Caveat Lector

I feel about singing much the same as I feel about published fictioneering, except that with singing I know I’m no damn good, so I don’t have to worry about it as much.

I’m still glad my first Fairfax Choral Society audition didn’t suck this badly.

Nonetheless, I’m back in, and there will be none of this soprano nonsense, thank you very much. Just another anonymous alto, that’s me, and happy that way.

Seeing the lyrics for something called a “Coronation Te Deum” all in English is enough to give an ex-philologist hives. Bloody Protestants, ruined all the good Latin singing, that’s what they did. The Tavener “Song for Athene” looks like cracking good stuff (bass drone! cool!), though as usual the altos get stiffed of their chance at the melody.

I’m sorta missing Monday nights already.

The big news: there were no trainwrecks. Not one. I heard a couple fluffs in the orchestra, and there may have been more I didn’t notice (can’t listen, must sing! can’t listen, must sing!), but the really wince-worthy stuff from rehearsal mostly got cleaned up.

I’m reserving judgment about the treble semichorus in the Holst—they were stuck up in the balcony, and the “hang time” for sound in that hall is considerable, so they probably weren’t as late as they sounded a couple of times. The middle-schoolers in the Chilcott were excellent, though; right in tune (which they, um, weren’t in the morning) and right together. Perfectly charming.

We batted the Chilcott out of the park; it sounded great. The Holst was a solid base hit, maybe even a double. I was concentrating too hard to get much of a global sense of the Duruflé, but nothing jumped out at me as being bad. I’m looking forward to the CD of the performance, and I usually cringe at listening to my own stuff.

We had one close call: conductor Doug accidentally tried to bring the tenors in a measure early for one of their big tenor-unison lines in the Duruflé. Bless ’em, they didn’t turn a hair, coming in at the correct spot all together. Not a single one fell for the false cue that I heard. Doug must be happy about that. It says a lot for how well he trained us.

(Me, I was all “crud, did I miscount?—no, no, I didn’t—wow, that was close! Go tenors!”)

As for me, I too fixed a couple-three things that I was fluffing as late as final dress rehearsal. (Got through the entire Libera Me without missing an entrance or fluffing a rhythm! Go me!) I did cut off one ending quite a bit too soon, and my voice betrayed me in the encore (I can suddenly and unexpectedly lose pitch if I’m trying to sing too loud, and, well, that’s exactly what I was doing), but nothing too horrible. In the encore, especially, there was so much racket on that stage you couldn’t have heard me with an ear trumpet.

The encore. Yeah. I haven’t talked about it much here (because, you know, surprise! and all), but… look, I cry at movies, get choked up at stuff I know perfectly well is manipulative, should probably have “SUCKER” tattooed on my forehead—but Joseph Martin’s “The Awakening” is too much bathos even for me. It’s smug, maudlin, self-congratulatory doggerel without any musical interest to rescue it. We sang it, I will allow, with what dignity it permitted, and it was a huge crowd-pleaser (which is really why it was included), but—yuck. Beneath us. Really.

Good crowd. Appreciative, and (from what I could see) really listening.

Audition for next season is a week from Tuesday. I’m looking forward to it!

I haven’t sung a choral concert in fifteen years. At least. It was fun! Can we do it again?

Kidding. Very tired. Not kidding about the fun! But very tired. Three hours of rehearsal this morning. Fantastic lunch at a Middle Eastern place in Alexandria; proprietor came out and gave each of the female patrons a long-stemmed red rose. (!) Short outdoor siesta, and then it was time to go dress.

And then fun! And now tired. Syntax completely hosed. Going to bed.

No choral concert survives first contact with the orchestra.

I mean, you pour your heart into getting triple-piano passages triple-piano (and believe you me, it’s much harder to sing triple-piano than triple-forte), only to hear the conductor grumble that they’ll have to be tweaked because they’re inaudible over the strings. Sigh.

The orchestra, I may say, has done a yeomanlike job learning a huge lot of highly difficult music very quickly. The danger in that, of course, is that it’s hard to relax into music that you’re not confident of. Our conductor had fair luck getting one or two timid soloists to make music instead of playing notes, but I hope they’ll feel easier still about it on Saturday.

Our high-school trebles sound quite good, so go them! And the orchestra’s brass section is excellent (though being right behind them for the Holst is more than a little deafening). There’s a trombone-chant bit in the Holst prelude that’s spine-tingly gorgeous. (Bet you didn’t know trombones could chant.)

I like this concert, despite a couple of still-rough bits. It’s got some mighty fine music in it. And despite my grousing, singing with an orchestra is fun; in all the years I’ve been singing, I’ve only done that a few times, and it lends such a different color to the proceedings. (Freaky celeste dissonance in the beginning of the “In paradisum.” Gotta love it.)

