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While studying at the Conservatory, she met and fell in love with the composer, David Kowalski. After completing her degree in 1982, she moved to Princeton where he was pursuing doctoral studies at Princeton University. She and David were married on Sept. 3, 1983 and spent the following ten years living in Kingston. In addition to teaching voice at Princeton University, Michelle was well known to and well loved by Princeton audiences through her frequent performances, both there and throughout the Northeast: with the Composers Guild of New Jersey, Voices, the Friends of Music at Princeton, the June Opera Festival, Gageego, the Griffin Music Ensemble, the Amara Ensemble and others. She was a founding member of a number of groups, including Voices, The Black Squirrel Baroque Ensemble and Music from Princeton. Her husband recalls that " . . . her earliest specializations were in Medieval, Baroque and early Classical music (Machaut, Bach and Mozart were her three great loves when I met her in the fall of 1979) and she never really tired of that repertoire. But it was her breathtakingly musical interpretations of difficult twentieth century music for which she is perhaps best-remembered. Composers of many ages and styles created new works for her. She premiered many other works, not written for her but performed with as much love and devotion as if they were. The truth is that Michelle simply loved to sing. That love and her consummate musicianship made every one of her performances a delight and a privilege to experience. She could take the most trite nineteenth-century parlor songs and turn them into truly touching moments just as easily as she could craft the thorniest twelve-tone compositions into an enthralling world of lyricism in which even the most conservative listener could find joy." Michelle was diagnosed with acute renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer) in November of 1989, shortly before she was to have given her debut performance in Carnegie Hall. The cancer was in remission from mid-1990 through the summer of 1992 but her initial bout had done extensive damage to her hip with the result that both walking and extended sitting would remain problems for the rest of her life. Still, no-one who knew her in those days could help but be struck by the perky-eyed cheerfulness, the brightly-colored ribbons she hung from her cane (and later her crutches) and the sheer determinism to triumph over her illness. On more than one occasion she said, "I'm not dying from cancer, I'm living from cancer," and, indeed, the incessant joie-de-vivre she maintained in the face of this devastating disease was truly inspiring to everyone who came in touch with her. Her insistent thwarting of doctors' prognoses of "so many weeks or months to live" had many of us likening her to a cat with nine (or more) lives. She simply had too many things left to do to be bothered with dying. Nonetheless, although she struggled valiantly against the ravages of the disease and remained cheerful until the very end, her strength waned rapidly and once her treatments began she was able to sing only on a very restricted basis. Every hour in the practice room meant two to three hours of extra rest at home and every recital appearance meant days or even weeks of recuperation. As Michelle grew increasingly weak and needed more and more care, she finally made the painful decision to leave the home she loved in Kingston and move to her mother's house in Amherst, MA where a veritable army of friends, relatives and hospice workers was able to tend to her on a round-the-clock basis. She died on the morning of April 29, 1994 at the age of 37 and was buried in Amherst on May 1. She is survived by her mother, three sisters and her husband, David Kowalski. A non-profit, charitable fund has been established in her memory. Donations may be made to Save the Music, Inc. (Post Office Box M554, Hoboken, NJ 07030-0554) and marked as being for The Michelle Disco Memorial Fund.
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Michelle
Disco was born on December 24, 1956 in Pittsfield, MA to John and Kathleen
Disco. Precociously musical almost since birth, she began singing and playing
the piano at a very young age and was frequently on stage in school musicals and
with her three sisters. With early training at the Pittsfield Community Music
School, she went on to receive a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman
School of Music in 1978 and two Master of Music degrees (in Voice and Vocal
Pedagogy) from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1982. She studied and
coached with Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Bethany Beardslee, Terry Decima, Mark Pierson,
Madelaine Chambers and others.
Farewell,
Sweet Angel...you are greatly missed.
