From the Soul of the World: Ravinia Festival and the Song Interpretations of Jackie Evancho

Watching Jackie Evancho sing is a religious experience. The vocal virtuosity of this young performer from Pittsburgh had “gobsmacked” me early on with incredulous astonishment that produces tear-filled sobs of smiley joy, a reaction that no one else has ever caused in me. So my visit to Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, IL to hear her sing in person on August 7, 2011 was like a visit to the sacred mysteries of Eleusis or Mithras in ancient Greco-Roman times.
 

Neither pouring rain nor screeching cicadas could drown out the effect that seeing this prodigy’s performance was going to have on me. I, of course, already knew what that effect would be. But I went with an inordinate desire to know why. A hypothesis provided by others is Evancho’s interpretive genius. But more important in my thinking is the psychological state she enters when she sings. Evancho says she is taken possession by the music. So I went to get an inside look at the genius of Jackie’s interpretations, especially when under the influence of her music in front of a live audience.
 

Due to the patient work of a key member of “Jackieville” and another who coined that title for Evancho’s facebook page and made a banner blazoned with its moniker, I was able to get a second row center seat. Unlike other venues, the spot set up for her on the stage was just a few feet back from the edge. I spent part of the interminable wait while the Chicago Symphony Orchestra warmed up speculating on what Evancho would seem like at her place there just 15 feet from where I sat. The height of the pair of microphones set up for her meant that she must be petite, a very tiny girl. How she, being so small, commands the power that I know she has made me wonder.
 

Then the prelude to the opening number began, during which she appeared from stage right, smiling and waving with one hand while carrying a water bottle with the other. She was resplendent in a beautiful purple dress. She was not overly “done up” like in so many of her talk show appearances. With grace and poise, she positioned herself behind those microphones. As I suspected, Evancho exhibited a diminutive stature with a porcelain delicacy as if a figurine atop a music box, that is, until she gathered herself in preparation to sing. In that moment of truth, Evancho underwent a physical transformation from a pretty little girl, kissed blond by summer sunshine and chlorine at the pool, all smiles and “angelic adorability,” to a strangely adult-like diva who takes complete command of her artistic performance.
 

Ticket to the Soul of the World

I observe this transformation regularly in the best artists where I teach, a high school for the creative and performing arts in Chicago. The head of school says our students have a passion for their art, one that they discover early in their lives. Jackie discovered hers at the age of seven, turning eight years old. From that point forward, parents, like Jackie’s, have to put up with their student’s peculiar and sometimes aggravating initiatives and prodding that, in the case of my school, compel parents to come to our open houses, children in hand, to listen to us offer a way to channel that passion to its rightful fulfillment.
 

Lovers by Shigeru Umebayashi is Jackie’s favorite song on her CD Dream With Me because “It’s so powerful; there’s so much emotion in it.” The theme from the film House of Flying Daggers, it was first on the playbill. The memory of a loved one lost, the “you” of “You ARE my true love,” is a universal experience. Perhaps all she needs is the memory of the loss of her pet duck MoMo to a hawk in order to evoke it. The accent is on the ARE, when she tilts her head back, eyes closed, clutching the fist she makes with the other hand with which to beat her breast, and the verb is exhaled with such force of her breath that she makes the microphones on Ravinia’s stage undulate. It’s the end of the stanza. She opens her eyes, lets her arms fall to her side, and gazes with a dreamy sadness out over the audience while the orchestra continues on with an interlude. That look is priceless. One can observe her render the same look of ethereal melancholy after each high note in Dark Waltz, a crossover classic popularized by New Zealander Haley Westenra on her first internationally published album Pure in 2004, and produced as part of the video marketed to PBS contributors, Dream With Me In Concert. Now comes the last line, which she begins a cappella. “Your voice still echoes…” She stops abruptly with a hard consonant “s” after she effortlessly raises the pitch ever so high with her light lyric soprano skill. The pause is pregnant. Then, “in my heart” escapes her chest as she lets her diaphragm and intercostal muscles relax. The orchestra reenters on the last word. I finally stop shivering and dry my eyes. She just has it.
 

