Journey of song: Costa choir teacher takes ensemble back to his Greek roots
Mira Costa High School choir director Michael Hayden directs the school's 31-student vocal ensemble that will perform in Greece this summer and at Carnegie Hall next year. Photo
by Andrea Ruse
Mira Costa High School Vocal Ensemble students and their parents packed into the Manhattan Beach Unified School District office at a surprise meeting in January.
The 31 students sensed something serious was afoot because Superintendent Bev Rohrer was present.
“We had no idea why we were there,” said senior Amanda Charney, president of the Costa Vocal Ensemble. “We thought something bad had happened, like our program had been cut with all the budget cuts going on.”
Instead, choir director Michael Hayden announced that, for the first time, the vocal ensemble had been invited to give a solo performance at the 2011 Carnegie Hall Concert Series.
MidAmerica Productions, the firm that produces the concert, typically contacts invitees 10 days after listening to applicants’ CD submissions.
Within three hours of hearing the ensemble, the show’s artistic director, Peter Tiboris, called Hayden with an invitation.
“To say that the musicality, choral tone, sensitivity to dynamics, dramatic interest, rhythmic exactitude and musical leadership were excellent would be a gross understatement,” Tiboris later wrote to Hayden.
This is the second time the Costa Vocal Ensemble has been invited to sing at the prestigious New York concert hall. In 2006, the ensemble performed in the concert’s festival series along with several other choirs.
Costa’s orchestra and wind ensemble were also invited to perform in the Carnegie Hall Concert Series, making Mira Costa the first high school in the event’s 26 years to send all three ensembles.
“Of course, the place went crazy,” Hayden said. “The kids cheered. But then it hit them that the seniors wouldn’t be able to go. Then there was a huge sadness.”
The exclusion of the seniors was doubly disheartening because their class barely missed the first Carnegie Hall trip when they were eighth graders.
“It was such a bittersweet moment,” Charney said. “It’s an amazing thing that we accomplished together as a team. But we knew we wouldn’t be able to go.”
The group of 16 boys and 15 girls that make up Costa’s ensemble cried and hugged as the conflicting joy and sadness set in.
Hayden waited a moment before revealing a second surprise — one that would take the choir teacher on a journey with his students across the Atlantic Ocean to the place that holds answers to the mysteries of his own past.
“I’m not done,” he said.
The woman under a tree
Michael Hayden’s family history reads like a Greek tragedy.
A woman shamed. A village scandalized. Families divided.
It began nearly 53 years ago, when 30-year-old Anthoula Giahali travelled to Athens from Lappa — a small village on the coast of Peloponnesus in the southwest of Greece — to put up her newborn baby, Costakis, for adoption.
Abandoned by the baby’s father before their wedding, Giahali was considered a disgrace to her family for having a child out of wedlock. Upon her return, she was kicked out of the village by her family and took up residence under a tree in a nearby field, where she earned a small living as a shepherdess. Although a nearby family took Giahali in sometimes, she lived under the tree for the rest of her life.
Little Costakis was cared for by a nurse at an Athenian orphanage until he was adopted at the age of 14 months by an American family living in Greece, who changed his name to “Michael.”
“They picked me because I had big ears like them,” Hayden said. “They were very nurturing and sensitive to me being a foreign adoptee.”
The Haydens — who lovingly referred to him as “our little Greek boy” — moved to the southern Indiana farm where Michael grew up, unaware that a woman named Anthoula ever existed.
On the farm, he developed a love of music, often singing while doing his chores.
At the age of five, Hayden’s adoptive mother died. His adoptive father remarried twice in following years.
“The personal loss of my adopted mother, combined with knowing my whole life that I was adopted, certainly heightened my desire to find my birth mother,” Hayden said.
Hayden’s growing curiosity about his past began to cause a rift in his adoptive family. During his senior year, he moved in with his high school music teacher’s family.
After high school, Hayden attended Indiana’s Butler University, where in 1979 he received a bachelor’s degree in Music Education. He was working as a student-teacher at an Indiana high school when the family of one of his students planned a trip to Greece. They offered to look up Hayden’s birth family.
