With one hand flipping through pages of music and the other waving as if haphazardly keeping rhythm, Dr. Gackle turns to the choir of women teasing, “some of y’all look like you’re at First Mattress. Sing with your eyes. People are watching, help them connect.” It was 9:30 in the morning on Halloween weekend, and Dr. Gackle was right. The majority of Bella Voce, her premier women’s ensemble, would rather be sleeping. Many of them had already sung at their own churches that morning. Others were still yawning off their dreams. Yet here they were, in the choir loft of a church none of them attended, standing in front of their matriarch who had promised a friend she would bring her group to sing. Her friend was sick. The choir was still there. Dr. Gackle follows through. 

Dr. Gackle is an enthusiastic person in the way only a woman with intense passion can be. For her, every song is an opportunity for producing believers. Whether that belief is in a higher power or in the thought that there is beauty in life, or in the conviction that the singer has something to offer that is unique to themselves, Dr. Gackle is a missionary for music, and the conductor’s stand is her pulpit. During rehearsal, she will often stop a song to make certain that her choir understands the text and is connecting to what they are singing. 

Preparing for the first in-person performance of A Baylor Christmas since the coronavirus pandemic, she stops the choir in the middle of Dan Forrest’s “Light Beyond Shadows.” Tying the song to the struggles that musicians have faced since the pandemic and emphasizing that the light referenced in the song is the “light of the world, Jesus Christ,” Dr. Gackle ends her speech by announcing, “if we at Baylor cannot tell this story then we don’t have a story to tell.” When she speaks, her southern voice rises and falls like waves meeting the shore. Sometimes it crashes down on the rocks passionately, but every speech ends at low tide, in a whisper, with Dr. Gackle’s hazel eyes lost in a mist. 

Growing up in Monroe, Louisiana, it was not typical for a person to possess a good musical education. However, her parents were lucky. Both had sung in high school choirs and understood good music. They sang in the church choir and, when they could finally afford it, paid for lessons for a fourth-grade Lynne Gackle, who earnestly wanted to learn piano.

As she plays the piano and leads her choir in warmups, it is hard to believe that Dr. Gackle could have ever been turned away from anything requiring her to sing. She is beautiful with a bob of voluminous, sleek brown, blonde hair and warm hazel eyes that look at you kindly through the lens of her square glasses. Dr. Gackle is compassionate yet authoritative in a way that immediately commands respect. She carries herself with elegance, always dressed fashionably, with the ability to make even a choir t-shirt and jeans appear stylish. Although she likes to poke fun at her age, everything about Dr. Gackle is vibrant, including her voice.

She riffles through the pages of music, correcting the sopranos with a strong, angelic voice that rings as it soars the music hall. “This chord is so exposed it’s like singing butt naked in front of the audience. We cannot mess up.” The choir laughs. The sopranos begin again. This part is challenging, but Dr. Gackle made it seem effortless. 

Dr. Gackle has a voice many women dream about. Yet, when she auditioned for her junior high school choir, Lynne did not make it. Like many girls her age, her voice was too breathy. At the time there was no research on how the female voice develops. Instead, research about vocal development focused on men and the “octave phenomena.” Young girls like Dr. Gackle were left lost, wondering what was wrong with them. “They think ‘I’m a singer’ and then they go ‘I’m broken. I don’t want to do it.’”

 In 1984, Dr. Gackle was the first to publish research on the female voice. At the time, she was working with community choirs like the Miami Girl Choir. When Dr. Gackle began working with the Miami Girl Choir, she was met with a group of middle school girls, all of whom were experiencing vocal change. While working with these girls, she realized that she did not possess knowledge about young female voices, and it seemed that no one else did either. 

“I just started thinking about, well, how do I teach boys? How do I use the breath? I just kept working and I didn't know why things were working, but I would take notes.”

 In 1984, Dr. Gackle took her troupe of forty-two adolescent girls to Chicago for the National Association for Music Education Bi-Ennial Conference. She had submitted their audition on a whim and, to her surprise, was asked that her choir perform and that she give a forty-five-minute presentation on the female adolescent voice. Prior to her presentation, she had not written anything about the female voice. The presentation was, as she calls it, a “proverbial door” that the Lord opened. 

After the conference, she decided to turn her presentation, which focused on how the female voice develops and changes, into an article. The article was published, and by the time Dr. Gackle entered academia, she discovered that she had been quoted in textbooks and that ten different choral texts mentioned the framework she had discovered through her experience working with female ensembles. She continued her research, and in 2011, Dr. Gackle published her landmark text, Finding Ophelia's Voice, Opening Ophelia’s Heart: Nurturing the Adolescent Female Voice. 

Dr. Gackle’s research does not only stand out for pioneering the subject of the female voice but for its focus on voice and psychological development. She understands that the voice is one of the most personal things about an individual and that, because of this, the voice is deeply tied to a person’s identity. Adolescents are preyed on by insecurity and comparison, which shows in their attitudes toward their changing voices. Yet, Dr. Gackle ardently believes that if girls possess knowledge about their changing voice, they will grow in confidence and come to see that a changing voice is not a negative thing but a process that is completely normal and natural. 

“I did a workshop [for the Florida Music Educators] with some of my kids and because it was community [choir], I had the little bitty ones and I had the ones that were sixteen. I had a little girl that was 12 years old and her mother told me, ‘She wants to drop out of choir. Margaret Sarah just doesn’t feel like she can sing anymore.’ And I said, ‘look, can she just come and be my demonstration? Do you think she would sing?’” Margaret Sarah agreed to take part in Dr. Gackle’s demonstration. After all, it was only vocalization, singing up and down the scale. 

The demonstration started with a young girl who sang with a sweet and clear voice. She had no vibrato, no rich womanly tone, just the simple, beautiful voice of a child. Another girl sang. She was slightly older, but her voice was similar to the voice of the first girl. Margaret Sarah sang in the middle of Dr. Gackle’s demonstration, and just as Dr. Gackle expected, “the voice broke.” Instead of coming out clear and strong, her voice sounded breathy, as if she could not reach the notes. After Margaret Sarah, more girls vocalized, each one older than the next. Finally, Christy, one of the high school girls, sang. Her voice was clear and pure. It was not quite yet the voice of a woman, but it was much more mature. 

After the demonstration, Margaret Sarah told Dr. Gackle, “I just realized something. I used to sound like the little girl with that beautiful sound, and now I'm kind of in the middle. But one day I wanna be like Christy” to which Dr. Gackle responded “Well, maybe not just like Christy, but yeah, you're in transition. You're not broken. There's nothing wrong. You're okay. You're spot on in fact.”

Dr. Gackle did not expect to become the first person to research the female voice. She did not go out with the goal of becoming a celebrated music educator. Dr. Gackle achieved these things because she was focused on truly shepherding her students during a critical time of their development. She researched because she wanted to know how to best help her students find their voice and confidence.

 Dr. Gackle looks at her students and sees herself: the girl struggling with her body image, the girl struggling to find her talent, the girl who is turned away from choir, and the girl who feels like she has no voice. She sees herself and meets her students where they are in the way that she wishes she would have been met. 

Although society has made progress, the world is still very much “a man’s world.” Dr. Gackle knows that. It is why she pushes her choir to perform to the best of their ability. She often exclaims in class, “a men’s choir can sing average and people in the audience will say ‘that was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard’ but a women’s choir can sing near perfect and everyone wants to be a music critic.” Dr. Gackle expects excellence because she knows that every woman in her choir has the ability to be excellent. In teaching music, Dr. Gackle teaches the dedication and commitment required to excel in all of life’s challenges. Not every person in Bella Voce is studying music education or vocal performance. There are future doctors, lawyers, and writers whose last experience singing in a choir will most likely be singing in Bella Voce with Dr. Gackle. She is aware of this and strives to ensure that her students graduate with more knowledge than simply how to sing pretty. 

This fall, her efforts were seen in the Bella Voce reunion. “We have almost sixty Bella Voce alumni who have returned for this weekend,” reflected alumni Casey LeVie during the reunion concert. “Yes, it was for the experience of singing together again as a choir and being back at Baylor, but I guarantee you if you asked every person on this stage what brought them back, it would be Lynne Gackle.” 

After a slow breath and a smile to keep from crying, LeVie resumes.  “So many of us have found belonging and purpose during our time in Bella Voce and that’s because of Dr. Gackle and the environment she’s created for us.” The women standing behind her look around. Each woman is unique in their interest, personality, voice, and reason for joining Bella Voce. Yet it is clear that there is a definite agreement with LeVie. They are united in song and united in their love of Dr. Gackle and the musical family she has created.  

LeVie continues, affirming the shared feeling. “Who she is as a person has not only shaped us as musicians, singers, educators, people in the workforce, spouses, friends, but truly as women. She has shared her life, her passions, her struggles, her humor, her dancing with us and shown us what it means to be bold, strong, graceful, courageous, and so much more.”

Dr. Gackle has helped women find their voice, both in music and in their lives. It is the drive behind all that she does. “At one point in my career, if you asked me what I ‘did,’ what my occupation was, I would have said, ‘I teach music!’ Now, I now am quick to say, ‘I teach people.’ Music is just my medium!’” Although Dr. Gackle is retiring this year, she plans to continue directing Bella Voce. The community of choir and the power of voice are too important to her. “Whatever we can do to help people find who they are, whoever that is, and if not, to find who they are, connect within themselves and talk with things around them. That type of community is, to me, the most needed thing in our world today.”