Gail Hodgkin was a dramatic and intense person, friends and family said, and her vocal students responded by working hard for her.
Hodgkin was 60 when she died at Porter Hospital on March 7 after a long battle with lymphoma.
Hodgkin, who taught vocal lessons at the Academy of the Arts in Denver, specialized in preparing students for performance, said Scott Martin, who directs the school.
She would use various techniques to get her point across.
Martin praised Hodgkin’s teaching ability and said he has incorporated one technique in which she used visualization to encourage a student to go beyond what the person thought he or she was capable of.
She’d compare their effort to jumping a few feet from one cliff to another.
“Now are you going to jump all the way or just kind of jump?” Hodgkin would ask the student.
“She taught people to communicate the thought of the musical number, not just sing it,” said her daughter, Taylor Hodgkin, a college student and singer. She said she took lessons from her mother “but that didn’t work out – mothers and daughters, you know.”
She said her mother grew to like almost every kind of music, “but opera had her soul.”
Gail Hodgkin trained two male singers from Russia to sing gospel music and they won a national Gospel Music of America award, said her husband, Don Hodgkin of Denver. She also succeeded in training an autistic student to sing on pitch.
“Mom was never easygoing, even if she was cleaning the bathroom,” Taylor Hodgkin said. “She did everything with her whole heart.”
Hodgkin believed in the Mozart Effect, the theory that listening to Mozart’s music will help people solve difficult problems.
“We tried it,” said her daughter, laughing, “and together we got a D in my high school geometry class.”
Gail Sawyer was born April 8, 1946, in Bronxville, N.Y. She studied music at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and Juilliard School in New York.
She married Don Hodgkin on June 27, 1981.
She performed in several summer stock productions in various parts of the country and in the Grand Lake Repertory Theater in Colorado.
Several years ago she played the lead in the opera “The Marriage of Figaro” when it was staged in Aspen.
In addition to her husband and daughter, she is survived by her son, Alex Hodgkin of Denver; two sisters, Sherri Bauer of Durango and Susan McDanal of Oregon; and a brother, Charles Sawyer of Denver.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