“You’ve got my name,” Hayden recalled saying to them. “Here’s my birthdate. Here’s the name of my adoptive father and mother. See what you can find out. Go on a sleuthing mission.”
The family stopped at three orphanages before stumbling onto the one where Hayden was cared for more than two decades before.
“This woman [at the orphanage] walks out with this beat-up manila folder with my American name on it,” Hayden said. “That father of my student — he sat there with his jaw on the floor. He couldn’t believe he was halfway around the world seeing my name on something like that.”
By 1980, Hayden – who was in the midst of a career that was just taking off – had finally learned of his birth mother’s whereabouts. But he was not ready to make the call.
“I found her, then I realized ‘I don’t think I’m ready to do this yet,’” Hayden said.
He continued teaching music and in 1983 received his master’s degree in Choral Conducting from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. After graduation, he began teaching at Indiana Purdue University Fort Wayne.
By 1987, Hayden’s career had settled. He wrote the first of many letters — translated into Greek by a colleague — to his mother through the orphanage. Since she was illiterate, Giahali had to have the letters read to her by orphanage employees, and then tell them what to write back.
“We did that for several years,” Hayden said.
Two years later, Hayden did a doctoral residency in Choral Conducting at Michigan State University. In 1994, he left academia to work as a private consultant to choirs around the country and in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
That same year, for his 36th birthday, Hayden took his long-awaited trip to Greece. He met his mother for the first time at the home of the family that sometimes cared for her.
“She walked down the hallway and my gut reaction was, ‘My God. I look just like her,’” Hayden said.
During his five week stay, Hayden often ate lunch under the tree with his mother, asking her questions about his history. She told Hayden his father, after abandoning her, started a new family in another Greek town. Hayden has made no attempt to contact him.
Despite the decades-old conflict over his birth, Hayden was also welcomed by uncles, aunts and cousins — some of whom were responsible for his mother’s exile — who still lived in the village.
Gahali told her son that he had chosen “a good and noble profession” in music.
Two years after their reunion, she died from Parkinson’s disease.
“There was always that question of, ‘Where do I come from?” Hayden said. “I had so many questions answered. Meeting her was a very important piece of my life puzzle.”
Westbound
A West Coast life was never in Hayden’s plan.
“It’s not the cornfield of Indiana,” he said of California.
“I was rather a snob about coming here due to the sheer cost of living and my innate sense of Midwestern provincialism,” he added.
But after years of traveling the world as a choir director, Hayden was ready for a change.
“As I was learning more about voices and general musicianship, I wanted to go back to the classroom,” he said. “I had gained all this knowledge and wanted to see if I could teach it at the high school level.”
Although he initially had dreams of teaching music in New York or Florida, Hayden’s job search landed him an interview in Manhattan Beach in May of 2007.
It took one visit to the beach to change his mind.
“I remember standing on The Esplanade by Hollywood Riviera going, ‘Why wouldn’t I want to live here?” Hayden said of the South Bay.
Hayden directed the ensemble in two pieces during his half hour interview at Costa, using the techniques he’d acquired during his varied career to get them to produce “a more adult, ringing, classical sound.”
He was impressed.
“When I came and saw the quality of the students’ singing and the high level of academic achievement, I really knew I wanted to be here,” he said.
Hayden was offered the job the following week and started at Mira Costa that fall.
In addition to adding an Oriental rug to make the choir room feel “more studio-like,” Hayden has worked to develop in the ensemble a keen response to his slightest direction.
“One of the things that’s so much fun is to say to the students, ‘Just watch my hands. The expression will be there,’” Hayden said. “They get it. They’re smart. They will change the way they sound based on the slightest gesture. They’re that responsive.”
“He has a very unique approach,” said senior Jack Danylik, vocal ensemble member. “If the choir is not sounding the way he wants, he changes his hands or his stance to get the sound he wants. The interesting part is you don’t think about it. You just watch what he’s doing and it just happens.”
From rearranging singers’ positions to teaching them to match their vowel sounds, Hayden has helped produce a more mature sounding group.
