"O God of Stars and Sunlight"

O God of stars and sunlight, whose wind lifts up a bird,

In marching wave and leaffall we hear they patient word.

The color of thy seasons goes gold across the land:

By green upon the treetops we know thy moving hand.

O God of cloud and mountain, whose rain on rock is art,

Thy plan and care and meaning renew the head and heart.

They word and color spoken, they summer noons and showers--

By these and by thy dayshine, we know thy world is ours.

O God of root and shading of boughs above our head,

We breathe in thy long breathing, our spirit spirited.

We walk beneath thy blessing, they seasons, and thy way,

O God of stars and sunlight, O God of night and day.

text by John Holmes, music by Johann Christian Störl

Ironic, this song, since part of what attracts me about the Unitarians is the lack of necessary belief in a deity. But I can still sing out without qualm about a god of nature, which encompasses my Agnostic Pagan nature quite well.

For the last couple of years I have not been studying voice, and mostly my singing has been limited to what I have done with the singing group at my daughter's school. With my daughter's graduation, this commitment, after six years, is at an end. My voice feels rusty from disuse this morning, and the attention to breath and shape of mouth feels new again. I feel impatient to sing more of what satisfies me.

"It Is Something to Have Wept"

Text by Gilbert Keith Chesterton:

It is something to have wept as we have wept, and something to have done as we have done;
it is something to have watched when all have slept, and seen the stars which never see the sun.

It is something to have smelt the mystic rose, although it break and leave the thorny rods;
it is something to have hungered once as those must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.

To have known the things that from the weak are furled, the fearful ancient passions, strange and high;
it is something to be wiser than the world, and something to be older than the sky.

Lo, and blessed are our ears for they have heard: yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
let the thunder break on human, beast and bird, and lightning. It is something to have been.

I really like this text, it has a mystery to it, and the song backs it up--though the text lays mighty strangely over that very last line. It is good to be singing more.


Tonight I did something slightly cool. I've started to sing with a local church choir, a Unitarian Church choir, and it was my second rehearsal tonight. This choir has been, astondingly, short of sopranos. Usually in a choir you can shoot half the sopranos and not miss them at all: not so here. While there were fifteen people at the first rehearsal that I attended, there were only seven there this evening, no basses (the low men's part), only two sopranos (the high women's part, including me). The other soprano is the woman who recruited me most enthusiatically.

We were singing a piece called 'Everybody Rejoice', and because this is what I do when I can, I was singing the second soprano part, harmony just a little lower, when it existed. Harmony is always more fun than melody, in my estimation. At the very end, in tiny script, the sopranos can hit an optional high 'A'. This is fairly standard for a first soprano, I've seen many parts that go up to a high 'C', still within expected bounds. My fellow soprano turned to me and said "I'm not really a first soprano. Can you hit that 'A'?" I said yes, and the director said, "Then do it." So I did.

Many things about singing are a challenge to me, but singing high notes is not one of them. I am a very good choral singer, and singing with this group makes me want to do the happy dance over and over, I'm that excited about singing in a choir again, practicing the skills of sight reading, blending, harmonies, new songs, difficult rhythms: it's all food for the happiness.

So I hit the 'A', knowing that I hit the 'D' above it in my lesson the other day, knowing that I can sing this straight and clear and on pitch like a little choirboy, and they said: "Huh. That'll break glass."

Again, it's not the most difficult thing that I do. It feels like cheating to be praised for it. But it's still nice to be able to do something just a little cool.

"I Brought My Spirit to the Sea"

This text is by Max Kapp:

I brought my spirit to the sea; I stood upon the shore.
I gazed upon infinity, I heard the waters roar.
And then there came a sense of peace, that whisper calmed my soul.
Some ancient ministry of stars had made my spirit whole.

I brought my spirit to the trees that loomed against the sky.
I touched each wand'ring careless breeze to know if God was nigh.
And then I felt an inner flame that fiercely burned my tears.
Upright, I rose from bended knee to meet the asking years.

The song has stuck in my head for the last few days that I've been attempting to blog it. It does feature two of the things in nature that I find particularly sacred: the ocean, and trees. Trees: always a mystery and a magnificence--how do they manage to grow so big, survive so many storms? I do love the trees. The ocean calms me, grounds me with its watery charm. I don't live near the ocean, have never lived close enough to live with it year round, but I'm a better person when I can spend time with the ocean at least yearly. Another plus for this song: I'm quite fond of the image that the last line brings to my head: Meeting the asking years, body in motion, something brave and beautiful moving forward in time to meet the mystery.

