Pilgrims on the Road to Sonic Heaven

We were the Pony Express of choral singers: “neither snow, nor sleet, nor death of night could keep us from our duty…” We got there. We left our work and our partners, our pets, and our kids. We scrambled out the door, showered or at least deodorized (unscented). Dinner: an apple, leftovers in Tupperware, roasted almonds, cookies, half a sandwich, and a power bar. Pre-Covid-19 sharing of a cup of coffee en route.

We chugged down the road, zigged and zagged across town, collected singers on street corners, and got to rehearsal. Slightly late if we missed a turn, slightly nauseous if the braking and steering were marcato. Thirty nights a year. That’s sixty hours a year on the road times ten years for me, times twenty-plus years for the others, making the trek on bumpy Chicago streets and expressways in bad traffic and all kinds of weather to converge, with other carpools, on one warm, lit room to sing together.

On the best Tuesday evenings, we started the drive tired, minds cluttered with day-job stuff, and left rehearsal refreshed. The discipline of focusing on music, text, technique, and ensemble took us out of ourselves, reorganized our brains, cleared out the code clutter, lesson plans, kid problems, and job dynamics, and sent us home changed. One must breathe deeply to sing.

Driving, we talked about books and jewelry, troubled kids and grumpy pets, jobs and vacations, politics national and choral, concert venues and audiences, musicians for and with whom we’d sung, repertoire and programming, money and food, how rehearsal had gone, lovers and agonies, our families, aches and pains, ­­our practice practices, words and languages, misbehaviors and youthful indiscretions, and our origins. We liked each other enough, most of the time. We weathered funding cuts, roster reorganizations, and conductor calamities. But Rose never told us how sick she was.

Charming, gregarious Rose; sparkly, vivacious Rose; opinionated Rose who shrugged and conceded to my route choice with “Oh well, you’re the driver.” Big-voiced soprano Rose who worked her abs and awed us with her straight, clear solo in Stanford’s “Blue Bird”. Kind Rose who said to a soprano quietly weeping in the ladies’, “Is there someone I could beat up for you?” Rose whose concert black elicited skirt-envy. Prepared Rose, with paper clips, safety pins, Kleenex, and cough drops tucked into her Black Folder. Chatterbox, party-loving Rose held her cancer close. She had a confidant, it turned out, but it wasn’t one of us. We only knew she had stepped back from preparing for our next concert to get a tune-up.  She died unexpectedly one Monday evening, with just a day’s notice that a procedure had gone wrong and triggered sepsis.

Rose’s family was one aunt and two cousins, and all the rest of us were friends and colleagues. Her music therapy team, and Chicagoland singers with whom she had sung church, synagogue, and choir gigs for thirty years came by taxi, car, and train for her memorial service. We sang together to her memory, for each other, and for all the history, connectedness, and music-making that her ashes represented. I so badly wanted to tell her about her service. She would have loved to repeat the story: the tragedy of her end, who came, who conducted, who sang, and what a glorious sound. Lucky short me stood in the front row of the volunteer choir, surrounded by an über-full roster of awesome singers singing out their shocked, sad hearts. We sang Paul Manz’s a cappella E’en So, Lord Jesus, Quickly Come and something else I’ve forgotten.

I had never sung Manz’s piece before. By the time the first run-through of those thirty-eight bars ended, I was in choir geek sonic heaven. I was enraptured that so much music was contained in such a short piece. The quiet unison voices began, the music swelled and expanded to the exuberant full voice of the choir, rested a moment, and turned to deep, quiet resolution, in no time at all. Its energy was like a seasoned trucker entering the highway, shifting his rig up through the gears to full speed, blowing down the road, and then, without terrifying the driver of the small car in front of him, coming to a smooth stop at the end of a downhill exit ramp.

It was as if I had once more found someone to sing the third voice of Dona Nobis Pacem. When I was 17, singing with friends while hiking on a Sunday afternoon in the hills near the Susquehanna River in southeastern Pennsylvania, there was no one in our group able (or interested) to carry the third part of the round, to fill out the chords, to add the completing layer to the texture. I have always remembered missing that third voice, badly.

In 2012, I visited Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial while on a choir tour. (Rose was there too.) As I ventured into the deep center of the memorial’s grid of massive concrete blocks much taller than my head, I felt a visceral sense of isolation and fragmentation. The paths through the stelae were too narrow, everywhere, for two people to walk side by side unless they were lovers. A tenor crossed my path some distance ahead; I saw his profile for a fleeting moment, and then he disappeared. From a chorister’s perspective, there was no possible place a choir could gather to sing. I perceived the space as the antithesis of a place of community and collective endeavor; each of us was alone. Ensemble was not an option. One would not miss a singer who left; one might not even know she had ever been present.

Years after that trip, we the gathered-together mourned Rose, who had been very much present among us. We sang for her, told stories about her, consoled each other, and ate baked artichoke dip made with her party recipe. Our carpool held close our memories of her, driving past her apartment on the run to rehearsal in the following weeks. Sans Rose, the voice of our collective stories changed. The timbre of our collective sound shifted. Tones and shades of vibrant Rose lingered, then dimmed in our collective future.

. . . . . . . . . . .

It’s 2022, and choirs are cautiously singing again. Rose’s Thanksgiving cactus is blooming in my house. I post a photo of its bright pinkish-reddish salmon-colored flowers on social media. Old singer-friends heart it. We remember her again.

The choir has survived. Younger singers fill the gaps in the roster. We sing.

These things brought us together, and keep each of us going for as long as we can haul: the chance to catch the fundamental under the second basses when they’re in tune; to arrive at a perfectly balanced pianissimo open fifth in an exquisite reverberant space; to drown in the sopranos’ floating line; to sing eight-part chords that span the range of the human voice; to lean into minor seconds until they feel good. To blend, to be part of a whole. At a good rehearsal, at a performance in a resonant, lovely space, singing with friends, I hear all three voices of Dona Nobis Pacem.

Biography

Marge attributes her love of choral music to the rich aural environment of her early years: her people singing as part of daily life. A cappella singing, often four-part, is her family network’s custom at family gatherings; church, high school, and college chapel services; and while shelling lima beans.

It was a cultural shock for her to discover, upon arriving at Mass with her young students in her first Chicago grade-school teaching position, that her assumption that almost all men, women, and children matter-of-factly could and would sing, together and often, was false. She went on teach general music, with an Orff approach, to grade-school students for 15 years in Chicago-area public and private schools, in summer arts camps, and at her children’s preschool. She has sung with others since childhood across the spectrum of informal and formally organized groups.

She lives in Evanston, IL, with her family and their pets.