Blue Ridge
Vocal Connection
Says Michael:
I can’t sing. I’m not awful, awful, as in wake-Pavarotti-from-the-grave horrible, but it’s nothing I’d want to subject my friends to. Bad enough not to sing to myself in the shower or car. I can’t read music—or much anyway—although I know a treble from a bass clef. And I’ve never had a day of musical instruction in my life. I’m so uneducated I don’t even know how to describe my failings. Lacking tonal quality? Weak armature? Immature range? Broken chakra? Whatever.
So I signed up for a choir.
Why, you may ask, would I do such a foolish thing given my accepted deformities?
Well, turns out my significant other is a talented musician and while she’s not impressed with her own voice—I like it better than she does—she can play multiple instruments and has a college degree in music. Susan plays mostly keyboards, but other instruments as well. She plays piano with a Big Band Orchestra. She plays recorders in a quartet. And she plays accordion in a Oktoberfest Oom-pah band.
I’ve tried the banjo, but my fingers are too fat to sneak in between adjacent strings on the neck. I can make innocuous noises with a kazoo and a Jew’s harp. But that’s about it.
Couple of months ago, we attended a holiday concert from a local no-audition choir called Blue Ridge Vocal Connection and they sounded good and looked like they were having fun. The conductor made the mistake of mentioning that “We’ll take anyone, regardless of skills.” Got me thinking whether I should test that theory…
Meanwhile, they recently got in touch with Susan and asked if she would replace their soon to be departing piano accompanist. As she was accepting their invitation, she said to me, “Why don’t you join them and we can go to rehearsals together?”
I had dozens of perfectly sensible reasons to say no, but none of them seemed compelling.
I can sort of carry a tune. I have enough of an ear for pitch to hear when I’m off it, which is most of the time. A new septuagenarian, I thought it would be fun to learn something and I’m too old to be embarrassed by public displays of my inadequacies.
So the other evening, I attended one of the Connection’s practices.
Let me say about that experience at the onset, everyone was amazingly congenial and welcoming. Maybe they just needed more warm bodies, although there were around 25 people there, joining the conductor and soon departing accompanist. Maybe they hadn’t heard me yet and had no idea what aural assaults I was soon to inflict upon them. I’m choosing to think they were just preternaturally nice. Whatever reason; I’d take it. But they must have a suspicion that the average musical skill level was about to drop 10 points, or however you measure such things, the minute sounds were to start leaking from my throat.
They put me beside a man I’d never met named Joe, who was awesome! Not only did he possess an exceptionally pleasing voice, but also the requisite patience to deal with an obvious cretin like me.
“What’s your voice type?” he asked plaintively.
I said I had no idea. “Maybe a berrytome?” I offered. “Or a terrazzo? Or a sopiopizzo. Or a contratello. Or a frappiapiano.”
“You’ll be fine,” he said reassuringly with enough sincerity for me to almost believe him. “Just follow me.”
Thomas the conductor began the festivities showing us a video on the big-screen TV of an exuberant young vocal teacher from New York City, a man who was to be coming soon to conduct a workshop with local singers, and urged us to register for that event.
Then Thomas corralled us into his attention upon which time he guided us through a series of warm-up drills, humming upward and downward on rising scales. My vocal cords protested the assault mightily and my lungs screamed like those of a couch-potato who had just climbed on a Stairmaster for the first time in 20 years. My diaphragm weighed down like a trampoline that just absorbed the jump of a 250-pound wrestler. I hoped nobody could hear me.
Then we got to actual music, a collection of popular and well-known tunes that I assume the choir will punish its audience with at the next performance. I’m just kidding, of course; it will only be an infliction when they hear me!
John Denver’s beautiful Annie’s Song never knew what hit it. My voice, butchering Paul Simon’s towering Bridge Over Troubled Waters surely sent Art Garfunkel into spasmodic convulsions, wherever he might be. The only positive observation was at least I could mostly tell when I was off-key, which was frequently.
On we went, over and over, repeating this and repeating that while Joe patiently and cheerfully urged me on, even with the auditory suffering I knew he must be experiencing. What a nice man! He held the scores in one hand and with the other hand pointed out on the sheet with a pencil where we were as we moved through the bars. I liked him immensely and greatly admired his restraint in holding back the truth about me to me. Could this please end soon, I begged?
By the time it was blissfully over, my lungs longed for a restful vacation, maybe at a tropical beach, sipping adult beverages with little umbrella straws.
As the singers began to disperse, Thomas thanked me again for coming and happily said encouraging things designed to bolster my wounded ego in the hopes I was not too demoralized or enfeebled to come to the next one. He said to me something like, “I didn’t hear too awful things coming from you,” to which I replied sarcastically, “You must not have listened too closely.”
And then he twisted my arm into signing up for the workshop. Stay tuned.
-Michael