A neat T-shirt has just gone on sale which memorializes my dear friend Walter Hermanns with these words emblazoned on the front: EXPECT GRACE. It was one of his favorite phrases, and it so many ways it completely embodied who he was and how he lived his life, despite the brutal encroachment of MS: with a air of joyous and grateful expectation. If anyone had a right to live with a gray sense of foreboding about what new disappointment or frustration was about to rear its ugly head, it was Walter. But he lived just the opposite: watching for the next sign of God’s grace. As it turns out, I didn’t stick around church long enough to get a shirt yesterday (I’ll have to do it another time) – but in a sense, I got to experience Walter’s motto in a very tangible way. And it came, quite surprisingly, at the 50th graduation ceremony for Tremper High School.
I was there – as I usually am (except for one infamous year when I forgot!) – to play for piano for the Tremper Chorale (and various senior singers who are invited to join them) who always sing something for the ceremony …. typically something which they themselves choose from an array of choices suggested by Polly, their director. This year, I am happy and honored to say, the piece they chose to sing was my arrangement of “Amazing Grace,” which was also part of their spring concert. Of course, it means singing in a huge gymnasium with heavy miking, for an enormous crowd which, by and large, hasn’t come to listen to the choir sing and tend not to be all that attentive or appreciative …. although I must say that I’m almost always pleasantly surprised at how quiet and appreciative the audience turns out to be. Still, it’s a performance that tends to be meaningful because of the emotional occasion itself and not so much for its intrinsic artistic excellence – although there is obviously something immensely satisfying about managing to deliver a fine performance under such less-than-optimal circumstances.
This year, for a couple of different reasons, I was excused from rehearsing with the choir ahead of time, so I just showed up at the exercises in time to watch as between 400 and 500 proud graduating seniors marched in to the strains of the Triumphal March from Verdi’s Aida. Right at the top of the program, even ahead of the invocation, was the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance …. and this year, it was lead by two deaf graduating seniors who did the pledge in sign language. It was a powerful moment for everyone present, I dare say – the kind of moment that gets you thinking about things which we might be inclined to take for granted …. like the gift of being able to hear the thundering voices of a couple of thousand people reciting the Pledge. (I suspect that those young people could feel the immense vibration of that many people speaking in unison.)
After the invocation and an address by the valedictorian of the class of 2014, the Chorale took the risers to sing Amazing Grace. It’s always a poignant sight to see the underclassmen joined by the robe-clad seniors, a clear sign that they are already on their way to the next chapter of their lives. But honestly, I wasn’t really looking at any of that this time around – nor at Polly, who’s the person I should have been watching with an eagle eye. Instead, I found my attention drawn entirely to a woman named Tina, sitting right next to the piano, who was signing the entire ceremony for the sake of the deaf students and adults in the audience. Polly tells me that she has been the main “sign-er” at Tremper for some time now, and she is very very good at what she does and takes it very seriously. Towards that end, she made sure that she had a copy of the piece that was being sung by the choir, so she could sign its lyrics just as she was signing everything spoken in the ceremony.
Oh my gosh! I would give anything to have some sort of video recording of her signing “Amazing Grace.” There was such expressiveness and sensitivity in the way she signed those powerful words of John Newton – “was blind, but now I see….” “He will my shield and portion be ….” “the sun shall soon dissolve like snow …” “but God who called me here below, will be forever mine!” I honestly never fully took in the beauty and poignancy of Newton’s words until Sunday, as I heard Polly’s skilled singers students singing them while this woman signed them before my eyes. It was incredibly moving.
But beyond that, it was also one of those moments when you find yourself suddenly aware of a blessing that you are perpetually taking for granted. For someone who sings, who teaches other people to sing, and who speaks on the radio, I don’t take nearly enough time to be thankful for the gift of hearing and for all of the wonders and riches which it affords me. When I sit and listen to something truly amazing- like the sunrise duet from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, I tend to be grateful for Wagner and his genius, and for the astounding voices of Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen, plus the magnificent sound of the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Georg Solti. None of that do I take for granted. But almost never do I stop to think about what allows me to hear that incredible music and those splendid voices in the first place. My ears – and their intricate, fragile mechanism which somehow transmits those vibrations into the brain, which in turn allows us to take in whatever it is we are hearing. It’s too complicated and also too invisible to be readily appreciated, but that’s no excuse whatsoever for letting such a precious gift just rush past us with little or no acknowledgment at all. I was so grateful to have this reminder of how fortunate I am – and any of us are – who can hear.
I actually had two such reminders in that one day. Right around 1:15, I stopped by the Racine Theater Guild to look in on the Les Miserables cast and to drop a couple of things off. As I was leaving the theater, I happened to pass a friend of mine who was arriving for the matinee. She happens to have a son who is a superb young baritone, with whom I’ve worked a couple of times and who has the potential to do some professional singing. This friend of mine, his mom, happens to have profound hearing loss. But she takes in music as much as she possibly can and is eager to learn more about it- and was thankful for the chance to experience “Les Miserables” and loved it! (Fortunately for her, the production is visually magnificent.) I had only a moment to exchange a very few words with her at the time – and it was only much later, as I was thinking about my encounter with the woman doing sign language at graduation that this friend came to mind. I am so inspired by the way in which she lives with her hearing loss – and it also reminds me that the sense of hearing is one life’s gifts that cannot and should not be taken for granted. It should be cherished as something precious- because that’s exactly what it is. For me, it’s especially precious because it allows me to do so many things that are so important to me, but especially it makes possible my work with singers. It allows me to appreciate the unique qualities of each and every student’s voice- and also to listen with great care not only to its particular beauty, but also to those subtle ways (and sometimes not-so-subtle ways) in which that sound could be made still better. That’s when the sense of hearing is used in the most extraordinary way, by “hearing” something which doesn’t yet exist: that person’s voice transformed into something even more beautiful, as we imagine it to be. It’s one of the greatest joys of being a voice teacher.
In the funniest of coincidences, I just listened a couple of days ago to a past Morning Show interview with the author of a book titled “Remembering Smell.” It was written by a woman who recounts the devastating experience of quite suddenly losing her sense of smell. I know that one thing she says about finally regaining her sense of smell is that now she is grateful for everything she can smell – even those things which are not the most pleasant odors. But to not be able to smell them at all would be awful. Likewise, I suppose I should be grateful for being able to hear anything and everything …. including the latest hit song of some heavy metal band or the grating voice of Kim Kardashian. But mostly, I’m going to be grateful for being able to hear Birgit Nilsson’s soaring voice as Brunnhilde, or the Tremper Choir’s lovely singing of “… was blind but now I see” …… or any of the myriad other sounds of the day for which, at least for the time being, I feel so incredibly grateful.