Agreeing that “angels” are the source of her inspiration to sing in the classic style

Starting with the aforementioned moment of truth prior to each song, Evancho’s passion apparently gives her permission to surrender to a possession by the music that is in her mind and soul. The words aren’t important. Music is a more universal language of passion. She made that obvious at the age of nine when singing the Puccini aria O Mio Bambino Caro without being able to tell Debra Crosby of the Talent Quest TV show beforehand what the title to the song meant. She grasps the music and appropriates it into the center of her being. As said before, she wasn’t taught that. “Nobody can teach you that,” said Ehkzu. “She just has it.” She closes her eyes feeling it. She must communicate it or suffer deprivation. Though the words aren’t important, it helps that she has a seeming photographic memory for lyrics and perfect diction. If she could, she would look you directly in the eye, like she does in so many of her early YouTube videos.
 

I lately made friends with someone who became a fan in March of 2009 after seeing one of her YouTube videos. He proceeded to donate to the family’s fund drive to support the production of her first CD, said to require about $20,000. In June of 2009, on a live computer feed, he watched Debra Crosby brought to tears as little Jackie softly sang O Mio. He went on to buy 35 copies of Evancho’s CD Prelude to a Dream when it finally came out. Before her “discovery” on the TV reality show America’s Got Talent (AGT), he helped raise money for a second family-produced CD. Then he helped get Evancho’s YouTube audition tape that the family submitted to AGT voted number one. For his efforts he is named in the credits on her second CD O Holy Night, which debuted in the number two position on Billboard’s Top 200 and earned her the distinction of usurping Michael Jackson as the youngest performer to put out a CD in the top ten of Billboard’s charts.
 

The “Jackie Effect” that had so thoroughly converted this fan, even though it was only in its nascent stages, was clearly visible in the video that snared his heart and subsequent devotion. It was the YouTube video of Evancho’s cover of Britney Spears’ song Everytime.
 

This homemade video, filmed in a corner of the Evancho’s house, let’s call it “The Love-Lost Laundry Room Lament,” shows Jackie’s emotional connection to the music she sings and epitomizes her latent genius for interpreting it. Study this video. A cute sports cheer, “Go Pittsburgh Steelers,” gives way to a total immersion into her fast becoming characteristic mental and emotional “zone.” Watch her. She looks down and gathers the folds of her mouth, closes her eyes, then looks up right at you and begins her soulful rendition of this heart-torn love song. It’s all there. She shakes her head in dismay and sways back and forth with eyes closed. The tone of her voice indicates that the impact is wrenching the words from her. Then she raises her hands up so you can see her flared fingers and laments like a propitiating preacher, “You seem to move on easy…” then turns her head away as if blind struck by the corporeal emotion of it all. Study her at the 2:45 second mark when, between verses, solemn glances around her give way to a sad, downturned demeanor. She is waiting to go on, though it looks like she just can’t. At the end of the need for lyrics, the music still playing, she is visibly wracked by the meaning she has so effectively made of it. Suddenly it’s over. The spell is broken. She makes furtive glances as if she doesn’t know where she is and needs to get reoriented. Then she smiles sweetly and says, “Thank you.” A child has just come back from a journey to the soul of the world.
 

I felt humbled upon realizing that piano prodigy Conrad Tao would be featured at Ravinia. In the words of Piers Morgan of AGT, “I know what is going to happen here, we’re going to wake up tomorrow and America is gonna be going CRAZY...” I was “feeling goose bumps” well before 17 year old Conrad walked out onto the stage. This performer does not press piano keys. Rather, like a harpist, he pulls at them, rhapsodically plucks at them from his heavenly lyre with gentle, graceful flourishes of his hands, as if they held the conductor’s baton in order to coax heaven-sanctioned sounds from the soul of the world. In the midst of Imaginer by Walter Afanasieff and Lara Fabian (the words arranged more appropriately for Jackie’s young age), I had to pinch myself. There these two prodigies were, teamed together, in the words of conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, giving us “hope for the youth of America” through music.
 

