Sylvia McNair is full of life and talent–and she’s from Mansfield. McNair made a name for herself in opera, oratorio, cabaret and musical theater; but she credits her musical talent to her roots in Richland County and the instruction she received, first at home, and then from local teachers and mentors. Though she’s most often described as a “two-time Grammy Award winner,” McNair doesn’t feel the Grammys are her most meaningful achievements.
“I can easily say, winning Grammys, winning any award, feels good–it feels fantastic,” said McNair. “But I don’t really think of those award-winning projects as the most meaningful projects. I would say that the most meaningful part of my singing life is coming in my life as a teacher because I’m able to take three decades of professional experience gathered from all over the world at the music business’s biggest and best venues—I’m able to take everything I learned from all that experience and give it to the next generation and honestly that’s what gives my life meaning—being able to pass it on, being able to share, being able to give it away.”
She continued, “I’m not trying to sound like a saint and an angel. There are performances in my career like when you get to shake hands with the pope. I’m not going to lie, there is a photo of me shaking hands with the pope in my home. I don’t hide that picture. I loved being invited to sing a recital at the Supreme Court and I’ve become friends with [Associate Justice] Sandra Day O-Connor and [Associate Justice] Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I also happen to remember a performance at Carnegie Hall with the Berlin Philharmonic where I knew I had done my absolute finest work.”
But McNair’s story began in Mansfield. She attended three schools in Richland County, first attended Mansfield Christian for her elementary school years and then junior high school at Johnny Appleseed, which has since been demolished. She attended Lexington High School, graduating in 1974.
“What’s really cool,” she said, “is that I am still really connected to people who I went to school with at Mansfield Christian, at Johnny Appleseed, and at Lexington. Like this summer is the 40th high school class reunion for Mansfield Christian for Malabar, which was the high school that Johnny Appleseed junior high school students went, and for Lexington. So I could easily go to all three high school reunions and have a blast because I’m still connected to people from all three schools.”
McNair’s musical instruction began long before she entered public school, however, and it wasn’t her voice that she was training.
The daughter of George and Marilou McNair, she first began taking piano lessons from her mother when she was 3 years old. Her mother was a music teacher in the Mansfield public schools and later at Lexington. She also had a large private studio of piano students. When she was 5 years old, McNair studied with another teacher. Then, when she was seven, she began studying with Elva Newdome.
“That’s really, really important,” explained McNair, “because Elva Newdome is one of Mansfield’s leading music teachers and she has been for over 50 years. She has touched hundreds, if not thousands, of students’ lives with her teaching of music; and she’s still alive and she’s still teaching. She’s an extraordinary lady.”
McNair was also friends with Newdome’s daughter Beth Newdome. Beth Newdome was Elva Newdome’s oldest child and “a successful violinist, a brilliant violinist,” said McNair. Beth Newdome died in February of 2010 of breast cancer. Not only were they childhood friends, but later in life they were also both cancer patients at the same time. McNair is a survivor.
Not only was McNair studying violin with Elva Newdome but at age eight she started studying piano with Elizabeth Pastor. Elizabeth Pastor teaches on the faculty at Ashland University.
“I think I was nine years old when I decided that I wanted to be just like Elizabeth Pastor when I grew up,” stated McNair. “What that means is that I wanted to be strong, independent, bright, full of edginess, a progressive liberal Democrat, willing to go to war to help the planet to be healthier, and of course, be a great, great artist–a great musician. Yeah, that’s what it meant. And I knew when I was nine, I wanted to be just like that because she was all of those things and more. She still is.”
She continued, “I had great music instruction when I was a child—great music instruction in Mansfield. In fact, so many of us who came up through the system studying with Elva Newdome, studying with Elizabeth Pastor studying with some many of the music teachers in Mansfield, we all talk about it now. Here we are in our middle to late 50s and we all talk about it. And we all say things like, ‘Wow, it’s only now we look back and realize how exceptional the music teaching was in Mansfield.’ We all went off to college and discovered that maybe we’d had our best teaching when we were kids.”
But McNair’s mother and two extraordinary music teachers weren’t her only musical guides. So was her father. He worked at Westinghouse.
“My father was the most extraordinary human being I’ve ever known. By way of saying that, even though he had siblings, he was the only one who dropped out of college in the 30s–there was a depression going on, you’ll remember. He was the one who dropped out of college to move home to Pittsburg to take care of their mother who was not well,” said McNair. “He put his own life on hold to move home and take care of his mom and he never managed to get back in to college. I think that was a fact that haunted him. It made him someone who valued advanced education more than almost anything in the world, and he made sure to do whatever he had to do to put my mother through college and then to put me through college and it wasn’t long after I graduated that he dropped dead. And it was probably that he was just tired.”
George McNair did more than sacrifice for his family. He was also the music director of a “vast” music program at First Alliance Church.
