Why I Don’t Sing | Talking Writing

October 27, 2011

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Essay by Danielle Martínez

Can One Teacher Make a Difference?

When I was five years old, my family moved from Boston to Puerto Rico. My American mother came from an Irish-Sicilian family in Melrose, Massachusetts, but my Spanish father had been raised on the island that became my home.

In 1990, I entered kindergarten in San Juan not knowing a lick of Spanish. I felt vulnerable; most of my classmates only spoke bits and pieces of English. These kids became my friends quickly, but they examined me as if I were an exotic flower—a turquoise flower, the foreign kind that stuck out.

I wanted more than anything to fit in, to speak the language. I wanted to be an ordinary Puerto Rican girl. With the help of a dedicated teacher, I was fluent in Spanish within six months and spoke with no accent. It didn’t take long for San Juan to feel like home.

Yet, my desire to express myself—to admit all the fear and excitement I felt about leaving our old life in a Newbury Street condo to live in a country of palm trees and sun—came up against my equally strong need to act as if nothing were different about me.

As I grew older, nowhere did I struggle with this tension more than in my music and writing. Spanish and music became ingrained in me, but English was my mother tongue. Putting my thoughts on paper became a refuge, especially writing in English. Given all the passion that singing promises to release, my need to write sometimes surprised the ordinary girl I tried to be.

But I was never ordinary in Puerto Rico.

When I was six years old, my grandmother took me to audition for the San Juan Children’s Choir, a prestigious afterschool conservatory. I’d always loved to sing along to videotapes of The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. I had sung Juan Luis Guerra songs with my grandmother in the kitchen, while she cooked succulent chicken chicharrones and cassava pastelón. No one in our family was particularly musical, but even those who couldn’t carry a tune loved belting out “Happy Birthday” several times a year.

My audition went very well. I repeated vocal exercises with a petite woman on a piano bench named Evy. She said I had good pitch.

Until I graduated from high school, I sang in that choir, where we performed songs in over twenty languages and studied dozens of styles of classical music. There were never more than a hundred of us, from age five to eighteen. Our musical education was privileged, so we were not allowed to participate in other choirs, private or school-run.

Music was the third language I learned in almost as many years. We were taught Gregorian chant for Sunday masses at the centuries-old cathedral in Viejo San Juan, romantic love songs by Franz Schubert and Lilli Boulanger, and folk songs from every country we ever visited. We learned about emotion through music, and how the strategic placement of words with perfectly sung notes could bring tears to the eyes of the surliest concertgoers.

But during my twelve years with the choir, my disdain for it grew as suffocating as the long-sleeved, Victorian-style gowns we wore to formal concerts. Our hair would be tightly pulled back. We wore black patent leather flats—no heels, no makeup, no nail polish, no jewelry. Even in the most tropical weather, we had to wear stockings.

Instead of the joy it should have been, music became a chore. An emotional change in vibrato was usually met with a scold. I had rhythm inside me, but nowhere to show it. The place I should I have been able to vent was where, for three hours a day, three times a week, my life ended up ruled by a metronome—and Evy.

To be fair, Evy’s dream for the San Juan Children’s Choir was innovative in a time when not much was expected of Puerto Rican women. She had studied music at the Longy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded the choir in 1966. She invented a place where children of all backgrounds could learn music. She was strict and determined. By the time I enrolled in 1991, she had survived breast cancer and a fruitless marriage.

Evy, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, was in her sixties for most of the years I sang. Her ash-blonde hair was cut short. She became a portly, pear-shaped lady who wore pastel-colored pants under airy blousons, covered in a thick layer of floral perfume. Evy was always in need of a pedicure, her yellowed nails creeping out of peep-toe clogs.

One of my worst moments with her came in late 2000. I was 16 when the choir put on a show commemorating the music of Richard Rodgers. For “The Lady Is a Tramp,” she’d cast me as one of the lead flappers with a solo. Our dresses were custom made, with sequins, crystals, and beads dripping all over. Mine was a striking red, and I loved it. But my breasts had developed early, so dancing front and center in a spaghetti-strapped flapper dress was a challenge. I did my very best, short of wrapping my torso mummy-style.

