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Transcription of the interview:

Erick Lichte and Tom McNichols - 5.04.06

E: Hello, and welcome to the latest installment of the Cantus podcast. My name is Erick Lichte. I’m the artistic director of Cantus, and sitting across from me is bass, Tom McNichols.

T: Hello, Erick.

E: Hi, Tom.

T: How are you?

E: I’m good. Tell us a little bit about growing up and some of your early musical experiences.

T: I was born to an Air Force father, and my mother stayed at home taking care of the four kids. Growing up had nothing to do with music. I was kind of your typical, sport playing, run around the house sort of kid. Then, freshman year of high school, on a dare to try to impress some girls, I joined the drama club…much to my father’s disliking.

E: Why do you say that?

T: Ah, you know…he was a fighter pilot, and I was joining the drama club.

E: Oh, right.

T: But, no. In all honesty, my parents have always been plenty supportive. I joined the drama club, actually really enjoyed it, even though I wasn’t very good.

E: Did you – what was your first play?

T: First play was West Side Story.

E: Uh, huh. Shark or Jet?

T: I played a Jet named Baby John with this voice.

E: (hearty laughter)

T: It was quite ironic. I still remember one of my lines that made people laugh – when I said, “Superman. Gee, I love him.” Which probably would have sounded a lot better coming out of a fourteen-year-old tenor’s voice.

E: “[imitating squeaky changing voice] Superman. Gee, I love him!” Yeah, something like that.

T: Exactly. Yeah, so high school continued on. I took a larger role in that by the end of high school I was running drama club. My neighbor at the time – The military base I few up on had closed, so my family moved into town. We were renting a house that happened to be next door to the chairperson of the music department at the State University where I grew up. We had a ice storm. We were at the neighbor’s house. She pulled me aside at one point and said, “You know I’ve seen you do these high school musicals.” And, mind you, by my senior year I was getting the leads…the tenor leads, which was always pretty interesting hearing me sing doo-wah-ditty - which was not even marginal at best.

E: I guess I’d pay for that even today!

T: Yeah. So nonetheless, she pulled me aside and said, “Hey. This isn’t really – these roles aren’t really what you should be doing. Let me give you a voice lesson.” I said, “Okay. Why not? What can that hurt?” This was right around the time when I had been applying to schools, college for a variety of different interests that I had, none of which included singing or music.

E: Sure.

T: Four lessons later I knew the two Sarastro arias, went to an audition at Carnegie Mellon and they laughed. Cracked all over the place, hit my ego and sent me home with a rejection letter. But, that’s okay. So, I went to Plattsburgh State at that point, studied with the same lady, Jo Ellen Miano, who was the chairperson. She became my voice teacher. They didn’t have a music major, so I was a theater performance major which basically allowed me to continue taking voice lessons while studying theater and dance. Continued, stayed at Plattsburgh State, finished up and went and auditioned for grad schools, where, ironically, all the same schools turned around and gave me scholarships for grad school.

E: Amazing what four years can do for you. Yeah.

T: It is really amazing what every year can do for a singer in their twenties, or even in their teens at that point. I finished up grad school. Freshman year of college, Jo Ellen set me up with one of her friends from college…her roommate Christine Ciesinski who’s a big international opera singer, who happened to marry one of the well-known Wagnerian basses of the last fifty years.

E: Who?

T: - Norman Bailey…almost Sir Norman Bailey. He jokes about being passed up for knighthood around the same time that Elton John got it.

E: - Elton John, yeah.

T: He was given his castle as a consolation prize. Oh, the drama. Nonetheless, they invited me out, after hearing me, invited me out to their house in the Teton Valley of Idaho, where I have been every summer since. Throughout undergrad, grad school, and now, even when we have some time off from Cantus, I still go out there and we do six days a week, two hours a day of direct mentorship. Whenever I was going on auditions during grad school for young artist programs and such, they always said, “You know, you haven’t done any of these programs. Why not?” I said, “Well, I have a choice. I could pay $3000 in tuition for six weeks and go on an apprenticeship with your company, or I could go and study with one of – who I consider one of the best basses of the last fifty years for free and have twelve hours a week of lessons.” All I had to do was mow the lawn. It was a very Forrest Gump sort of relationship.

E: I didn’t think of it that way, but you kind of are like the bass Forrest Gump in this story, aren’t you?

T: Yeah, yeeeesss.

