A Voice to Listen To
November 27, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Gender, Music
34-year-old Charlene Sawyer has a “rich and dark mezzo soprano voice,” today’s Charlotte Observer notes. Sawyer was not diagnosed with autism until she was 17 years old. She started piano lessons and performing with school choirs at the age of 12, and has been taking voice lessons since she was 14. And
Around this time, she says, her peers made fun of her because they knew she took special education classes. Instead of the socializing she might have enjoyed as a young teen-ager, she immersed herself in her budding gift, learning pieces in Italian, Latin, German and French.
Sawyer has written an outline of her autobiography and now lives in a group home run by the Enola Group, whose director, Fredda Monroe, “says she wants to market Charlene to perform at weddings and to perhaps cut a CD of her singing.”
Heidi Thompson, a friend of Charlene’s who accompanies her to see opera performances in Charlotte and works with her at Studio XI, says Charlene told her she wants to “tell the story of what it’s like to be an artist with a disability.”
“Most autistic people can’t feel or express emotion,” Charlene says. “I do.”
It’s not stated clearly in the Charlotte Observer article: Is it through her singing, through music, that Sawyer is able to “feel” and “express emotion”—usic certainly seems to be such a medium for my son Charlie, from the days when him singing “Frere Jacques” signified that he was upset.
(No, he wasn’t singing that song tonight!)
Jeff Stimpson
Jill Cornfield