Notes

When I took voice lessons, at a year-end recital, I absolutely destroyed my semester grade by forgetting the second line of the second stanza to "The Rose." I feel strongly this was a mental act of self-defense, the brain vomiting the song right back up at me so as not to be contaminated with the likes of "I say love it is a flower, and you its only seed."

Evil irony, for I am a second soprano. We sing beneath the first sopranos, who get the dog-calling, upper-end notes, and above the altos, who do a lot of "ba-bum"ing beneath the melody. I love singing second.

If only I didn't sound like a very angry wombat with a sinus infection.

I tried, at Saint Mary's, having discovered female choral singing at my sister's high school concerts. I tagged along with my mother to pick her up from a late rehearsal one afternoon, and echoing down the hall was two-part a capella. I laid my miserable sixth-grade head against the doors, then slid inside and sat in the back of the theatre. The alto and the soprano melted and bent the musty air-- this was a bunch of fourteen and fifteen year olds slogging through "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and they very likely sucked, but the harmony slid over me like warm caramel.

I auditioned for--and clearly because few others had was admitted to--the World's Most Obviously Named Vocal Group, the Saint Mary's College Women's Choir. Few songs were in English, which seemed to be the rule for Serious Music. I didn't mind, because I didn't need to comprehend what we were singing to understand that the human voice, when properly struck against another human voice, provides a glorious sense of human tonal smugness. Screw you, piano and trombone! Look what we can do! Sometimes during rehearsals the director would sustain us in the middle of a note, arms raised: Hold it hold it hollllllllllld it.... and the thick female braid of sound wound about the room.

And sometimes we were placed in circle so as to check our pitch against the other vocal parts. The director stood in in the center, keeping time, slowly spinning, stopping before offending off-key singers. When she pointed at me--and she always did--I cringed into my sheet music and stopped singing, camouflaging my English major's voice by mouthing the syllables. Nodding at my sudden competence, she would move on to some other poor girl who had been in the bathroom when the Vocal Talent Fairy rang her doorbell. The voice lessons aided me in forming a water addiction but not much else.

The Women's Choir wore floor-length sapphire blue dresses fashioned by the cast of Dynasty. They had puffy sleeves and a pointy waist and nobody looked good in them, not
even after we started selling wine and beer in the lobby before concerts. When I was a junior we sang at a fundraising affair and an alumna was so appalled by them that she sat down and wrote the director a big fat dress-replacing check on the spot. "Big Blue" was chucked in favor of stretchy black dresses, which were somewhat less hilarious but not nearly as character-building.

We sang "The Belles of Saint Mary's" and "The Magnificat," and we never ever had hand motions, which disappointed me until I realized that few truly elite vocal ensembles throw synchronized shoulder rolls into every little thing. Once we performed a Latin piece in honor of the inauguration of a new College president, and it ended with a trio of shouted "Vivat!"s, and my desire to throw in in corresponding arm-pumps practically caved the stage in, but I clenched my music folder. I'd done enough to disgrace Big Blue already.