Pop 89: Genius Mother
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
How does a genius become a genius, and what do people say about them? How do they do that genius-thing they do? I invite you to close your eyes and imagine what a genius looks like. Describe the person floating in your minds’ eye: age, hair colour, shape, colour etc.
For most people the word ‘genius’ renders up the face of an Albert Einstein or a Bill Gates. However, the word genius traces back to the 14th Century and is Latin for: “guardian deity or spirit watching over each person from birth.”
The word is related to the verb “genitus” which means to “bring into being. To create or produce. To generate.” Which leads us to a lesser-used definition: “a gift, talent, aptitude, faculty, endowment, predilection, penchant, knack, bent, flair, wizardry.” By this definition, we are all latent geniuses. And the big question becomes not am I a genius, but what is my genius? Am I living up to my genius potential? Are we, as a culture, recognizing and valuing everybody’s inherent genius? Please note: Genius comes in every gender and gets better with age.
Another definition of genius comes from Schopenhauer, who says: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” To my mind, that makes my mom a genius. Her capacity for both understanding and engagement with a world many never, ever experience, let alone witness, made her one of most gifted singers and voice teachers of her generation. As kids, we studied with her without realizing our midnight mass concerts and holiday singalongs were master classes in harmony, voice and presentation. Her formal students went on to sing at La Scala, but also to do musical theatre, to front rock bands, to travel with Cirque de Soleil. Even while raising six children, she poured herself into enterprises with a boldness Goethe, one of her favourite authors and librettists, would be proud of. It was Goethe, after all, who wrote:” Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
It takes years to master a craft and tune in to one’s subtle, intuitive sense of genius. If genius means being aware of the existence of something that others haven’t even considered, then it also means facing that something head-on, banking on a hunch that it actually exists and is potent, despite other people’s obliviousness to it. And so, it not only takes boldness to arrive at one’s genius, it takes ‘oldness’. Which is why many of us come to it ‘late’ if we come to it at all. My mom was born here in Val Marie and raised on the farm. She went to the convent school and was taught by musical nuns. Her oldest sister, also a nun, saved her egg money to buy a piano for the family home. Mom sang, and her mom accompanied on piano with her brother George on clarinet. Her Val Marie farm family was a built-in choir.
In her late 40s, after marrying and having children and moving to BC, my mother revived her music career. My father supported her. She quit the bridge club. She got herself a voice teacher at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Victoria, BC, and once a month, she traveled over four hundred miles to study among singers half her age.
My mother’s eye was on song. Always. Her heart seemed propelled by a desire to express her divine gift from the rawest, purest place deep inside her. After she died, while cleaning out the family home, I found her Hilroy pocket notepads. Interspersed between pages of shopping lists and recipes for upside-down cakes were considerations of possible pieces to perform: A Faure Art Song or a Schubert Lullabye?
Mom would stay at my apartment when she went to her classes. Those were the days when her genius and magic became powerfully clear to me. I watched her like a hawk, how she allowed her feelings to inform her singing. She made people cry - partly because her voice ranged between both light and lyrical and deep and dark. But she also made us cry because the songs she sang - so full of loss, grief, love, wonder and heartbreak - were songs of experience. She’d lived them. She was a grown woman with a life behind her. She lived bravely, as Camus suggested we try to do, “on the verge of tears.”
It was not something she was always happy about - feeling so helpless in the face of life - because she didn’t always know how to handle it. But if she could sing her life, song would support her. And in so doing, she was showing us, her children, a way through any calamity - honour your genius. And so, ever since her death, the calamity of losing her has made honouring my talents a daily necessity. My mother’s genius for wonder and compassion enabled her to see inside the sad, limited workings of the minds of bullies and fools. When teased for my own bold, burgeoning eccentricities by neighbourhood boys, she managed to reverse my self-pity into sympathy for their sad sense of self-worth. They knew not what they were doing, she’d point out, like Jesus on the cross, because they were “just insecure, dear.” As documentary producer for CBC’s Sunday Afternoon In Concert, I interviewed mom about her role as a music teacher. I asked her what gift, as a teacher, she hoped to pass on to her students. She began to recite the poem by Keats - On Looking Into Chapman’s Homer. And when she got to the part about approaching new territory “with a wild surmise,” her voice cracked, and there were those tears again. The most important thing she hoped to inspire in students, she said, was a “wild surmise,” a sense of awe and wonder. And you did, Ma. Happy Birthday.