Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Telling people she sang in a choir had become a chore she avoided. People outside this world, who didn’t do it, didn’t understand and imagined church robes and evangelical preaching. Or they thought rarefied music nerds who played recorder and built their own harpsichords.
At 18, she just didn’t have the right language to explain the bloody marvel of it. The sheer, gorgeous, lush, filling up that happened inside her, which made her want to cry with joy and was surely better than any of the sex she had yet to experience. That a few dozen people, most with little or no formal training, could make something so stupefyingly glorious was a phenomenon that defied explaining in any comprehensible way.
She felt it before she knew it, when it worked. The air changed. An outside observer might note them standing straighter but with such a dimunition of tension, and the clear lines of sight between every face and the conductor’s hands. When she felt in good voice, when at least eighty percent of them were confident of their entries and when everyone actually watched the conductor, it was like this.
They started the fugue, tenors first then altos. She couldn’t hear his voice but felt it, just behind her and to the left. Part of her anchored itself to that feeling, a strange cousin of hand-holding. A corner of her mind not currently occupied with singing was immersing itself in a fantasy kiss. Her blood rose.
Basses, then, gloriously, sopranos. Vocal lines twined around each other like lovers, feathery caresses, a brief slap, a long embrace. A call and response, soulful questioning followed by triumphal declamatory shouts. The conductor moved his hands, arms, torso and feet, his whole body leading and guiding, interpreting the lines and dots and weaving them together.
She imagined an invisible aura hovering overhead, shivering and silver. Competing and complementary placement of syllables, the Latin incomprehensible but the emotion and meaning pulsating with life. You couldn’t be inside this and not be moved, this piece, this product of the mind of a long-dead German man. He probably never imagined his music being heard outside his own skull, never mind his own lifetime. And sung by people living in a place barely known in his time, on the other side of the world. It was incomprehensible yet a cornerstone of Western culture and thus part of the everyday. An everyday miracle.
The apex phrase, the theme everything else depended from. A two-bar D natural at the climax she sung as if it wasn’t near the top of her range, feeling the note rise from her belly and fill it, not hearing her own voice but conscious of a faint buzzing in the middle of her forehead. The voices beside and behind her picked hers up and made something new and beautiful and carried it forward and up, joined by yet more voices and merging with that glistening invisible thing above. Everything north of her groin felt like the struts of cathedral arches, an infinity of resonant space between her pelvic floor and the top of her skull. Her solar plexus thrummed.
Finally and far too soon, the diminuendo. The tangle of lovers unknotted themselves, then chastely kissed each other on the cheek. The majesty of a moment before was gone, replaced by homely comfort, dignified withdrawal.
On the long last word, their diaphragms strained, tongues tautly poised for that last “n”. Ending on a hard consonant, like a “t” is avoided whenever possible, for fear of the machine-gun rattle of dozens of “t”s microseconds apart. A soft “n” allows the choir to hum the final chord, leaving the audience with a little afterglow of sound.
The final hum, cut off by the sweep of the hand. A beat, silence, breathe out. Scores down. Small smiles, a quiet, contained laugh. Yes. That was it. After hours, nights, weeks of frustration and note-bashing and drunken nights at the pub and late-night coffees and an informal crash-course in reading music, now they could perform and sing their pride and love for the sheer doing of it and soak up the reward of the applause and foot stamping and after-party vodka.
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