December 1 (late)
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wintercreek asked for a post about vocal music, specifically mentioning your experiences singing for religious services.So what can I say? I'm a singer, and most of what I sing is religious in nature, though I myself am not. My voice is best-suited as a soloist to earlyish music (in European terms), and what those guys were writing was - at least what we're still using of what they were writing is - generally sacred music, or musical settings of sacred texts. (As a choral singer there's more secular stuff out there, but I've still tended to be with groups that do older stuff that has demonstrated its appeal over time more often than newer stuff that, well, hasn't. Not never! But a new work by a modern composer still has as much of a chance of being a setting of a biblical text, or a poem by a religious poet like Hopkins or Donne, as of being a setting of a secular text or even - gasp - one written by the same composer who wrote the music. I'm afraid I'm thinking of Sir Paul McCartney's Ecce Cor Meum as an example of the very last. For pre-contemporary works, the most obvious example to me is Carmina Burana, which of course is not merely not-sacred but actually profane.)
The first non-school-assembly vocal performance I can remember being a part of was Britten's Ceremony of Carols at my (Unitarian) church the December I was six. ... I can't possibly have been as young as six. Maybe it was 1986, in which case I'd have been nine. That makes slightly more sense. Anyway, my mom was singing in this thing the choir director put together, and I was allowed to participate also (along with some other younger people), and I don't remember a lot about it except finding the archaic language very odd. The next organized choral experience that stands out to me is the Cleveland Orchestra Children's Chorus, which I guess auditioned in the spring in those days for school-year participation, so I'd have missed the boat for seventh grade (because we were in England until July or August), but I sang in that group in eighth grade. The children's chorus was featured at the orchestra's already-popular Christmas concerts (what's not to love about shining wee faces in choir robes with big bows on, piping sweet treble harmonies, to say nothing of the leap in ticket sales to parents and grandparents? [g]), and once in a while had another gig here and there when the regular Cleveland Orchestra Chorus did a piece that had a part for a children's choir. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, for example, or see above re: Carmina Burana.
Just as I was aging out of the children's chorus, the orchestra's director of choruses founded the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus, bridging the gap between the children's chorus and the "real" chorus and providing some vocal backup for the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, which was at the time (and is still, for all I know) a very good youth ensemble made up mostly if not exclusively of kids studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music. We got one show a year, the choral portion of which grew as we proved ourselves. In my senior year of high school I learned that I had been one of just three or four freshmen who passed that audition in the group's first year (or at least that was only how many went on to sing with the group all four years).
And then I didn't do much singing in college. I mean I did musical theatre, just as I'd also done in high school, and there was singing there, but not symphonic-chorus singing. At my first job after college, at the law firm, there was a partner who was in the Choral Arts Society, and from time to time I thought about giving that a whirl, but I never did. A couple of friends of mine joined a couple of different choral outfits around town, and I never got it together to do the same. One lawyer I worked with put together a little choral group to sing in the lobby before the firm Christmas party, and I did that for a couple of years. But that was it. Likewise my first year and a half in grad school, I didn't have time.
But then I went to England, which is just lousy with chapel choirs. Within about two months of meeting
sebastienne I'd also met the organ scholar at her college, who accepted me eagerly into her choir, because remember what I said about my solo voice being suited to earlyish music? Another way of saying that is that I'm an English soprano. :-P I've got more or less exactly the voice the Anglicans are looking for, and I learned musicianship in Cleveland, Ohio, so really: who wouldn't want me in their choir? So I sang with that choir for two years, and with my own college's Christmas choir for two years, and with another chapel choir and the local big symphonic choir for one, and when I came home for keeps, I didn't want to stop.I landed in the Cathedral Choral Society because they rehearse on Mondays instead of Tuesdays, when I knew I'd be busy with curling (so no Choral Arts for me after all). And after six or so years in that group, one of the basses sent a note to some or all of the first sopranos saying he had a vacancy in his church choir, of which he was the director, and asking if any of us were interested in the gig. I may have been the only one who didn't already have a church job - in any case, I have that church job now.
Just as when I was singing in the Church of England, singing for the Catholics does involve leading a worship service in which I am not actually participating. I mean to say: there's not really a mechanical difference between singing parts of the Mass in a performance of, say, Bach's Mass in B Minor and in an actual Mass. Except that, non-mechanically, one is a performance and one is somebody's religious experience. I don't think I do my singing any differently in those different circumstances. When I'm in a chorus that's performing a work with a sacred text, I try to think about the composer's faith when I'm singing the words; I don't need to be a religious person as long as I can make the audience understand that the composer was a religious person. (Or not. Apparently, at least according to the program notes from our last concert, Verdi was a great atheist? But you'd never know it by his Requiem. So as long as I can make the audience believe that the composer was a religious person, then, it doesn't matter what they think about me.) (Somewhere back in my archive there's a post about Rachmaninov's Vespers, in which I make essentially that point about one of the bits that goes "aliluiya, aliluiya", and someone in the comments invoked Cleveland-area homeboy Marc Cohn, who, as all the world knows, wrote And she said "Tell me, are you a Christian, child?" And I said, "Ma'am, I am tonight.")
So it's the same with singing in a choir that's providing music for a church service. Sometimes I try to think about the composer's faith, and sometimes about the congregation's. I don't believe in the words I'm singing myself, but I don't have to, as long as I enrich the experience of those who do. We did a funeral a few months ago in which one of the hymns was to the tune of the Old Hundredth - you probably know it as "All People That on Earth do Dwell" - but with different words; the last verse began "I know that my Redeemer lives". And the thing is that even without being Catholic or in fact religious at all, I can recognize the important bits of the text and emphasize them in appropriate ways. I feel like that's musicianship just like knowing how to read and count and breathe and produce the right notes. ... I don't take Communion, obviously. And I never say the prayers.* In the C of E, when the psalm was spoken, I never spoke it. But I'll sing every note you put in front of me, because my job in that situation is to be a musician and a musical leader, not to be a religious leader. (Incidentally, those who are there to be religious leaders - i.e. the priests - read every word they're saying out of a book. I feel like if I know your liturgy by now, surely you must, and wouldn't it be more meaningful to your flock if you gave it by heart? Anyone can pray off a page. But hey: not my department, so I just sit up in the loft and wait for the next cue.)
* I also don't say Christian prayers when I'm in a congregation, such as when I'm a guest at a wedding or a funeral. I don't even say "amen" in response. But I do say Jewish prayers, when I know them, and I say "omeyn" at the appropriate times. I am not a religious Jewish person any more than I am a religious Christian person; but I do identify myself as a small-J jewish person, and somehow participating in Hebrew-language prayer feels like a manifestation of jewish cultural identity (for me) even as it is also a manifestation of Jewish faith (for others), and in a way that participating in English-language prayer doesn't feel like a manifestation of anglo cultural identity while also being a manifestation of Puritan (and its descendants) faith. I think that's what's going on in my head, anyway. I'm not going to stop saying Kaddish for my father, in any event.
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Anyway, this is all a long way of saying, I enjoyed this particular essay lots.
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