I attended a performance of Handel’s Messiah, in its entirety, for the first time in my life tonight. I have heard portions of it and performed portions of it, but never the entire thing. It was glorious. The Nashville Symphony, Chorus, and the Schermerhorn are things of marvel and beauty.
And more than anything, it made me want to go find a choir to join.
For as long as I can remember, I have loved to sing. When my mom taught me how to use the riding lawnmower, I rode around the yard singing at the top of my lungs, thinking no one could hear me over the engine (not true… my mother has the video to prove it…). Similarly, when my mom started letting me stay home alone, I would use the time to walk around the house and belt my favorite Broadway tunes in all the echo-y rooms.
Despite a love of singing, I have never had a great passion for performing. I enjoy it, and while I sometimes have nerves I’ve never really had stage fright, but it’s never been my driving force for acting or singing. For me, it is more about the internal process, the way it feels to express myself in music or in the character of another person. My best solo performances are consistently when I am less, not more, aware of my audience.
Choral performance, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. And I DO love that. Because when you are part of a choir, you are part of something bigger than yourself, bigger even than the sum of all the parts, and you get to share that experience with the audience, expanding it even further. A choir truly singing as one voice – through tricky rhythms, drastic dynamic changes, key changes – is a magical thing, as is the weighty, breathless moment of silence that follows a truly spectacular performace.
My favorite exercise in choir was always to sing in a mixed formation. It was easy to hold your part amongst 10 fellow altos, but stick yourself between a baritone and a tenor and in front of a soprano and you’ll really see how solid you are.
Not only that, but suddenly you start to hear how your part fits into the whole sound of the piece. And once you hear that, you can start adjusting – shift your pitch a little, change your volume, fine-tune your rhythm. And as the people around you do the same, you meet in the middle to create a better harmonized, more interesting, tighter performance.
As I sat listening to the perfect acoustics of the Schermerhorn and thinking about how much I missed that particular part of choral performance, it occurred to me that singing in mixed formation is not unlike being in a relationship. When you spend all your time with people who think, process, react just like you, it’s easy to think that you have settled into a stable, unchanging self-identity. It’s comfortable, and reassuring.
But start listening to a different voice with different rhythms and pitches and sounds, and suddenly you start to hear the places you’re a little off in pitch, or fudging the rhythm, or singing so loudly that no other part can be hard – as does that other voice.
And so both voices start adjusting – little, tiny movements. A sixteenth step here. A grace note there. Pianissimo instead of piano. Small things – nothing that changes the fabric of the music itself, but instead helps to realize the music as it was written to be. And then, as the structure becomes more secure, you start to lean into not only the harmonies, but the dissonances. Learn to move more gracefully into the resolutions.
And it is a process. A long one. I distinctly recall rehearsing a piece of music during the spring semester of my senior year of college. We had been singing this piece, even performing it, since early in the fall – never poorly, but never brilliantly, either. One day late in the spring, our choir director started us, and then just stepped back and let us go.
And it was magic.
After 2 semesters with 4 hours of weekly practice in addition to a week-long choir tour during which we sang this particular song at least twice daily, we had finally settled into the true sound.
Tiny movements. Microscopic adjustments. Patience. Time.
Magic.
Quote for the day:
“It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.” - Henri Poincare