Lessons and Carols Redux

This year I raised the stakes on the Service of Lessons and Carols and volunteered to sing with the church choir.  I’m still not sure what motivated me to do this.  I like music (I play the drums and sometimes sing in a cover band) and I like singing in church, but it’s not like I have 17^th century choral music in heavy rotation on my car stereo.  Also, and probably more importantly, my formal musical training is nonexistent: I downloaded a free piano app for the iPad so I could hunt-and-peck my way through my parts at home, but I had to turn to google to remember what the notes on the bass clef were.  Nonetheless, I found myself at the church fair in mid-November telling Peter our choir director that I’d really like to join them for the Christmas concert. 

This year, it would actually be two concerts: our choir would join up with the choir from the Swiss German church, and we would perform on Saturday at their place and on Sunday at ours.  We would do a mixed repertoire of around a dozen songs, some in German, some in English, one or two (like the old standby “Veni Veni Emmanuel”) in Latin.  Peter would share directing duties with their choir director, Stanislava, a Bulgarian with frosted hair who unlike Peter is an actual pro musician.  This led to some tense moments in the days leading up to the concerts, like when Stanislava told Peter he was wasting precious rehearsal time working on nuances, and Peter angrily stomped off and threw his sheet music binder at the organ.  Or when Peter, during a rehearsal of “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came,” allowed the tempo to slow down almost to a complete halt and Stanislava sat in the front pew holding her face in her hands in anguish.  This didn’t seem to faze the other choir members much, though, as they happily offered me glasses of white wine during the mid-rehearsal pause.

There were roughly 30 of us singing.  I would put the median age of the tenors and basses around 75: this likely explained Stanislava’s asking me to sit near the middle of the tenors, my lung capacity partly compensating for my lack of chops.  From time to time I would observe a few of the basses nodding off during rehearsals.  The altos and sopranos skewed younger.

I became friendly with Moises, another tenor from the Swiss German choir, who had grown up in Bolivia but had come to Geneva 50 years ago as part of a scholarship established by some Bolivian who had made his millions in mining.  His wife was a sorprano, and from time to time they would interact in a very sweet way: “Chouchou, t’as un stylo?” (“Sweetheart, do you have a pen?”) he would ask her, or she would turn around and offer him a sip of tea from her little thermos.

The rehearsals passed quickly, and we almost certainly needed more time before the first concert on Saturday night.  We were joined by a string quartet + flute, which definitely raised our overall game musically.  Two young organists tag-teamed: Oscar, a teenage musical prodigy from our church with an androgynous vibe and a watch chain dangling from his waistcoat, and Arthur, who had a mop of dirty blond hair and round Harry Potter glasses and who became my secret ally when I suggested to Peter that we try not to let the tempo drag so much on one of his songs.   

The concerts themselves went well enough: no horrific flubs, and I even managed to execute a solo, as Gaspard in “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” alongside Peter and a different Arthur, a bass with a white beard, a smooth singing voice, and essential tremor.  As usual, there were several truly moving moments: on Saturday when Arthur the organist slowly opened the swell box shutters as he played the prelude, which introduces the melody from “Joy to the World” with slightly different chords; during several of the really kick-ass German carols*, especially “Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen” and “Kommet, ihr Hirten;” on the fifth verse of “We Three Kings,” when we come roaring in with “glorious now behold him arise;” and of course during the murderer’s row of a climax of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” the John 1:1-14 reading, and “Joy to the World.” 

Yet the service itself felt different somehow.  Obviously, the visual perspective is completely flipped, as the choir is facing the audience.  And afterwards, I noticed an uneasiness that I found hard to pin down.  I compared my post-concert experience to what usually happens after my band plays a show: you have drinks with some of the people who came to see you, you get compliments, you pack up the gear and do some post-mortem critiques with the other guys in the band, pictures and videos get posted on social media, you get “likes.”  Considering this, I realized that at least part of me had gone into this looking for some kind of recognition, to have one of the people from my congregation come up to me and say, “I didn’t realize you could sing,” or something.  Now maybe this didn’t happen because we actually sucked.  But I think more likely it’s because it’s not at all the point: performing music in this context is not about impressing your friends; it’s about glorifying God and celebrating His arrival on earth.  And perhaps this is part of the “lesson:” stop thinking about yourself for a second and instead glorify God, the Creator, the Force, or whatever you want to call it.  And maybe consider for a minute what things would be like if everybody did that a little more often.

Afterward, I encountered the most intense case of earworm I have ever experienced.  I literally could not stop hearing these songs in my head, loudly and insistently, for days.  Like relay runners, one song would hand off dominance over my neurons to the next.  I’m sure there are easy explanations for this.  I did of course sing those songs several times over the course of four days.  Since my sight reading is not so fantastic, I tried to memorize my parts as much as I could.  And especially on some songs where there’s a strong impulse to follow the melody (e.g., “Joy to the World”), I would really have to bear down and concentrate on the tenor part.  Or it could simply be because these songs are just that good.

* Since I know like five words of German, I’m basically singing these songs phonetically, and I wonder if that actually makes them more emotionally evocative. Like with the words stripped of significance, you’re left with only the music and the feeling itself.  A more direct path to the mystical, if you will.