Finding Voice
It's a sultry Thursday night in August and Fairmount Church is brightly lit. Our new choir director and I are here alone. Palatine Germans built this plain little country church of local fieldstone in a more sober age, but its mood is festive tonight. I feel a little high, like I've been drinking wine. Long ropes tip open the stained-glass windows, letting in a welcome breeze and a couple of moths attracted by the church's light. Every so often one swoops down and tries to land in Martin's hair.
My voice is unremarkable, the fill-in-the-spaces kind that's necessary to blend a church choir but uninteresting to a voice teacher. Still, Martin has agreed to give me weekly lessons. It's hard work, singing. I've kicked off my clogs, the better to stand on tiptoe. I've removed my glasses. We clasp our hands as high above our heads as we can reach. "Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhph!" sighs Martin, swinging his arms down and following with the weight of his head, bending from the waist, coming up vertebrae by vertebrae. I do the same. Repeat.
We drop our jaws and slacken cheeks. Repeat. As I rotate my head from left to right, Martin grabs a fistful of hair to keep my posture erect. Neck bones crunch, separate, glide. Finally we bend our knees slightly and extend our arms to thigh level, palms down, as if warming them over a fire. "Fffuh! Fffuh!" We try to blow out imaginary flames. "Lower," says Martin, watching me carefully, "Imagine the fire is lower."
"Fffffuh! Ffffffuh!"
"Yes!" says Martin.
For weeks we've concentrated on loosening the body, unlearning acquired tensions and inhibitions, building strength for the beautiful noise it can make on the proper foundation. Tonight we create space in the chest, head, and face. I am a chamber, like a cello or horn, learning to channel sound. "EEEEEEEEEEahOOOOOO," we sing, our weird Halloween sounds crisscrossing and chasing like an unintelligible round. They bounce against the plaster and into the steamy night. Can anyone hear us?
After a few sets of scales we try a little song by Francesco Durante, Martin at the piano. An unfamiliar voice leaps from a brand new place at the back of my throat.
An early memory: I'm sitting on a low stool beside my grandmother as she plays the organ at Embury Methodist Church, where she doubles as choir director. I'm two years old here, up way past my bedtime. My mother, soon to deliver twins, is playing bridge with the other young wives in town. Something called a war is going on, what we call The War but later comes to be known as World War II. My father and uncle are there.
From my spot at the base of the organ I can watch Nanny's feet pumping the pedals, her hands working the keyboards above my head. It's hypnotic. Perhaps I doze. There's a choir, invisible to me but not to her, so there must be singing. My memory cannot quite capture the sound.
Twenty years ago, a few months after my grandmother's death at ninety-nine, I came across the twin to that organ in a secondhand shop. I gave in to a sudden urge to drop to the floor and lean my head against the bench. Her shadow brushed me and I sensed the choir. Leading with her left hand, she picked out notes—soprano, alto, tenor, bass—with her right. This time I could vaguely hear them, their voices tuning to a common chord.
Martin has transformed our pokey little church choir into a fine instrument. We've performed our first concert, a successful fundraiser for the music program. The centerpiece was Mozart's Missa Brevis in C, also known as the Organ Solo Mass. We sang it in Latin, a departure for us, and some members grumbled about the effort. Not I. Martin knows what he's doing. Sing it in Urdu? Sign me up. In addition to shepherding us through months of practice sessions, Martin arranged for singers at the university where he teaches to make a tape of each voice part. I played my alto tape first thing every morning until I knew it by heart. This allowed me to concentrate on Martin's direction, rather than the score, during our concert. At the end, crowding into the tiny choir room, our group shared a noisy euphoria more typical of a winning football team. We did it! But for the next week I continued to sing with the alto tape every morning, unable to let it go.
I joked once to a friend that my daughters were lucky I hadn't been born with a "real" voice. My friend, a thwarted dancer, laughed in agreement. Nice Fifties girls, we believed that talent might have been a ticket to more interesting lives. Instead we had taken a more typical path: early marriage and pregnancy. My nod to the wild side was to marry an artist.
