It’s been an amazingly musical week, with Carthage’s Christmas Festival, the Tremper High School concert, and a big morning at church including the first rehearsal for the upcoming Christmas program, a rehearsal with the youth choir and some dads in a rockin’ arrangement of Little Drummer Boy, a fine performance by my senior choir of Bach’s “Wachet auf”, plus a little “Great and Glorious Light” at first service, courtesy of voice student Jamie Wilson. As I reach the end of the week, I feel like the only musical thing I haven’t done in the last seven days is “I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. . . and who knows? The day is young and maybe those will get stirred into the musical mix before midnight.
I’m basically an audience member for most of the Christmas Festival, which is nice- – – and I was also a plain old civilian yesterday morning for the dress rehearsal of the holiday concert of the Racine Choral Arts Society. (They’re the same group that performed my music for “Julius, the Baby of the World,” talked about in this blog the second weekend in October.) I was there because the special guests for the concert are singers from Schulte Elementary, where my wife teaches. She presides over a choir of 4th and 5th graders which is one of the nicest such groups in the city. She really gets them singing out loudly and strongly without even a hint of screaming. . . and they have so much fun doing it. They needed to meet yesterday morning at 9:15 at Evangelical United Methodist, the church where Kathy’s dad belongs – and 45 of her youngsters were there with bells on. And they were amazingly well-behaved, to boot. It may have had something to do with the fact that they were in a church sanctuary- I think even someone unchurched probably has some sort of sense that this is not the kind of room in which one throws water balloons. They were little angels- and they sang like it, too.
In fact, as I sat in the pews listening with some of the parents, I was really struck by how beautiful young voices are when they have just a smidgen of guidance. I don’t particularly care for the Charlotte Chuch- type of young singer who founds like a 40-year-old woman crammed into a teen’s body. I like it when children sound like children. . . that purity and warmth and unforced beauty.
Anyway, in a week that included as superb a group as the Carthage Choir under Weston Noble and the excellent Tremper Chorale under Polly Amborn – I gotta say that the 4th and 5th graders of Schulte Elementary managed to more than hold their own. And especially as I look at some of those young boys, singing out with all their hearts, I hope with all my heart that they will keep singing. . . that they won’t find themselves pressured by peers who don’t understand this whole singing thing to devote themselves to other things. Or I hope that even as they explore other loves like baseball or Dungeons and Dragons, they will still find time for singing. Nothing makes life better. I have been very potently reminded of that time and time again, this week.