The stack of available tickets was looking a bit thin last night, but I think some may still be around. Go ahead and call.

Norton Juster’s extended meditation on sound in The Phantom Tollbooth starts with a visit to KAKOFONOUS A. DISCHORD, DOCTOR OF DISSONANCE. (My apologies to those whose news-aggregator layouts I have just broken.)

I’d put good money on Holst being one of Dr. Dischord’s favorite composers. The Hymn of Jesus is good and loud (though I’ll stop short of calling it cacophony). It is also plenty dissonant.

You’ll be happy to know (especially if you’re coming to the concert May 20th) that we’ve finally pretty much pulled the piece together. The high-school semichorus must have put in some serious after-school practice time last week, because they got themselves in gear quite impressively. This won’t be a Holst for the ages, but it won’t be a trainwreck either.

It’s not a bad idea to check out a translation of the Acts of John from which the text is taken before you come. (Search the page on “hymn” until you find it.) David and I discovered that Holst seems to have taken a couple of useful and interesting liberties with the text, which he translated himself.

Before the hymn proper, Holst introduces the two famous chant melodies “Pange lingua” and “Vexilla regis” in a short, undemanding, meditative prelude. (I digress briefly: One of the few good memories I have of my first stretch in grad school was signing up for an evening enrichment course in singing chant. I learned to read neumes and to fake reading C-clefs, and I had a marvelous time. I will always remember “Pange lingua” fondly.)

Hold onto your seat at the end of the Prelude, because the chorus is about to peel the wax from your ears with a stentorian “Glory to thee, Father!” The semichorus calms your fight-or-flight reaction with some nice amens, and then the main chorus burns another one over the plate: “Glory to thee, Word!” More amens, and just when you’re cringing back in your seat because you know this invocation (slightly unusual though the second recipient is) comes in threes, Holst gets the last laugh, a murmured “Glory to thee, O Grace” wafting out gently.

(Hey, I like a composer with a sly sense of humor. Sue me. No, this is not a funny piece—not at all—but I do think Holst is going for a laugh. A shaky laugh of relief, if nothing else, the sort of laugh-to-keep-from-crying that is very proper to the piece’s post-WWI milieu.)

Holst isn’t very sophisticated with choral dynamics; his method of starting something off softly and letting it get loud is staggering entrances with a view toward a big pile-on at the end. Not that this doesn’t work, mind you; it’s just not the most intriguing way to get the effect. (Compare this to the Chilcott Canticles, which make the chorus work hard for dynamic effects.) Be that as it may, he staggers entrances in a spoken section and then a sung one, ending in a split-chorus shout of praise. (The part of my brain that likes clever translation work delights in the inspired “We give thanks to thee, O shadowless light!”)

The chorus split now takes on character: half the chorus represents the master(s) of the rite, and half the initiate(s). They trade lines back and forth, the initiates explaining what they want to gain, and the masters what they can offer. Tellingly, both halves exclaim together “I am mind of all—fain would I be known!”

And then Holst starts a catchy, brass-laced dance, although why he thinks anybody dances in 5/4 time is beyond me. (Holst. 5/4. It just is. You deal with it.) It is a dance of joy, a dance of grief, a dance that covers earth and heaven and everything in between, a dance that grants knowledge, a dance so vital that it is almost frightening. (Here is where having read the words will help.)

Indeed, the initiates are now a little nervous; the masters reassure them. When all is well, both choruses united explain the significance of the rite to its celebrants in immense crowded chords that would have Dr. Dischord clapping his hands in glee.

And then the “Pange lingua” turns up, Jesus explaining that the dance is key to understanding the suffering about to ensue. Another dance begins (at least, I think it’s intended for a dance), this one a swingy reedy number that reminds me so of Gershwin that I actually looked up dates—but Gershwin wasn’t Gershwin when this piece was written, so perhaps Holst was one of the composers that Gershwin learned to be Gershwin from? Anyway, this dance leads into triumphant trumpets and sopranos proclaiming the “Vexilla regis” (which it kills me that I don’t get to sing; it’s an awesome bit). Triumph through dance, again. I love it; it’s a deeply unusual message in our hyper-verbal world.

The next section is about suffering, and without being bombastic, it cuts to the bone. Watching Jesus’s pain, using empathy to learn from it, letting it be a spur to action, is the only path to wisdom; the end to suffering is through suffering, dealing with suffering, transcending suffering. I can’t see any better way to say it than Holst did: “Learn how to suffer, and ye shall overcome!”

Quite a message, that. Worth pondering, particularly now, and particularly for us who are soft and privileged. What wisdom are we missing?

A last echo of the dance, from the semi-chorus: “Fain would I move to the music of holy souls!” A last invocation to learn, and then to praise—and then we’re back to the stentorian shouts of glory, much easier to hear, even to thrill to, now that they have been explicated. The piece closes with thoughtful, considered amens from the entire chorus.

Even less-than-stellarly sung, this is a wildly fantastic piece of music, worth hearing in person. It is not often performed in this country, I am given to understand, so call for tickets.

The Holst is written in eleven parts (eleven!), two full SATB choirs plus three treble parts singing a lot of amens and one or two other little tidbits.

We’ve drawn our trebles from the youth arm of the choral society, which has run into some difficulty lately because their director has been ill. They’re… um… how to put this nicely… let’s just say they could use some divine grace dancing, okay?

So the solution may turn out to be yanking a few women to sing with them, and because I am a big lummox, I volunteered. Haven’t heard whether that’s the plan yet, but if it is, it’s back to high-school choir for me. Amen, or something.

We did a straight-up runthrough of the Holst last night.

And. Oh. $DEITY. Did. It. Ever. SUCK.

Eggs. Rocks. Boulders. Words exist not for the total suckitude that was that runthrough. Wow, the last time I remember a runthrough that bad of anything, our conductor unceremoniously yanked it from the program.

We don’t have that option. So we’ll just have to soldier on through.

In our defense, this is certainly the most technically difficult music I’ve ever tried to sing. Holst doesn’t exactly shy away from musical weirdness. Split the chorus into eight parts, then put each part on a different note of a whole-tone scale? Yeah, sure, why not? (It actually sounds pretty cool, I must admit.) Syncopation ’r’ Holst, as are tricky entrances, inconsistent phrase-ending lengths (I’ve taken to writing down the number of beats, in preference to doing music-math in my head while trying to count beats simultaneously), and no orchestral support in key spots.

I’d like to say I’m confident we’ll turn it around. Unfortunately, I’m not. That isn’t to say it’ll be a disaster from one end to the other; we have considerable swathes of it right. It’s just the bits we don’t have right that we, well, don’t have right.

I think a large part of our problem is that we were coddled too long, singing it at too-slow tempi. After a while singing it slow (but not ludicrously slow), that speed bakes itself into the brain, and abruptly speeding it up to the proper tempo gets folks lost. Back in high school, my conductor had two speeds: half-speed (when necessary) and a tempo. I think it worked a little better than what we’ve been doing here.

But we’ll see. Some choruses have amazing powers of pulling things together at the last possible minute. Hope this one is one of ’em.

Bob Chilcott sang with the utterly godlike King’s Singers for quite a while before turning his hand to choral composition. His singing experience shines through his compositions; he writes gorgeous singable lines even for the oft-neglected inner voices, understands singers’ ranges, and doesn’t over-orchestrate. His work is modern and pleasantly accessible, not exactly the commonest of combinations; a little reminiscent of Randall Thompson.

“Canticles of Light,” a series of three hymns about the fear of darkness and the godliness of light, is most remarkable for Chilcott’s sensitivity to the rhythm, sense, and emotional content of the texts he is setting. I strongly recommend reading and pondering the texts and their translations (”Te lucis ante terminum,” “Christe, qui, splendor et dies,” and “O nata lux de lumine”) before you come listen to them. (Because you’re all coming, right?) Duruflé has an annoying habit of not putting stressed syllables on the beat, subordinating the text to the melody he happens to want. Not Chilcott, whose lines flow so handsomely along with their texts that you won’t even notice the considerable effort the chorus has put into getting the rapid-fire time-signature changes and polyrhythms correct.

(I kid you not. Measures 16 through 25 of the “Te lucis,” to hand you a not-unrepresentative sample, run 5/8 4/4 3/8 4/4 5/4 5/8 7/8 5/8 2/4 4/4. Once I got the sense of it, it worked for me and I could more or less ignore the bar lines, but it’s not exactly music for sightreading.)

The mood Chilcott creates is delicately hopeful, trustful, confiding. Bad things can happen in darkness, but Chilcott’s singers trust that they will be protected from them; they have only to ask. God is an ally to be praised, not a judge or executioner to be feared.

This is a gorgeous piece. When I sing on a walk or at the bus stop (which I do; very old habit), more often than not these days it’s a bit of the Canticles. My sense is that we’re doing it justice, which I like. I’m also grateful to it (and to our very skilled and patient conductor Doug Mears) for getting me over the worst of my fear of changing rhythms and polyrhythms—just keep counting, subdivide as necessary, and it all works out in the end.