One day I tuned randomly to a classical station on the radio and happened upon one of the Bach Passions. The chorales, melodies on which many of our oldest hymns are based, touched me in a deeply remembered place. I stopped making lunch and listened. At home my parents had favored symphonies and my scant musical education in college focused on concerto and opera. I was apparently unacquainted with the vast sacred choral repertoire but here was a piece of it, strangely familiar, mesmerizing. On a tight budget, I began to explore. Rummaging in the bargain bins of music shops, I worked my way backwards from Bach through the Renaissance to Early Music. On this happy pilgrimage I soon discovered the brilliant 17th Century German choral composer Heinrich Schütz, who became a constant companion. Our tiny apartment rang with his ecstatic polyphony, as familiar to my toddlers as songs from Sesame Street.
Caught up as I was in the exquisite expression of Schütz's deep faith, my own lack began to seem odd. In my teens I had drawn away from the church of my childhood, turned off by tired dogma and a misplaced emphasis on the trappings of religion. For years after rediscovering sacred music I let it feed my acute musical hunger. But when my marriage ended I sought out a church with a good choir. I needed to sing. And by now I was also admitting to a sense of spiritual longing. Returning to church at forty, I was disappointed to find the situation little different from when I left. But perhaps I had grown more tolerant, more able to suspend criticism and accept imperfection, more willing to take responsibility. I wasn't sure whether this was the right place for me. But singing in the choir filled me with such joy that I found myself nudged toward tentative reunion with the Protestant tradition that had been my heritage.
I've always sung alto, but Martin proves that I'm actually a soprano by urging me up and down a series of scales. Before he began to give me lessons, I had a pronounced break separating what he would teach me to call the "chest voice" from the "vessagio," or head voice. Much music is written in a middle register that required crossing the uncomfortable divide between head and chest, unless I sang alto. Now that Martin has erased this impediment, I have no excuse. "You really should sing in your true range," says he. But I stay rooted in the midst of the four other altos. We've sung together for years, as comfortable as the fingers of a glove. I need their voices in my ear. And alto has always been my favorite part, except for counter-tenor—a spare oboe-like male voice above tenor (and for whom an alto is often substituted today)—a great favorite of Schütz. I prefer the alto harmonies. They're more interesting and challenging than the melody line that is usually given to the sopranos. But sometimes Martin coaxes me into the front row if that part needs more weight.
Tonight is the beginning of Choir Festival weekend at the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, an old Victorian-era camp meeting site still active at the start of the third millennium. My grandmother lived in Ocean Grove in her later years and often worshiped at the Great Auditorium. Now I live within a few minutes' walk of this beautiful wooden structure, rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1898. With its soaring ceiling, deep balconies and world-class organ, it is the painted lady of auditoriums, an historic treasure, open only during the summer months and lovingly maintained by a large organization of volunteers. Like hundreds of other choristers from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, I've come this Friday evening to practice for an annual event that will take place on Sunday, as it has every July for half a century.
At the front entrance one of the volunteers hands me a music folder. I move by habit toward the alto side but veer off instead to climb to the second floor balcony with the other sopranos. Some have come with their home church choirs but many, like me, have arrived alone. We've learned the music on our own or during practices held at the Auditorium in June.
At Sunday's Festival, one quarter of the 6,000 seats will be occupied by participating singers. As often happens during Festival, we're in the middle of a prolonged heat wave, relief provided by ocean breezes blowing through the many wide doors. It's a clever architectural design that facilitates this natural air-conditioning; nonetheless, on Sunday evening hundreds of people will begin to fan themselves with their programs the instant they are seated in the congregation.
Early into rehearsal, the woman to my left drops her water bottle behind my folding seat. In our efforts to retrieve it, we start to chat. "We're singing second," she says, gesturing down the row to include her friends. Second soprano is a female voice part sometimes inserted between the soprano and alto. Most often first soprano takes the melody, with second providing an additional line of harmony. "Me, too," I reply, the possibility just now occurring to me. Perhaps Martin would be satisfied with this compromise. Five years ago he moved to Boston to pursue a doctorate.
On Festival night ten leading choral conductors from around the country will take us through a program of hymns, anthems and chorales, accompanied by a professional orchestra. Tonight we work toward ensemble, one voice comprised of many, greater than the sum of its parts. It's a transformational process akin to alchemy, and we can hear it when we succeed. The director has at his disposal a number of time-tested ways to help us achieve this goal. For instance, he may ask us to sing a nonsense syllable instead of words, concentrating on the musical aspects of phrasing, pitch and note values. "Our song of praise. . ." becomes "Deeee_ deeee_ dee deeee_ . . . ."
