I sing in a very small church choir every Sunday. We have three sopranos, three baritones, four very quiet altos, and a single tenor, more of an ensemble, really. We aren't very good, but we try and we have an amazing pianist. Even in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, there are music students who couldn't make a living as musicians and are now working in some other field. I don't know what our pianist does for a living, but it's not music.
Recently, we lost our director to a move and one of the members of our choir stepped up to fill in. She's very talented, pushing at the edges of our abilities to get us to blend and use dynamics. She was born to teach. For a while, I tried to help and got to using my Indiana heritage as a way to introduce diction into the conversation.
"Well, my choir in Indiana," I'd say with a dumb-hick accent, "would say 'thuh' earth instead of 'thee' earth." It was funny. People laughed and that one voice I'd heard singing 'thuh' would switch. I did that a couple of times, all the while thinking of the church choir I actually sang with in Indiana.
When I was a kid, I went to a rich church in Bloomington, Indiana. Some people went there to be seen going to the best church in town. I didn't like that. The minister, Dr. Gingery, didn't like it either and preached that Jesus would welcome someone in cut-off jeans and flip-flops as much as someone in a new dress with a fur coat. That was the height of the sixties, after all, and our town had its share of hippies. Oh, I was enamored of the hippies and would have loved for them to have walked, en masse, into our church one Sunday. It didn't happen. I loved Dr. Gingery anyway, for his openness and his warmth.
The other cool thing about our church was the music. The organist was Charles Webb, the Dean of the School of Music at Indiana University. He played the organ in a most fluent and almost playful way, never leaving the tone of the hymn. His influence also brought in the most amazing voices to sing, ethereal sopranos, deep basses. He could even gather a volunteer orchestra at a moments notice. Take out a few rows of pews and we were good to go. Every week, we heard voices of people whom everyone expected to go on to sing at the Metropolitan Opera and around the world. While I was listening, I didn't mind that some of them were only there to suck up to Dr. Webb.
Well, there was a boy I had a crush on who was in MYF with me at church. He was really a good musician too and one day, he got it into his head to join the choir. I couldn't believe he wanted me to join too and when I told him I wasn't nearly good enough, he told me it was a church choir, that anyone could join. So I screwed up my courage and went with him. I was a second soprano and sat opposite him in the rows of basses, baritones, and tenors. The sopranos moved over to make just a little room for me. I sat next to the one older soprano whose voice quavered a little. She kept coming, though the other sopranos, the young college students, seem to be trying to make her feel bad enough to quit. I liked that woman's determination and she could read music like nobody's business. So she belonged there, quavery voice and all. It was a church after all. I learned that every one of them turned the page almost a whole stanza early, that if I didn't really focus, I would be lost entirely. But I kept going. My crush made certain of that by asking me to pick him up for practice.
Eventually, I started to feel more comfortable. I learned the harmonies for the common hymns and got to where I could keep up, learning a new classical piece each week, usually in Latin. I barely kept up, but I did keep up. It helped to be surrounded by the finest second sopranos in the nation. I matched my voice to theirs, my breath to theirs, and tried to sing out without standing out. That, my friends, was a feat.
Now, it wasn't long before I realized that my crush wanted a ride and no more, and I moved away from music when I headed off to college where there wasn't even a music program. That was the first and last time I was ever surrounded by voices of that caliber. I will never forget it. I also have cassette tapes they sold to us after we performed each orchestrated mass.
So last night, at our rehearsal, the new director used my choir as an example for the fourth or fifth time, saying "Don't sing 'HAL-le-lu-jah' the way the choir in Indiana sang it. Sing 'Ah-le-lu-jah' with your jaw dropped." You know, I'm allowed to make fun of myself, but when someone else makes a habit of it, it kind of torques my feelings. This woman might just stop if she heard the tape I had of the very song we were mutilating from the Faure 'Requiem.'
I rushed home to find it, play it for them next week, but I couldn't find it. All I had was a copy of Handel's 'Messiah.' It put me into a situation I hate. I really want this woman to stop what she's doing and be duly impressed by my feat, but I want it to look like a natural part of the process. If I bring in that cassette tape, not music that we're actually practicing, it's just me with my low self-esteem, trying to feel better about myself. It makes me look pathetic. I don't want to look pathetic, but with the dumb-hick Indiana jokes, I feel pathetic anyway.
I don't like playing those kind of games with people. They either like me and appreciate my talents or they don't. No amount of trying to prove myself to this director will accomplish anything. Hell, she can hear my voice. Before she got up front, she sang next to me for a year. She hugs me and gives me solos and calls me her friend, but there's just a smidgen of competition there with our voices. The interesting thing is that when the sopranos are supposed to hit a high note, she and I absolutely do not blend, no matter how hard I try. So as a rule, we decide who's going for the note and the other person harmonizes. It's much prettier that way. Yet there is that existing tension between us, even though she's directing now.
My job here, is to resist the urge to bring in that tape of me sounding amazing with that professional choir. In order to be true to myself, I need to let it go. I dug this hole and there's no getting out of it with an old cassette tape of music we're not even practicing.
Oh man, give me the strength to resist humiliating myself just that much more.
Thank you for listening, jb
Recently, we lost our director to a move and one of the members of our choir stepped up to fill in. She's very talented, pushing at the edges of our abilities to get us to blend and use dynamics. She was born to teach. For a while, I tried to help and got to using my Indiana heritage as a way to introduce diction into the conversation.
"Well, my choir in Indiana," I'd say with a dumb-hick accent, "would say 'thuh' earth instead of 'thee' earth." It was funny. People laughed and that one voice I'd heard singing 'thuh' would switch. I did that a couple of times, all the while thinking of the church choir I actually sang with in Indiana.
When I was a kid, I went to a rich church in Bloomington, Indiana. Some people went there to be seen going to the best church in town. I didn't like that. The minister, Dr. Gingery, didn't like it either and preached that Jesus would welcome someone in cut-off jeans and flip-flops as much as someone in a new dress with a fur coat. That was the height of the sixties, after all, and our town had its share of hippies. Oh, I was enamored of the hippies and would have loved for them to have walked, en masse, into our church one Sunday. It didn't happen. I loved Dr. Gingery anyway, for his openness and his warmth.
The other cool thing about our church was the music. The organist was Charles Webb, the Dean of the School of Music at Indiana University. He played the organ in a most fluent and almost playful way, never leaving the tone of the hymn. His influence also brought in the most amazing voices to sing, ethereal sopranos, deep basses. He could even gather a volunteer orchestra at a moments notice. Take out a few rows of pews and we were good to go. Every week, we heard voices of people whom everyone expected to go on to sing at the Metropolitan Opera and around the world. While I was listening, I didn't mind that some of them were only there to suck up to Dr. Webb.
Well, there was a boy I had a crush on who was in MYF with me at church. He was really a good musician too and one day, he got it into his head to join the choir. I couldn't believe he wanted me to join too and when I told him I wasn't nearly good enough, he told me it was a church choir, that anyone could join. So I screwed up my courage and went with him. I was a second soprano and sat opposite him in the rows of basses, baritones, and tenors. The sopranos moved over to make just a little room for me. I sat next to the one older soprano whose voice quavered a little. She kept coming, though the other sopranos, the young college students, seem to be trying to make her feel bad enough to quit. I liked that woman's determination and she could read music like nobody's business. So she belonged there, quavery voice and all. It was a church after all. I learned that every one of them turned the page almost a whole stanza early, that if I didn't really focus, I would be lost entirely. But I kept going. My crush made certain of that by asking me to pick him up for practice.
Eventually, I started to feel more comfortable. I learned the harmonies for the common hymns and got to where I could keep up, learning a new classical piece each week, usually in Latin. I barely kept up, but I did keep up. It helped to be surrounded by the finest second sopranos in the nation. I matched my voice to theirs, my breath to theirs, and tried to sing out without standing out. That, my friends, was a feat.
Now, it wasn't long before I realized that my crush wanted a ride and no more, and I moved away from music when I headed off to college where there wasn't even a music program. That was the first and last time I was ever surrounded by voices of that caliber. I will never forget it. I also have cassette tapes they sold to us after we performed each orchestrated mass.
So last night, at our rehearsal, the new director used my choir as an example for the fourth or fifth time, saying "Don't sing 'HAL-le-lu-jah' the way the choir in Indiana sang it. Sing 'Ah-le-lu-jah' with your jaw dropped." You know, I'm allowed to make fun of myself, but when someone else makes a habit of it, it kind of torques my feelings. This woman might just stop if she heard the tape I had of the very song we were mutilating from the Faure 'Requiem.'
I rushed home to find it, play it for them next week, but I couldn't find it. All I had was a copy of Handel's 'Messiah.' It put me into a situation I hate. I really want this woman to stop what she's doing and be duly impressed by my feat, but I want it to look like a natural part of the process. If I bring in that cassette tape, not music that we're actually practicing, it's just me with my low self-esteem, trying to feel better about myself. It makes me look pathetic. I don't want to look pathetic, but with the dumb-hick Indiana jokes, I feel pathetic anyway.
I don't like playing those kind of games with people. They either like me and appreciate my talents or they don't. No amount of trying to prove myself to this director will accomplish anything. Hell, she can hear my voice. Before she got up front, she sang next to me for a year. She hugs me and gives me solos and calls me her friend, but there's just a smidgen of competition there with our voices. The interesting thing is that when the sopranos are supposed to hit a high note, she and I absolutely do not blend, no matter how hard I try. So as a rule, we decide who's going for the note and the other person harmonizes. It's much prettier that way. Yet there is that existing tension between us, even though she's directing now.
My job here, is to resist the urge to bring in that tape of me sounding amazing with that professional choir. In order to be true to myself, I need to let it go. I dug this hole and there's no getting out of it with an old cassette tape of music we're not even practicing.
Oh man, give me the strength to resist humiliating myself just that much more.
Thank you for listening, jb
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