I don’t know much about opera, though Evancho has put me on a steep and rapid learning curve, but I’ve watched my niece who just graduated from the classical voice program at Notre Dame. She appeared stiff at her senior recital, saying afterward that holding onto the piano of her accompanist with her right hand “was allowed.” I had given her copies of Jackie’s music but never heard back from her. I feel sorry about that, how rule-laden operatic performances must be in order to best exemplify intentions in the minds of the genre’s composers. But classical crossover has a more universal appeal. It’s more approachable. Imaginer marries the masses and thus made me, a member of the class of commoners, marvel and melt in the midst of these two young performers. Not opera, Imaginer “allowed” Jackie to do something else that I appreciate, being a school teacher who is well versed in the theories of educational psychology. Though behaviorists say, “prove it,” the branch generally called “cognitive structuralism” describes how one’s mind constructs its percepts of the world into seemingly three dimensional concepts like arranging furniture in a living room. Evancho’s hand and arm gestures, just like Conrad’s sweeping pectoral pronunciations, corral the mind’s musical meanings into intended arrangements. The result is a pleasing sense for the evocative expression that the mind wants to make out of the music. It may be only suggestive, but Evancho’s fluid stance and undulating hand gestures kept time with the unfolding of the song’s magical mystery of “old wars dissolving, a world without hunger, the extinguishing of all fires by a single God.” Did she need to study the words or only learn to pronounce them in flawless French? Did it matter? Their meaning flowed out of the sung soul of the world, especially the verse that she raised up to Conrad’s crescendo, “ouvrez les yeuxxxxxx!!!! (Open the eyes!!!), her hands in fists pounding the word’s compelling command out of the center of the living room, her heart, and up and out of the ceiling above it, her head, with eyes closed and larynx channeling its soaring energy like a rocket launch.
 

I now understand what Dr. Clark Rosen, director of the Voice Center at University of Pittsburgh Hospital means when he says her genius is not simply that voice; rather, it is her brain that constructs a virtuoso performance of Imaginer by expertly coordinating all her physical apparatus, lungs, throat, and skeletal and muscular gesticulations.
 

After coming back down to the soul’s center at the end, Evancho croons softly as she gently shakes her head, like brushing one’s self off after the exhausting physical exertion of an athletic performance. Yes, Jackie can croon like the Las Vegas rat pack. She did at eight years old in Everytime at the end, at nine years old in Teaching Angels How to Fly before and after the last refrain, and here at age eleven in Imaginer. They may merely have been in the body, but these two performers created for me an out-of-the-body experience.
 

Making the closest encounter with the soul of the world, at least for me, were Evancho’s renditions of The Lord’s Prayer by Mallot and arranged by Nicholas Dodd, and of To Believe by Jackie’s uncle Matthew Evancho. I sense that the Evancho’s are very spiritual people, and it is no accident that these two pieces were included on Dream with Me. It is worth noting that BOTH of these gospel-hinting songs were chosen for Evancho’s road tour. This decision effectively forced the exclusion of other, less “spiritual” songs because the play list had to be kept to a maximum of eight or nine to better preserve Evancho’s voice. Perhaps piety becomes a more suitable attitude the closer in proximity one is brought to the soul of the world.
 

On the AGT Tour in LA singing the spiritual “The Prayer,” written by David Foster

David Foster wrote the spoken prayer part for her in To Believe, and I think it is the fulcrum upon which Dream With Me and its concerts are balanced. For me it is the most powerful point in Evancho’s performance. She stops, publically faces the world as her witness, and tells God that she intends to do the very best that she can. And she does so without the dour solemnity of a penitent; rather, with the singsong cadence of a raconteur. She’s telling a story about her arrival at the center of the soul of the world. She told David Foster, who asked her what is going on in her mind when she sings, “when I sing something just overpowers me and makes me very comfortable and very happy.” It also makes her very courageous, offering her a conviction that grants her command of the soul of the world, and I was struck to the core of my being hearing her recite this prayer at Ravinia.
 

Like a switch that completes an electrical circuit, Evancho needs an audience with whom to reciprocate the intense emotion she elicits from the music. Heart to heart communication must come full circle. Her experience of that emotion is personal. She then communicates it in a manner very personal. At Ravinia, it seemed as if Miss Evancho sang just for me. It was like I was the only one in the audience. I knew I wasn’t, but she possesses the power to reach out to individual hearts. Someone said, “This little eleven-year-old girl is expressing feelings that only I have ever experienced, and I don’t really know how to comprehend that.” Perhaps we all help make up the soul of the world, and she has been gifted with an innate understanding of its universal nature and how to connect each one of us to it.
 