E: You, then, went to Peabody Conservatory…

T: I did. Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University…far too long of a name for a school. I auditioned at all the major conservatories on the East Coast for graduate school, and also some colleges. And, I got in everywhere, which was twice the problem. I was not expecting that. If you remember back, I had gone on auditions and got rejected everywhere. Peabody turned out wonderful. It’s a small enough school that everyone gets very much specialized attention…or, at least, those people they feel have professional potential. I did four operas in two years…four fully-staged operas, two of which I had leading bass roles in…countless other opportunities of various sorts. The composers worked very closely with the singers and whenever they would write something they would write it for you in particular and you would perform it on one of the recitals, which were always well attended. Everyone knew each other. There was only, I’m gonna say, nine voice teachers, as compared to somewhere like Indiana University where there’s 90 voice teachers. As the years have gone on I’ve continued to improve. Even to this day, every year that goes by I’m amazed at how much easier everything gets. The top of my voice, which was always the problem, is getting easier and easier, when I thought it never would.

E: Now, I gotta ask the question at some point here… Tell us a little bit about your voice change. Obviously, I hang out with you a lot. It’s very funny. We go places, you say, “Hello” in your voice, and people will go, “Oh my God! You have a low voice.” It’s sort of like, you want to go back and say, “Oh my gosh, you have a nose on your face!” It’s a very, very obvious thing.

T: It is.

E: Tell us a little bit about what it’s like having a voice that is so unique.

T: Well, until I started singing, my voice wasn’t anything unusual. If you’re not a singer, you don’t pay attention to your voice. It’s just the way you communicate with people. Granted, it’s gotten a little bit lower over the years, but I don’t ever remember it changing in particular. I have a video from sixth grade where I had a high, squeaky voice. Then, I have a video from seventh grade, random home videos, and all of a sudden my voice was low. I wasn’t singing during that time, so I don’t remember the traumatic experience that some singers will talk about if they were the boy soprano turned baritone. It dropped somewhere between sixth and seventh grade and has been here ever since. People have always commented on it, just as you say, in such a way where I can’t really think of what to respond back to it.

E: So, all you listening out there, please give the kid a break…you know.

T: Come on, seriously. It’s gotten to the point, especially with Cantus, where we do so many shows and meet so many new people, where everyone – I’ve heard – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “Well, you must be the tenor.” I’m like, yeah, I am. Okay. I’ve actually started responding, “Yeah, I actually am one of the tenors. I just have a really low speaking voice.” To which, I think they actually believe me until we get on stage. Then, it’s pretty obvious who the tenors and who the low voices are. Actually, at our last performance (you can read about it on my website: tommcnichols.com – sorry)

E/T: Shameless plug.

T: Tommcnichols.com, check out the blog. It’s pretty informative. - Not very clever, but there is a story about our last show when a high school girl from the choir we were working with walked by and said, “I heart your voice.” I stopped in my tracks and asked her to repeat it. She said, “What?” I said, “’I heart your voice.’ In all these years of people commenting on my voice, I can’t say that I’ve ever heard someone say, ‘I heart your voice.’” I guess its IM on the internet has changed the vernacular.

E: The language is no longer spoken anymore, as we know it. Now, you kind of had an interesting start with Cantus as far as how you discovered us, and your beginning tenure with the group. Tell us a little bit about that story.

T: If by interesting, you mean complicated?

E: There you go. That’s sort of what I mean.

T: I was in the elevator at grad school. The chairperson said, “Hey, Tom. A new listing went up on the audition board. You should check it out. It’s a full-time job, and their looking for basses in particular right now.” Of course, I was busily running from one rehearsal to the next, so I really didn’t think twice about it at the time. I said, “Thanks. I’ll check it out at some point.” The audition board was a whole lot of young artist program, all of which took money out of your pocket to supposedly go learn to sing. So, you would – I checked it out about a month and a half later, just randomly happened upon it when I was asking her another question. I was outside of her office and called the phone number that was on – or, excuse me. I sent an email -

E: Right.

T: - to the email address that was on there, which at the time was to Brian Arreola’s email address. Anyone who knew Brian, he was not exactly on top of checking his email on the road. As it turns out, somehow he checked it within an hour or so of me sending the email, got back to me and said, “Hey! We’re actually coming into Baltimore this evening. Here’s my cell phone number. Give me a call.” I called and said, “Can I come in and sing for you all, even though it’s too short of notice for me to get out all the audition materials?” This all happened in a matter of one evening. So, the following night, I went. I sang for them. Somehow they liked it. Luckily, they had me sight-read Biebl Ave Maria, which I had sung enough times that I actually knew it.

