Spotlight On Marie Newsom
photo: Ben R. Haggard
Signposts help both travelers and readers by showing the route, highlighting key points along the way, and signaling directional changes. Marie Newsom’s life journey signposts include banjo, ukelele, recorder, viola da gamba, harpsichord, guitar, and handbells.
As the youngest (with her twin) of six children growing up in Washington D.C., Marie’s pre-tv era entertainment was family singalongs with mother at the piano and father playing banjo. A proudly Irish lass, she also recalls Gregorian chants heard in Latin masses and parochial school, as well as jazz, as different but complimentary, influences.
Marie was 12 when the family moved to San Franciso for her father’s job with America President Lines (APL). Only a year later, just before Christmas, her mother died. APL invited the bereft family to sail to Hawaii for the holidays on the company’s SS President Cleveland liner. There Marie found a bit of comfort in new musical sounds and learned to play the ukelele.
While at all-girls Presentation H.S. and all-women Lone Mountain College, music brought happy times singing and dancing in school programs, and again with her informal family musicales. She recalls that “Cleaning up after meals was delightful! Father kept asking ‘Aren’t you finished yet?’” because brother Paul played the banjo while the sisters sang and danced in the kitchen.
An older sister moved to Baltimore, and Marie went along. There Marie met a Ph.D. student, whom she married the next year. The Maryland years brought three sons, and serious immersion in vocal training at the Peabody Conservatory. During her second lesson the aghast teacher discovered Marie could not sight-read music. She’d learned arias by memorizing all Maria Callas’ recordings! Retired diva Rosa Poncelle coached the Baltimore Civic Opera Company’s chorus. Marie sang in the chorus of Tosca – only the second opera she’d ever attended.
She continued studies at Peabody, but as a faculty wife at classics-based St. John’s College in Annapolis, Marie’s musical journey backtracked to more ancient periods. In its madrigal singing group she learned to sight-read at last, and learned to play the recorder and then the viola da gamba.
St. John’s moved the family to its new campus in Santa Fe, and Marie transferred vocal lessons and chorus performance to UNM. Excited to be cast as understudy in Gian Carlo Menotti’s rather challenging modern opera The Medium, Marie was disappointed yet relieved when she wasn’t called on to stand in.
Changes in direction were brewing. A harpsichord moved into her home to accompany her own music studies and sessions with her recorder group. Marie’s major changed to Elementary Education, with the goal of using music in teaching. She quickly was hired to teach 6th graders and direct the chorus – in Fremont CA! She moved there with her three sons to live and work in the area which would become known as “Silicon Valley.”
For 21 years she taught elementary students and directed scores of concerts and school productions. Her brother Paul taught her the guitar, on which she mastered more chords than she’d learned on his banjo. It was useful to focus youngsters’ wandering attention as well as accompany their singing.
Her own musical attention was focused performing choral classics with the Palo Alto Schola Cantorum, and with the West Valley Light Opera. Marie knew her voice was better suited for operetta than grand opera and delighted in performing in productions like Naughty Marietta.
After retiring from teaching, she moved northward to Clear Lake CA, but didn’t retire from either music or education. A topic she developed for an adult study group morphed into the FAME (Famous Artists and Musicians Experience) program for elementary school students to learn about art, music, and the connections between them.
Returning to Santa Fe as a widow is what Marie calls the “Grand Finale” but is really a fourth act in a vibrant life. She’s enjoyed glorious art and opera during European travels, has performed with the Cathedral Choir and as a “ringer” in its Bell Choir, and has volunteered with Santa Fe’s Symphony, Desert Chorale, and Opera Gift Shop. You’ll also see her greeting and checking in attendees at our Opera Guild events. Be sure to say “hello” to this delightful lady whose coast-to-coast life journey now finds her happily back with us in Santa Fe.