I Couldn't Keep from Singing

Sketching on the bulletin up in the choir loft, during the sermon last Sunday...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone back to singing in the cathedral choir. As the warmer weather appeared, the risk/benefit ratio between continuing to be super-careful and starting to live more normally seemed to change. My husband had started encouraging me to go back to the choir, but I was unsure. One day not long ago I went for a walk, feeling a bit morose and sorry for myself, but by the time I came back home, I had made a decision to write to the music director and ask if it would be all right for me to return. He said yes, and on the next Sunday, I sang in person with the group for the first time in three years.

It’s been a long history. I started singing in a church choir when I was about six years old, and have continued (which seems incredible, even to me) nearly all of my life.

I graduated to the adult choir in that Episcopal parish once I entered junior high school. After I graduated from university and was working in my home town, I conducted that small choir for two years. In 1976, I moved to New England, and joined a very good choir at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover, New Hampshire. I stopped for a few years when J. and I got together, because his father was the Unitarian Universalist minister in Woodstock, Vermont, and we started going to hear him preach on Sundays, and then often had lunch with his parents at their home afterwards. After my father-in-law left that position, I realized how much I had missed singing, and began again with the choir in Hanover. I sang there during all the years we lived in Vermont, until we moved to Montreal in 2006, and took private voice lessons for some of that time as well. When we moved, we joined the congregation of Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Montreal but I was unsure if I could manage the commitment or the stress of being in the cathedral choir, which was on another whole level of rigor than anything I had experienced. Thank God I had the courage to try, and to sing with Patrick Wedd — the cathedral’s music director, extraordinary organist, and soon a fast friend — for twelve years, and then with Nick Capozzoli and Rob Hamilton, Jonathan White, and then Nick after he became the Director of Music following Jonathan’s resignation in the second year of the pandemic. But with my own age and my husband's immune issues, I didn't feel comfortable going back to singing when the choir regrouped in person, and especially not when the masks came off. It was only this spring, as the pandemic waned somewhat and we began to feel more comfortable after some medical advice, when I began to think about possibly re-joining.

I had almost resigned myself to the idea that my singing career was over; after all, I was not young anymore, and I absolutely did not want to be one of those people who is talked about behind their back: “Why doesn’t she quit?” I wasn’t sure how it would feel this time around, but so far, my voice has felt good, and not too fatigued even after a full day of rehearsals and two services. However, I’ve pledged to myself that I will stop when I can no longer contribute positively — and hope it will be clear to me when that time has come.

Making music hasn’t been the problem: I’ve been playing the piano a lot since moving it to our new apartment. This winter, working on some Schubert Impromptus, new to me, was a great consolation during the darkest months of weather as I dealt with change and grief. But if you have had a history of making music with other people, that experience is pretty irreplaceable. Singing in a choir is a particular kind of musical experience, too, and in one like ours, where we churn through a huge amount of repertoire in a short time, you have to like sight-reading and be good at it, have experience in a wide range of periods and styles, and be able to absorb and learn the music very quickly so that you can perform it confidently after only a couple of times through -- if that. It’s not the same at all as a choir that practices a few pieces of music intensively for, say, a whole semester, and then gives a concert. A choir like ours cannot work on each piece with the same level of attention to detail, but if the singers and director are very good, and they have a strong affinity and sense of singing together as a group, they can actually perform very well, week in and week out. Although we don’t repeat pieces very often — it may be a matter of many years — when we come back to something that we know, then of course we can work on the details with even greater finesse. It’s a particular kind of challenge, and it’s exactly what I like most as a musician.

The camaraderie of a choir is also a particular sort of bond, and I think some of that comes from the fact that our only instruments are our bodies. There's a physicality about singing with others that creates a greater awareness of all the other group members than I ever found when I was playing in a band or orchestra. The personnel of this choir has changed a lot in the years I was away. Most of the professionals who sang with us have left and been replaced by new and younger singers (all of whom are excellent); most of the volunteer singers are also younger — many are McGill students or recent graduates — and in addition to the eight paid professionals we now have three choral scholars. These are gifted college-age singers who are given a stipend in exchange for the experience of singing in this kind of a group, and doing some solo and ensemble work on their own. But there are several people who, like me, were in the choir for years and are still there, and some new, but older volunteers I’ve been happy to meet. One of them is a man in his late 80s who I talked to for the first time last Sunday. He had sung in the cathedral choir thirty years ago, and then stopped because of some vocal problems — and now he is back. After we had told each other brief versions of our choir histories, he smiled at me and said, “Yes, it just gets into your blood.”

Like him, I don’t know how long I will be singing, but I know how much I missed it, and that it means a great deal to me to be able to do it again. Of all the things I've done, singing is one that keeps me firmly attentive to the present moment, and is perhaps one of the best ways of finding the joy that being fully in that moment can provide. And it still seems miraculous to me that, with only our bodies, we can take a collective breath in silence, and, the next moment, bring forth the extraordinary music that only a choir of human voices can create.

For a quiet moment that illustrates this, listen to the introit (opening choral work) by going to 6:20 in the video below, of last Sunday's Evensong for the Feast of the Ascension. It's "My Peace I Leave with You" by the 20th century American composer Amy Beach. (All the works except one that we sang that afternoon were by female composers.)

 

 

 

Comments

[Roderick]

I'm so glad. But I was - I hope - sympathetic when you dropped out. You clearly have very high standards and any doubts you had (I seem to remember age was was the dominating reason, but I may have got that wrong) would have been enough for you to take the hard decision.

Please understand, I sing but not for a moment do I pretend we share anything other than those bare words. The rigour you've observed, the hard work you've endured, the skills you've acquired put you way beyond anything I can even appreciate. Also, I know how tedious it is for pro-level musicians to be approached by rank amateurs like me with their repetitive and naive views and ill-formed questions. All I can say on my own behalf is that what I've learned from six years of weekly lessons is that the thought of having to give up singing is more scary than considering the likely outcome of three cancer ops during the last two years.

I'm tempted to go on, telling you you about my progress, the difficult stuff I'm facing but that would simply be more of my amateurishness. And would obscure my pleasure in what I - sort of cheekily - see as your "redemption". But I'm struck by by that line of yours: "There's a physicality about singing with others..." I'm sure that exists but, as you know, I waived the idea of joining a choir because I couldn't see what I'd be doing for the remainder of the week after choir practice. Cranking out the baritone line from the Hallelujah Chorus wouldn't be enough. But I have to say there's an internal physicality about singing alone, a sense of strength, which helps drive out pessimistic thoughts on other matters. The way the body, weakened by age, converts itself into an instrument, a consciousness of vibrations. One might say that singing is a sort of therapy but that would be to sell it short. How about a parallel life?

Welcome back

[Natalie d'Arbeloff]

Thanks for this Beth, I never joined a choir but often wish I had. Your experience of this joy is contagious, even if only by proxy. I looked for you in the video but couldn't find you. Are you there, if so where?

[Duchesse]

A friend who is a music teacher in primary school says he is often asked by parents what their child's first instrument should be—piano, violin, flute? He always replies "Voice". It is, he says, an instrument for life, and can be applied to so many types of music and settings. I am so happy you have returned to your choir, to this parallel life. And, it not only benefits you and your choir colleagues. The entire congregation is lifted by its choir.

[Rachel]

I'm so glad. I've been singing with my synagogue's small new choir and it has been a revelation. I had forgotten how much I need it.