More or less. Heh. But that’s what rehearsals are for.

Requiem masses are a golden excuse for composers to mess around with the audience’s emotions, to grab it by the collective throat and twist. The only reason I can sit through Mozart’s “Lacrimosa” without crying is that I sang it in high school; it’s manipulative in the extreme. But they all are, in their separate ways—Verdi will happily scare you straight, Fauré wants very badly to reassure you, and Mozart will run you right through the emotional wringer, awe to grief to terror.

The more I get used to singing this Requiem of Duruflé’s, the weirder its emotional content seems. I don’t agree with what seems to be common wisdom about it; I’m finding it the nervousest requiem mass I’ve ever heard or sung. I’m honestly not sure if it’s me, the music, or the effort of getting the music right, but I can feel tension building in me just listening to my rehearsal CDs.

The Introit starts calmly enough in the men’s voices, but there’s this little unresolved wriggle going on in the low strings that feels anxious, and the chanted treble “Te decet…” lines with their worried woodwinds don’t help. When we finally get back to a drone of “Requiem aeternam dona eis” again, it sounds like a plea, and not a plea assured of success, either.

The Kyrie is probably the most straightforward movement in the piece; it’s a plea and it’s not pretending to be anything else. Nice counterpoint, nice long lines in each part that are fun to sing, nice thrilling forte section toward the end—but even so, Duruflé ties the movement off quietly and in the lower part of the singers’ ranges, very doubtful-sounding.

The Domine Jesu Christe starts with more tooth-grinding low stuff in the strings, and expands into an almost Mozartian description of the horrors of hell. The middle section feels rushed, frankly afraid, before turning matters over to the low brass and strings again. The “sed signifer sanctus Michael” promise sounds remote, disinterested—sure, a vow was made, but does it matter? Then a terribly uncertain, unhappy baritone solo (we won’t have a soloist, but that’s all right; our baritone section has this line just exactly perfect) asks for death to give way to life. The answer is a repeat of the promise, just as remote and disinterested as before. This is not reassuring. Not even a little bit.

Duruflé finally lets the chorus cut loose in the Sanctus with some real from-the-gut hosannas accompanied by trumpet fanfare, but he undercuts chorus and trumpets both beforehand and afterwards. It’s as though the piece has to build up its courage to dare a moment’s self-assurance, promptly returning afterwards to its normal timorous state.

I haven’t heard the Pie Jesu since I sang it in college (it’s normally a solo; my college women’s chorus sang it as a unison piece), but I remember it being lovely and pleading. The Agnus Dei is soft, dark, rather forgettable. Much emphasis on eternal rest, which after all these fidgety troubled pleas is entirely understandable.

The Lux Aeterna is just weird. I don’t get what Duruflé is driving at with it. It bounces this cutesy, swingy, pastoral introduction around the woodwinds for a bit, and then hands the chorus this off-beat chant melody that frankly sounds smug as sung. If I were pleading for eternal light before a stern judge, I wouldn’t send chirpy sparrowlike sopranos to do it for me!

I suppose I don’t think Duruflé believes “quia pius es.” I can only give this movement sense if the melody is almost parodic, being tossed off as nothing anyone is really supposed to give credence to. The sober reprise of “requiem aeternam” on a single chant tone again utterly fails to reassure; it makes the soprano sparrows’ final “quia pius es” sound thoughtlessly featherbrained by comparison.

Like the Kyrie, the Libera Me feels emotionally honest. The chorus is scared, it’s got plenty to be scared of, and it makes no bones about wanting to be set free. It does not, however, offer much hope about that eventuality. Nothing that ends with the tenors sighing, then joining the altos on a short phrase ending on a pianissimo low F-sharp is hopeful.

The chirpy, untrustworthy soprano chant is back to open the In Paradisum. And the choir of angels that’s supposed to carry everybody off to heaven? Is sung about in lots of troubled suspensions that Duruflé never resolves—he ends on the scariest, uneasiest ninth chord you ever heard, and just lets it die off into nothing.

Was the guy a nihilist? Calvinist? Secret atheist? What? Why on earth would anyone want this piece played at a memorial? For the postmodern anguish of it all? I can believe that this Requiem is a reaction to Fauré’s, actually, because the missing Dies Irae is a dead giveaway, but on the whole, it strikes me as a deconstructionist reaction. If Fauré wants to reassure, Duruflé wants to perturb.

Not that it’s not a gorgeous piece—it is, you should all come hear it, and these rough scribbles of mine are not doing it justice—but it’s just not a piece I’d want to offer someone grieving.

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.