Gone with the autumn wind.
9:15 p.m.
Today was a bit better than yesterday. I shopped, I practised, I participated in a choir rehearsal which was rather interesting. As I have mentioned before, we are preparing Messiah for our fall show (the use of the word “show” is not my choice, it’s what our fearless leader calls it). There will be two performances, the first at our own auditorium (which seats 600) on December 7, and one the following night at a rather embarrassingly ornate Chatholic church in town which seats a gazillion and has terrible acoustics if you are not sitting directly in front of the performers. Both will be conducted by the director of the choir which we are joining for this occasion. Oh, look, I found the poster. Click on it for an enlarged view.
Anyway, Herr Doktor Professor is a very fine professor of philosophy, and he is a not bad singer, and he does a very good job with the choir, especially with the amount of energy he puts into it and the results he gets out of it. However, he does not hear everything. After running through something, he will invariably ask if anyone is having any problems. A really good director would know that the basses are faking it, that the altos can’t find the B-flat in measure 36 and so on and so forth.
Today, we sang through about half of the choruses from Messiah that we will be doing in the concert and, after each one, he took notes from the choir. We got to tell him where things were breaking down. He’ll do the same thing on Thursday with the other half of the choruses, then make a proper list, and work on details the following week. It seems a really strange way to prepare a concert, if you ask me. But he does have people in the group who have as much or more musical training and experience as he himself. There’s the retired high-school music teacher in the alto section, me in the sopranos, the guy with perfect pitch in the basses, and the tenors have that one really loud guy who seems to know what he’s doing and the rest just follow. You know who I mean. And of course, there are the people who are actually having trouble.
Before rehearsal, I pulled aside the girl who is best friends with the alto I talked about yesterday, the one who apparently requested to study with the other singing teacher. This girl, a fine-arts major, adores me (I’m not sure why--maybe it’s my diminutive stature, or my scintillating personality) and had been telling the alto since the beginning of the term that she should really get into my studio because I was “amazing”. I don’t think I am, but it was really nice of her to say so. Anyway, I asked her if she could please speak with her friend, ask her about her singing lessons situation, and find out (without mentioning me) if her choice had been truly her own (and if so why) or if she had been steered in a particular direction and by whom. This may have been the totally wrong thing for me to do, but because this friend is in the fine arts department, which has a terrible reputation for political infighting and faculty feuding, she actually understood immediately when I said I felt there were malevolent forces at work. So, we shall see. Or we won’t. Or my actions will ultimately get me in trouble. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
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