This morning I got to sing with a choir that I wasn't leading. I got to sing soprano, and sometimes a harmony line (the absolute best of both worlds). I got to sing things that I didn't choose, didn't have to lead or teach. And they were great! New stuff that I was happy to learn, familiar songs in powerful arrangements, sung by people who could sing, and men, and everything. It felt like Christmas. Sometimes, it truly doesn't take a lot to make me very very happy.

"That Old Time Religion/May Nothing Evil Pass This Door"

All of my four regular readers have noticed that it's been a mighty long time since I've written daily, or at all. I'm still singing, and still needing to write and to organize my thoughts, but nothing has happened here. While this is partially due to the waves of my life carrying me out to sea on a regular basis, I think I've mostly been avoiding my blog because I couldn't stand the music, and that songbook was just never going to end. It's appropriate that the last song, the song that had me stuck through multiple days, is 'That Old Time Religion'. I am all about the old time religion, or more accurately, that new religion that we like to think harkens to the way old, to the polytheistic, unafraid of sex, woman-friendly, earth-friendly religion going on previous to the current monotheistic trend. (We can argue this as a term, and as a trend, and as history, but in my personal Judeo-Christian inspired world, it's how I'm going to frame things.)

It's so hard not to love the music of my Catholic upbringing, especially when the church's very existence is what let music as we know it in the west first be recorded on parchment, and what initially inspired so much gorgeous harmony, polyphony, virtuosity and orchestral splendor. All that so that I can now sing folk songs and play my mandolin, reading little dots on paper and making sense of it. Ah! And that doesn't even touch the fact that I still know all the words to the Catholic hymns of my childhood (frankly horrifying the friends who don't), or that I still cry and cry when I hear 'Be Not Afraid'.

To inspire my forever-music hungry brain, while still keeping to a sacred genre, I will now be singing from the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, 'Singing the Living Tradition'. I'm going to include the words to these songs sometimes, since they may in general be less familiar. This first song's words are by Louis Untermeyer:

May nothing evil cross this door,
and may ill fortune never pry
about these windows; may the roar
and rain go by.

By faith made strong, the rafters will
withstand the battering of the storm.
This hearth, though all the world grow chill,
will keep you warm.

Peace shall walk softly through these rooms,
touching our lips with holy wine,
till every casual corner blooms
into a shrine.

With laughter drown the raucous shout,
and, though these sheltering walls are thin,
may they be strong to keep hate out
and hold love in.

I love this. These words, the peace they bring my heart. This is a perfect prayer to me: poetry set to music, poetry that speaks clearly of what is important and dear, set to music that gently holds the text.

Today in my voice lesson we talked about my own connection to physicality, and how that relates to singing. The more I understand the sensuality of anything, the more I feel it, the more I understand it. Years ago I did a movement workshop in which the presenter spoke of letting each cell in the body be like a garden, with the dancer as the gardener: what does this do to my movement, to my experience? What does it do to my singing, to my music, if I let it inhabit my body fully? If I let the vibrations affect every cell?

"Mansion Over the Hilltop"

Will the horror never end? Will there come a song that doesn't suck to sing, that--dare I say it--inspires me? Will this book last forever? Will I be foolish enough to continue? Stay tuned, gentle reader, and meanwhile: never sing this.

A few years ago I assumed command, as it were, of the adult singing group at my daughter's Waldorf School. I managed this not through any great show of experience, or talent, but through knowing just the smallest bit more than anyone else, and being crazy enough to be willing to take on the work. Plus, I had a lot of music at home to peruse, and a mild obsession with finding more.

This year our group, The Purple Mondays (named for Rudolph Steiner's convention of associating colors with days of the week), took a different turn. We suddenly became a smaller group, though not for any one reason, it seemed. I was very discouraged, though. We had been doing so well, and then it seemed that our momentum had died. I called the group together to discuss options.

The response was overwhelming: everyone, all five of us, wanted to keep singing. We wanted to do more challenging, interesting, and fun pieces. We wanted to stay small. We wanted costumes, preferrably with tight striped and flared pants, and shirts with fringe. We chose a variety of groups to research, and quickly acquired enough music to get us started.

This last Monday evening the four of us present sang some new rounds to warm up, improvised harmonies to some folk and gospel tunes as a second course, and then sang a bit of 'Java Jive' and 'Boogie Woogie Bugler Boy', and Wow. *We* weren't perfect, but the sweet smell of possibility was in the air. We realized that we could do this. The chosen songs we started with might not seem to be that challenging, or contemporary, but gosh golly they're a heck of a lot of fun. Give me four part harmony any day, and my day takes a turn for the happy land. Give me more.

"Moonlight Bay"

It was fun working on this one a bit more in my voice lesson today. It was short enough to run through a bunch of times, trying different things.

[Happy Birthday to my incredibly wonderful and generous little sister, Beth! I don’t mind at all that Mom loves you more! Really!]