E: Oh, no! I didn’t know that part of the story.

T: Because at the time my sight-reading skills were not yet quite up to par. So, believe it or not, thank you.

E: We’re going to have to choose another song.

T: Y’all gave me the Biebl Ave Maria, and therefore you offered me a job. At this point, I was only six months through a two-year master’s program for which I already had loans and everything else. So, at that point, I went, “Oh God. What do I do now?” I sent around a bunch of messages to all my mentors, asked everyone under the sun what they thought I should do. Everyone was adamantly opposed to me leaving grad school to join Cantus. - Nothing against Cantus, of course.

E: No. We were disappointed too, but we understood. Getting your degree finished up would be a worthwhile thing.

T: So, yep. I had to turn it down, finish up my degree... Believe it or not, after turning it down and having a less than fun three-way call with Michael, Brian the “recrutinator” at the time, and myself to where they basically tried convincing me that Cantus was the way to go, I had to stick to my guns and say, “I’m sorry. I really have to finish school.”

E: Yeah.

T: They called back a couple weeks later and said, “Well, will you at least come this summer and do a recording with us?” I said, “Yeah. Why not? Three weeks, nice paycheck, I’m in.” - Did the recording. I really enjoyed it.

E: That was the Deep River recording?

T: Yes, Deep River, so what, about three years ago now, four years ago?

E: Yep.

T: It was never anything against Cantus. It was really me having to make the choice of what was best suited for me. Luckily, the following year I told Cantus I was still interested and the position was still open…or, had become open again, you could say.

E: - Opened up…

T: At that point, I again asked all my mentors what they thought. I honestly couldn’t believe their answer. All of them were gung-ho for it at that point, which proved to me that it really was about me finishing my degree and had nothing to do with Cantus. Everyone was really excited and said, “Yeah! You are studying to be a singer. Go ahead. Be a singer!”

E: Go sing. Yeah.

T: It was wonderful. I caught some flack from some of my colleagues at school, who as I was leaving to move to Minnesota said, “Have fun with your choir.” I said, “Have fun waiting tables. Guess what. I’m not studying all this time and spending all this money to learn how to do something in order to not be able to do it.” Since then, I joined up. I did some more recordings with them that summer before I joined full-time. Here we are, approaching the end of a second season…more to come.

E: So, now that you’ve been with the group for two years…what are some of the things that you really enjoy about the group? Highlights for you as far as what you’ve done here? Things you’re looking forward to?

T: The part that I enjoy most is the part that I’ve always enjoyed most about this, which is performance. I didn’t get my start because I had a beautiful voice. I got my start because I had a unique voice and have worked years trying to make it something a little bit more beautiful. So, being on stage is always the part that has attracted me to this and continues to keep me interested in it. Of course, with Cantus, doing the number of shows we do there is…I’m convinced that there’s nothing better for your progress than doing that many shows.

E: It’s true. I think both individually… You see the individual singers grow through the course of a year or their tenure with the group, and then the ensemble as a whole grows.

T: It really gets difficult to spend as many hours as we spend practicing, which, like any muscle, the more you work it out, the better and stronger it’s going to become. It’s really hard to spend that much time practicing on your own. You get tired and everything else. We get tired, but there’s enough change in what we do and enough structure to it, that we really are working out all the time. I finished the first year with Cantus, went back out to Idaho to study, was a little nervous not knowing quite what they were gonna say. I was not singing as boombastically as I had when I joined the group. They said, “You sound great!” So, there’s nothing wrong with having more control and having more finesse in your singing. I still had the boombastic side. I just had to learn that that wasn’t always what was necessary.

E: - Twenty-four seven. Yeah.

T: So, it’s been a very positive experience. Personally, I’ve grown vocally throughout the time. There’s nothing better than having resume fodder that says you actually have recordings that are distributed internationally and to do all the shows that we get to do. No, I guess I could pick out one highlight. Last year, when I first joined, my alma mater, my undergrad joined up with one of the chamber ensemble presenters near my hometown and had Cantus back once I had joined full-time. It was great to have a packed house of pretty much everyone I know from my hometown. There’s really nothing better than performing for the hometown crowd, because even when you’re bad, you’re good. Especially, if you’re good, you’re even that much better. So, that probably would be the highlight. Then again, there’s been so many wonderful shows that we’ve had and so many wonderful experiences.

E: Is there anything that you’re particularly looking forward to?

T: I’m looking forward to the day, whether I’m here or not, the day that Cantus becomes a household name.

E: Thank you, Tom.