When I gave her a double wave, a gesture that has become the trademark for her effervescent charm, she gave one back to me. That is because Jackie feeds off her audience. Authentic artists are not so much concerned with the effect the art has on them as they are about the effect it has on their audience. Many aspiring artists must learn to move past mere potential in which it seems as if they are in their art rather than their art is in them. Good art leaves the artist behind and stands alone, shimmering, mesmerizing, drawing the audience in, beckoning to be received. It is noteworthy that Evancho’s meteoric success is primarily based on performances in front of live audiences. Like a good entrepreneur, she knows the customer is everything. She needs to connect with “you guys” out there who are watching her and for whom she sings. It began with the YouTube videos. “Hey, it’s Jackie, and I’m here to sing….” When she connects, the effect it has on her is part, parcel, and reciprocal with the cause, the passion, with which it began. Only then can there be those endearing, wide-open smiles and clutched hands extended straight down. The audience’s response finishes a cycle and serves as positive feedback with which to accelerate the system. When I yelled, “We love you, Jackie!” she literally hopped into the air. I remember Howie Mandel, after her inaugural AGT rendition of O Mio Bambino Caro, exclaiming, “Jackie, you’re amazing!” This elicited from her an absolutely priceless giggle. Such positive feedback makes her interpretations for the songs she sings gain in power, passion, and perfection over the course of the concert. This is what made the last two songs at Ravinia, Sarah McLachlands’s Angel and Lloyd Weber’s All I Ask of You the best of the best. Evancho’s sense that her audience successfully empathizes with the passion with which she communicates through her singing fortifies her genius and accelerates the maturation of its expression.
 

Evancho describing her ambitions and fears at Dylan’s Candy Bar in NYC

Strangely enough, it is not the quality of her voice that matters to her. While in New York City last June promoting Dream With Me, Jackie told TVNZ reporter Tim Wilson, “Whenever I sing I sound like a normal kid, almost. I don’t see what’s so special about my voice. When everyone says, ‘Oh my goodness, Jackie, you have such an amazing voice,’ I go ‘I don’t really understand.’ I mean I just sound like a normal kid. I mean I hear a lot more maturity to it, but I don’t hear, like, I don’t hear what everyone else is hearing and why it’s so amazing.”
 

Why Evancho can’t understand this had puzzled me until now. It is true that such a nonplussed reaction is appropriate for a genius and also a kid who just wants to fit in with her peers. This was illustrated in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon’s mathematical genius character Will Hunting refuses to leave the construction jobs of his working class buddies from south Boston, with whom he grew up, for jobs with the intellectual big leaguers. Stellan Skarsgard plays the role of the brilliant mathematical Fields Medal-winning professor Gerald Lambeau who takes Will under his wing when he gets into trouble with the law. When Professor Lambeau critiques an even more brilliant paper that Will writes for him, Will expectorates, “Hey! This is so easy that it’s a joke. And I’m sorry, I really am, that you can’t do it.” I can thus take Evancho’s word as a “truthful girl,” as well as a preternaturally intelligent one, that she can’t acknowledge that she has a voice so awe-inspiring that even adults can only describe it as the voice of an “angel.” Even her parents initially misunderstood. Their suspicions required testing. In their own words, “after her showing in the competitions, we thought there might be something here…” But Evancho just sees the music, her experiences of it as it seeps out of the soul of the world, and her desire to communicate it.
 

Now I know that the driving force of Jackie’s genius is her passion for the music and having an audience feel it too. Matt Damon’s character gave himself away in that he plied his blue collar janitorial services at MIT, one of the most intellectually prestigious universities in the world. Being where it matters, picking the place where passion can be communicated most successfully, explains how and where one can find Evancho’s interpretive genius-in front of a live audience. When asked during AGT where she would most want to perform, she said, “on a stage, any stage.” There, she doesn’t hear herself sing. She’s too busy. Called by her muse to the center where the music is, she, like a siren, a savior figure with outstretched arms, palms up, is busy beckoning us forward to join her at the center. What she hears, what she can take to heart, what spurs her to improve in her use of her gifted pipes every time she sings, is the praise of an appreciative audience. It affirms that she has successfully gotten us there. Out of that little girl then, like a sipapu on the floor in the center of a Southwestern pueblo kiva, has come the soul of the world.