“When we teach high school students to do this, you see the growth of youth in choral singing is one of the most rewarding experiences,” Hayden said. “You can see a student so shy turn into a confident young man or woman able to sing in front of his or her peers.”
Charney has noticed a difference in the ensemble’s sound under Hayden’s direction.
“It’s very different now, in a good way,” she said. “We have more of an individual working sound now, instead of many parts.”
The ensemble has performed at events including a Lakers game and Manhattan Beach’s annual 10K run and Holiday Open House. But Carnegie Hall will be the biggest stage on which they’ve performed.
“Singing is one of the deepest expressions that a human can experience,” Hayden said. “It combines melodic sound with great poetry. When you put that in front of an audience, the interplay can be life-changing.”
The 2010 Mira Costa Vocal Ensemble. Photo courtesy of MCHS
Though the vocal ensemble seniors were disappointed after hearing Hayden’s announcement about Carnegie at the January meeting, they were nonetheless proud.
“It was monumental,” Danylik said. “The fact that we even made it there felt great.”
Their disappointment, however, was short-lived. Hayden made his second announcement.
Unexpectedly, MidAmerica Productions invited the vocal ensemble to perform in the annual International Festival of the Aegean this July in Greece. They will be the first high school group ever to perform at the festival.
“When I announced the two week residency at the Aegean, the kids’ jaws literally went to the floor,” Hayden said. “Everybody was just stunned. It wasn’t the icing on the cake. It was the second, third and fourth dessert.”
The Sixth Dessert
Hayden had been shocked when Tiboris invited the ensemble to perform, of all places, in the Mediterranean.
“‘Peter, I’m from Greece,’” Hayden recalled saying. “This is incredible.”
Tiboris invited Hayden and his ensemble to the Greek island of Syros for two weeks, where they will combine with the Ionian Chorus from the Greek University of Corfu to sing in three performances of the opera Carmen. The choir will be accompanied by the Pan European Philharmonic Orchestra and will back an international cast.
“My kids are combining with a university chorus to become a professional opera performance for Carmen,” Hayden said. “This is huge that a high school ensemble was picked to perform in a professional arena.”
The ensemble will also be the only U.S. choir next year to sing in the festival’s a cappella Sunset Series on the island’s St. Nikolas Church.
“It’s the perfect consummation of four years of this amazing experience and program — this year especially more than any other year,” Charney said.
The choir members work daily with Hayden to prepare for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and regularly listen to a professional recording of a 1984 performance of the opera.
“I love this,” Hayden said. “They’re humming Carmen in the halls. To be doing an opera with such a beautiful melody so recognizable is an incredible experience.”
Tiboris was so moved by the choir director’s story, he offered to sponsor the ensemble to spend an extra day in Greece to travel to Lappa for a special performance in Hayden’s family’s village.
“That was the fifth dessert,” Hayden said. “My Greek relatives are so excited. It will be very informal. We very well may be singing outdoors in the town.”
With only a few months to go before their departure, the vocal ensemble has raised three quarters of the roughly $41,000 they need to fund the trip. Manhattan Beach’s Petros Restaurant contributed $5,000 earlier this week.
Next month, the choir will hold a “Prelude to Greece” send-off concert, where they will perform Carmen choruses and sacred songs selected for the Sunset Series.
“We want the fundraising off our back so we can concentrate on the music and doing what we’re meant to do, which is a professional job singing in an opera,” Hayden said.
The trip has sparked new contact between the choir director and his Greek relatives.
A couple months ago, Hayden learned of a 14-year-old English-speaking cousin in Lappa with whom he has started regularly emailing in preparation for the trip.
Hayden choked up as he envisioned his students singing in Lappa.
“Perhaps we will get to perform under my mother’s tree,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “That would be the sixth dessert.”
“A Prelude to Greece” will be held at 4 p.m. June 12 at Cross by the Sea Episcopal Church in Hermosa Beach. $20 pre-sale and $25 at the door. For more information, visit www.mchschoirs.org. ER