Singing in the Choir

I've been singing in the church choir since December and it has been interesting. I sang in choirs back in High School and at the University of Washington, but that was a long time ago.

I started just in time for Advent, and during Advent they use no instruments, it's all a cappella. We had one rehearsal on Thursday and a small rehearsal just before mass. Some of the songs were familiar - Christmas carols - but I was singing the tenor part so it was unfamiliar. It was a challenge but I did OK and it was fun.

Oddly enough, one of the harder parts is letting go - we did several songs that I really enjoyed, but we only practiced them perhaps twice, performed them, then we were done with them. I don't have a very good vocabulary for describing why I liked them. We did one song that had the lyric "Peace, peace, wonderful peace..." where the tenor part started fairly high on the first "peace," then went up and down a half step at a time while the other parts changed through chords, it sounded beautiful but I don't know how to describe what was so moving about it. Then we turned the music back in and went on to the next week.

Some classics and old favorites were nice - "O Come O Come Emanuel" is one of my favorites, and it was fun doing it in 4 part harmony. Between Advent and Christmas I recognized perhaps half of the songs we did. During the 4 weeks of ordinary time through last Sunday I pretty much didn't recognize any songs at all. For the most part it doesn't make much difference being familiar with the song, since I'm never singing the melody anyway.

Last night we sang at the 7PM Mass for Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent. During Lent they don't use instruments either, just like Advent, so it's challenging - if you blow it it's pretty obvious (no instruments to cover you), and you can't pick up your pitch from the instruments either. We did a song called "Miserere" in Latin that has an interesting history. It was originally written in the 1600s and performed exclusively at the Vatican only during Lent; the author was jealous and didn't want it performed any where else. Eventually some famous composers heard it and wrote the parts out, so several alternative versions were created with slight differences. Finally the original version was released, and that's pretty much the basis for what we do. It's a very typically Catholic song: all about guilt and our need for God's forgiveness. As Greg our choir director said "this is not a happy song: think guilt!" to which one of the altos said "we're Catholic, we know how to do guilt."