As we pranced around the stage during a rehearsal, Evy didn’t like what she saw. She called me out in front of my choir mates and professors, the stagehands and design crew.

“Danielle!” she yelled from row three. “You’re bouncing all over the place! Buy a better bra, or I can’t have you in the show.”

I was enraged, unable to speak. This from a woman whose gold bangles clanged when she conducted songs, whose droopy arms flapped like a hammock in a hurricane?

None of the other girls would meet my eyes, although I felt their pity. Suddenly, I was that turquoise flower again, with my petals wilting under the hot lights. When I finally managed to move, I ran from the stage, tears dripping down my cheeks and neck.

I did eventually return to that rehearsal—and, a week later, on with the show I went. (I borrowed a brassiere from my grandmother.) But the sensual thrill of the music was gone.

Meanwhile, as I endured two more years of constant scolding in the choir, I was also reporting for my high school’s Spanish- and English-language newspapers. I studied Italian. I wrote poetry. I looked forward to essay assignments.

Growing up in San Juan and going to Catholic school, much of the reading I did was preselected for me: classic British novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; standard Spanish-language poetry by Pablo Neruda and José Martí; and, of course, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. But even these titles evoked whole new worlds and got me to write. Even Don Quixote just wanted to be heard.

And in my junior year, a free-spirited and hopelessly romantic English teacher, María Elena, told our class she wanted us to be passionate about what we read and to love writing about it. She was tall with shapely curves and creamy skin. She had intense black eyes and lustrous curls. Both she and her classroom smelled of dark-roast coffee.

That year in her class, I read When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago in its original English. Through Santiago’s words, I saw my little island in an entirely new light. Santiago grew up between Puerto Rico and the United States (New York City, in her case), much as I had. The Puerto Rico she described, however, was not the one I knew.

While I lived on the sixth floor of an oceanfront high-rise in an affluent city neighborhood, Santiago would play hide-and-seek in the dirt with her siblings and their pet chickens.

Santiago was one of eleven children who shared a single room and hallway. In the Puerto Rican countryside, she’d wander underneath her cement house, which was built on stilts to avoid flooding and mudslides. I played in the gated parking lot behind my building, writing poems about what I thought was love and watching boys surf on the beach.

Santiago’s writing, so vivid and poignant and real, made me want to explore the world I lived in. I wanted to communicate the beauty around me, in any written way possible, and I knew then that singing about it wasn’t enough.

As Santiago writes of moving to New York, “For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.”

In 2002, I applied to several schools, including the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I didn’t know a single jazz standard, however, so I asked Evy to help me polish my audition piece: Gershwin’s “Summertime.”

We went over it the way we’d sung it in choir, with no riffing, no outbursts of jazzy harmonies. Our interpretation of the song was as unexciting as the hazy summer I was living through then, and I didn’t receive any constructive musical advice.

“You should go to a regular college,” was all she said. “You’ll never make it as a musician or a writer.”

I don’t recall if she was tired when she said this—simply tired. I do remember I was angry, which made me resist her words.

The following year, I was admitted to study music business at Berklee, returning to the hometown of my childhood. I kept singing in class and wrote music criticism. Then, in 2009, I entered a graduate program in journalism at Harvard University. Almost ten years since I last saw Evy, I have both music and writing degrees.

One choir director is not enough to determine every choice a student makes. But I think about María Elena, too, and how she taught me to be passionate. Be it music or writing or both—or anything else—it’s not worth doing unless you love it.

I might not be singing much these days, but my voice will still be heard.

Publishing Information

When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir by Esmeralda Santiago (originally published in 1993; Da Capo Press, 2006).

Art Information

Danielle Martínez received her master’s degree in journalism from the Harvard University Extension School in 2011. This piece began as a "Why I Write" essay in Martha Nichols's magazine writing course at the Extension School.

Danielle has published online and in print, and is drawing inspiration for her first novel from her experiences in the Middle East. She hopes to continue writing journalistically about Arab politics and music, perhaps while moonlighting as a belly dancer. She now lives in Boston.