoot to the front of my chair, or hold my music properly, or hear A Ceremony of Carols, Mood Indigo, The Nightingale, or...

God Bless you Mrs. Marshall.

7/1/2020 09:41:16 pm

Thank you so much, Debbie! You were a bonnie Jean in Brigadoon. I'm glad you still sing. Mrs. Marshall meant a lot to so many.

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