The second soprano line on "Beautiful River" is difficult. My new acquaintance and I struggle to find and hold it—not easy with voices all around us singing "first." "I'm Shelly," she says as we fold up our music and prepare to leave. "Why not sit with us on Sunday? We'll be over there." She points two rows down. I'm still singing softly to myself as we descend from the balcony. In the Lord, in the Lord. My soul's been anchored in the Lord. It's a gospel arrangement, catchy and playful. In front of me another singer picks up the refrain, then another. Walking home through the quiet streets I keep hearing snatches of it on the breeze.
Why do we sing? Science tells us that humanity shares singing with the rest of the animal kingdom, down to the tiniest termite. We know about the survival benefits of song, such as defining and protecting territory, aiding reproduction, and signaling danger. But scientist-physician-philosopher Lewis Thomas teases us with examples that appear to go beyond self-preservation, one being the much studied and recorded song of the humpback whale. In his essay "The Music of This Sphere," first published in the early 1970s in his regular column for The New England Journal of Medicine, Thomas writes, "The proof is not in, and until it is shown that these long, convoluted, insistent melodies, repeated by different singers with ornamentations of their own, are the means of sending . . . such ordinary information as 'whale here,' I shall believe otherwise." Gently challenging the dogma that until very recently prohibited using human terms to depict animals, he goes on to describe the whales' jubilation after an exchange with their fellow creatures, lunging into the air and beating their flippers in ecstasy.
That elation is familiar to a humble, less-studied choir singer. Joining with other voices can be thrilling, particularly in the mass of a large choir but often with a smaller group, too. Perhaps it's late on a Festival practice evening, or maybe just an average Sunday during church services. You're giving it all you've got when suddenly you feel the vibration—others' voices coming alive in your own throat. It is always strange and surprising when this happens, a rare moment of transcendence. The song is singing you.
Where is God in all this? I'm still wondering. Song as praise, song as pleasure—sometimes both, but often only the latter. Why then a church, why a choir? There are other outlets for someone who wants to sing—that old standby the shower, for instance, but also barbershop quartets, community chorales, Christmas sing-a-longs, even karaoke. Maybe I'm in the wrong place.
Maybe . . . but, singing with a church choir, I'm always aware of deeper purpose. Even in doubt I'm a necessary part of the whole, nurtured and sustained by that knowledge. For many the church is the only available place to hear or participate in some of the world's most gorgeous and affecting music. Weekly, not just seasonally or prepared for a one-time concert, that music awaits us. Frankly, the lack of auditions is also a big attraction. You're a child of God, with a God-given voice. It doesn't have to be great. You need not be Cecilia Bartholdi. Even if you're tone deaf, the choir will welcome you, as it must. That unquestioned acceptance is wonderfully freeing. And I have seen a brilliant choir director make magic with just such unpromising material.
Is it possible that the pleasure of singing prevents me now from seeking a more fully realized faith? Something in that rings true, although I am at a loss as to what to do about it. Singing has not been my only spiritually directed activity over the years. I've served as Elder, participated in mission and community works, struggled with the Bible. With curiosity and an open heart I've studied and considered other religions, and yoga and meditation have always been a part of my adult life. But none has brought me quite as close to a sense of oneness as singing the treasure trove of sacred music. Maybe I'm asking the wrong question here. If, as we are taught, each is given what he or she needs to know God, maybe the question is: How can I better receive this gift of song?
The Choir Festival is nearly over. Now half the congregation is fanning itself with the programs, roughly in time to the music. Two thousand determined fanners can raise the temperature quite a bit. In the aisles the ushers have removed their navy blazers and loosened their ties. In the balcony we're feeling it too, our white blouses clingy, the air so heavy it is almost visible. On her platform below, the final guest conductor tries to wring from us whatever we've still got left. I swear I see both of her feet lift off the podium as she attempts to buoy us up once more.
It's been a great choir festival, we'll say later, but we say that every year. How could it be otherwise? We've flubbed notes, mastered tempos that in practice eluded us; success and failure binding us in brief community. By now I'm as weary and hoarse as anyone. But already it seems like a long time until next year.
We lean into the final chorus, controlling volume without sacrificing power or pitch, just as we have been trained to do. One voice, my mind exhorts—ensemble. It's almost a prayer. Our crescendo rises into the ceiling's dome and dissipates in applause—It is well, it is well with my soul!
And for tonight at least, for me, the singing itself has made it true.
Copyright 2006 by Juditha Dowd
Juditha writes:
