A glottal-stop story
After this Saturday, I never need to sing the vile Ravel again. Cheers!
We were working on the Holst when we got to the phrase “the passion of man that I go to endure” and the conductor stopped us to have us pop a glottal before “I” so that the end of the last word wouldn’t sound like the beginning of the next.
Which brought to memory a good glottal-stop story…
When I was a high-school senior, my school’s choir joined up with two other choirs to sing Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (in English translation) in Carnegie Hall, under a moderately well-known composer/conductor whose name I won’t mention because he was terrible, absolutely the worst chorus-handler I’ve ever had to sing with.
The first evening’s rehearsal was a massive fiasco. He hated us, we hated him, and there was talk on both sides of a walkout. The next morning, we slouched into the rehearsal room dispirited and mutinous to find that we’d been handed over to the conductor of another of the choirs.
This genial fellow, after a good warmup, asked us to start off with the moment when Jesus announces to the apostles that one of them will betray Him, earning a rapid-fire part-by-part clamor of “Lord, is it I?” from the choruses. So we sang it.
The conductor looked at us. He looked at us some more. We looked back.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, deadpan, “the Lord is not a tie. Could we try that again, please?”
And we all burst out laughing, felt better, stuck a glottal stop in the right place, and whipped the concert into shape.