“And when I say vast,” said McNair, “I mean at one point there were six or seven different choirs at the church. For special occasions there would be orchestras which he paid for out of his own pocket. He’s been dead for almost 35 years and people still remember me as George McNair’s daughter. He didn’t have formal education but he played piano and violin. He as the real artist in our family. He had the artist’s soul. He had such a passion for music.”
But today Sylvia McNair is known for her voice, yet her early years were spent learning the piano and violin.
She sang in school productions and church choir when she was young but didn’t get serious about singing until she was in college. She had a violin teacher in college who suggested she take some singing lessons. He told her that if she learned to breathe properly it would help her play the violin better “Because all music, all of music making, requires phrasing and to phrase well you have to breathe well,” she noted, “He thought if I took some singing lessons, my breathing would be improved. He knew that would just spill over into the violin playing.
McNair realized she enjoyed sing and studying languages and getting in tune with her body. She described singing as a very physical, athletic exercise and it appealed to her, both because of its ability to communicate, and because it is physical. So she switched her focus from violin to singing.
She went to graduate school at Indiana University, one of the best music schools in the country at the time, she said. It was there that she said she “sort of got bit by the opera bug.”
She was cast in productions of operas and enjoyed that, so she entered the National Metropolitan Opera auditions in the spring of 1982 and “managed to win them.” It was a big year in her life. She won the Met auditions. She won the SanFransisco Opera auditions and went as an apprentice. It was the first year she made a classical recording with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She was 25. Her solo performance there was nominated for a Grammy.
“When you’re 25 years old and you’ve made your first classical recording with Arnold Shaw. That’s a big deal. It was the year I made my European debut. So 1982 was a big year in my life,” noted McNair.
Sylvia McNair was not immediately attracted to opera, but singing and being in the orchestra pit and wearing costumes in front of scenery and musically telling stories appealed to her. And it was hard work.
“I’ve always said opera is sort of like the Olympics for the voice. It’s terribly demanding. In the opera world, we’re never using amplification. We’re never the beneficiaries of sound enhancement. We have to do it all ourselves with our bodies and our voices and opera houses are big, very, very, very big,” said McNair, “And I sang opera at some of the best opera houses in the world for 20 years,and honestly at the end of 20 years I sort of thought, ‘Phew, I’m tired now.’”
She decided she was ready to “take that opera career and put it in a beautiful box and tie a beautiful bow around it, put it up on a shelf, honor it for what it was, and then do other kinds of singing.”
In the early 2000s she wanted to spend more time doing musical theater productions, symphony pops, cabaret.
“I love the Great American Songbook,” she said. “It is now literally considered its own genre. But I love it and I am now for these past 10 years, I’ve been singing music that is so deep in my blood and in my bones, I feel like I’m singing repertoires that I feel I was actually built to sing, vocally and artistically. I’m having the time of my life.”
She said she had to learn to sing opera, but what she’s doing now is “just completely natural.” “It’s so much who I am. It’s more honest. It’s more authentic. I learned how to sing opera and I did it at the very top level for two decades. Now, I’m doing stuff that I didn’t have to learn how to do. It’s so much who I am,” she said.
She also agreed that the discipline of opera facilitated singing the new genre. She said it is so demanding and difficult and to be able to step back from that, it’s been “kind of a relief.”
In addition to her successful career, McNair also enjoys her family, which includes her cocker spaniel Maybel.
Divorced for the last 10 years, McNair enjoys her children.
“I want to tell you that while I’ve not given birth to any children, I have adopted five children who I take care of who live in Kenya,” she said. “Two of them are orphans. I send them off to private schools and I look after them; I keep in touch with them; my house is plastered with photos of them. I do have children but they live in Kenya. When I’m in Kenya for the month in the summer, and I do that as often as I can, I spend a lot of time with these children.”
“Two are living with their birth mother but they are in private schools. And the other is living with an aunt; he is probably going to be reunited his dad. So they’re not technically orphans but they are children in need and McNair wants to provide for their educations. “That’s really the only religion I can claim right now, and so I want to everything I can to make sure these children get a good education,” she added.
Esther is 17, Jackson, 15; Alexina, 12; Darrem, 6. And Anastasia was left on a doorstep but the doctors believe she’s between 4 and 5.
From Mansfield, Sylvia McNair has performed on many stages and still does. She’s also on stage, or a platform, teaching. Her students at Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University can reflect, as the curtain to their stage opens, on the effervescent personality and talent that leads them today.
To read more about Sylvia McNair, visit her Facebook page or her website.
“I had great music instruction when I was a child—great music instruction in Mansfield. In fact, so many of us who came up through the system studying with Elva Newdome, studying with Elizabeth Pastor studying with some many of the music teachers in Mansfield, we all talk about it now,” said Sylvia McNair.
