Schreiber

So last night we had some wonderful people over for dinner. They arrived late, but we forgave them, because a) their roof was leaking, and b) they then set up our wireless for us. Yay! Now I just have to keep from screwing it up, and keep Peter from messing with the wires...

So now that we have reliable internets, let me tell you...


Subrealm: About Choirs
Being called on dissing St. J's choir told me two things I should have figured out. First, that this site is a little too public. I'm doing something about that: if you're not an lj person, you'll notice that a number of earlier posts seem to have disappeared; and I'm pondering making friends-only the default for posts in the future, and just emailling them to non-lj-using relatives. (Which would have the added bonus of getting them to people who don't habitually read my blog, particularly my Mom.) It seems a shame, but that may be what I'll have to do.

< pauses to retrieve Peter from the hallway before he pulls his stroller frame over on himself. And then change a diaper. And then start feeding the kid lunch, before an old college friend shows up on my doorstep. > < Three hours pass >

Secondly, that yes, I had been a bit unkind in my comments, though I'm not going to retract them. It did get me thinking about what makes a good choir, though. St. J's is frequently underrehearsed, and we almost never worked in depth at getting the balance right, much less things like tone quality and fine-tuning dynamics. It rarely takes on anything really difficult; when it does, it frequently gets abandoned. Now in practice, quality at Church of the Prevenient DOES vary: we kinda fluffed up on Sunday (well, by my exacting standards), and Thursday's rehearsal everyone seemed to have caught my sleep-deprivation, and we were all just trying to stay afloat. But still, we worked on stuff we won't be doing for a month, despite the fact that we're doing TWO anthems, one of them in Russian,* on Sunday. So what's the difference?

I'm inclined to think it's the director. Church of the Prevenient is slightly larger, but not much. That the choir is a slightly larger proportion of that slightly larger is key (if one tenor doesn't make it on Sunday, the anthem goes on), but I think it's the result of a tradition of good music,** rather than the result of people in the congregation being more engaged in matters churchy. (They're pretty damn engaged at St. J's!) And certainly, C of the P draws its choir members from whomever feels like joining: some people have some musical background, but by no means all...

Perhaps competent isn't quite the right word on Choir Directors. The director at St. J's is a perfectly good, even talented musician. But his expectations are low, and the choir meets his expectations. The Director HERE has AMAZING talent...but I think what's more important is that he has high expectations of us, and is prepared to [make us] take the time to meet them. In this, there's also a marked contrast with the Yale Collegium, where all the performers are music students (or people like me who've been doing this for years), and the director's a tenured professor who teaches conducting and music theory; but we always sounded patchy (again, to me, at least), because getting it to actually sound good wasn't really anyone's priority. We were always under-rehearsed, and it always either came together in last minute extra rehearsals...or didn't.


So yeah. I'm finally back in a good choir. My previous two*** choirs didn't really seem competent; not because the people were in any way inco, but because the choirs as a whole--in their culture, perhaps?--just didn't have it together.

* or maybe Old Church Slavonic? I don't speak either, so can't tell.
** Though the fact that we're the only comparable choir around (that I know of) is probably important in attracting singers. In New Haven, you had lots of competition from Trinity and Christ Church, to say nothing of all the other parishes around...
*** two; or three, or four. Constance had its own problems; YIS too.

Edit: I forgot: I was going to give a big shout-out to Fred Jones and Jan Smith, both recently retired. Who GAVE me those exacting standards. Hey, former choirmasters! I'm sure you don't read lj, but you taught me damnnear everything I know about singing, and you took your singers from where you found them and made us great!