I like the process of this learning to sing (again). Until this year, every year for the past dozen or so I’ve gotten away to some sort of retreat: personal growth, or meditation oriented, and most often, I’ve done one of each. Then this year, nothing. One gathering that I loved was cancelled (and for the future has changed into a form that I can’t afford), and the other retreat was timed such that it was attend that, or my brother’s wedding, and that was a no-brainer. (Admittedly, the wedding was in the Virgin Islands, I got to go with a very dear friend, and spend time with my awesome family, so I didn’t suffer overly much there, but it wasn’t relaxation, per se.)

I missed the time away to naval gaze. Time to look inward and decide what I thought about what I saw, time to rest my tired parental brain. Time to process. I once wrote a song: “Process. . . process teaches, eat your lessons, love the process. . .” and I do love it. I know how process works, how one takes new information, makes it one’s own, hard wires it into the system, and runs with it: rejoicing, accepting, acknowledging. I know all about the watching time, where I just have to pay attention, and remember to pay attention again. I know how things I’ve ‘put on a back burner’ come to the fore mysteriously soon, get solved, or accomplished. I know what resistence to process is, and how sweet it is to break through into something that later always seems easy--if I didn’t know how damn tough it was to do the breaking. I so miss the processing this year.

So I can latch, a little, at least, onto these vocal excursions into me, into my issues around my own voice. Today I realized I’m afraid when it seems too easy. As much trouble as I’ve gotten into in the past, I distrust when it feels too good also, a little. Surely the entirely sensual pleasure I take in my voice must be wrong somehow, right? What if someone hears that? And then another part of me says, ‘Goodness, girl, just get over it! Surely you’re old enough now that you don’t care what anyone else thinks.’ And maybe, finally (for the most part, and for all practicality), I don’t. Watch me process, folks. Gory details are optional.

"If You Were the Only Girl in the World"

". . . and I was the only boy. . ." Gack. A bit too much on the schmaltzy side for me. And, frankly, why would I want to be one of the two people left in the world? What does that imply? World plague a la 'The Stand'? Who would work at Starbucks, making the Have-A-Happy-Day mochas? And how much time do I really want to spend with anyone? Yeah, this one's really not working for me.

When I studied voice in college, at Penn State, I was at the bottom of the School of Music barrel. Not a voice major, just pursuing a BA in Music, with voice as my main instrument. But I was lucky enough to study with an excellent teacher, Suzanne Roy, and doubly lucky to have her encourage me to sing in one particular choir, where I sung under an amazing director, Douglas Miller. And somehow I got all the way to the senior voice recital. My voice teacher knew me pretty well at this point (5 years into my college career), and so we chose music where the text interested me as much as the music did. No songs about love, none about God, but bloated corpses? Absolutely!

I remember at the time that Dr. Roy was having ongoing discussions with the Music Theory instructor, Burt Fenner, about the importance of text. He refused to give it the weight that she thought it deserved. And that still sticks in my head. I've sung in French, Latin, Italian, and German, and more often than not I felt I really had to know the meaning of what I was singing, word for word. And most times, it seemed that the composer really wanted me to know, as well. Classically composed sacred music is all about the text, holding up the Divine on a high 'C'.

When I wrote my own music, later, it was still about the text. It came equally from my love of poetry and love of singing, and I've often thought that the reason I haven't written any songs lately is that I'm not reading enough poetry, not enjoying the play of language as much as I used to.

My voice teacher recently suggested that I work on my articulation in my everyday speech, since speaking really isn't that different from singing, and when I make some effort (or when I'm excited about something, or have some determination to get my point across), I can make myself heard very clearly indeed. *This is what I want heard and understood.* I call it my 'on stage voice', it feels like a performance in a good way. I'm looking forward to singing about the corpses again, and leaving no doubt of what I'm singing. Maybe I'll find some better love songs to work on as well.

"Avalon"

When I was a child music was the thing I loved most. I played clarinet in school, I taught myself basic keyboard skills (and flute, and guitar), but more than all these, I loved to sing. I would walk home from school--down an unpaved, one lane, dirt road in the woods--singing at the top of my voice. I made up songs, sang what I pleased, and if any of the few neighbors heard, they never let on to me, at least.

I wasn't exactly discouraged from music making, but I was made to understood very clearly that music was not a 'money maker', and that it was better relegated to hobby-status in my life. Of course then I pursued music all I could, even into college, though there, at least, I gave a nod to money making by initially double majoring with computer science.

And, of course, music is not a money maker, for most people. I have no particularly fantastic voice, though it isn't usually painful to hear it. It's more that people with fine singing voices who can carry a tune are a dime a dozen, and it takes more than the voice itself to 'make it'. And moreover, I didn't really want to 'make it' in music, as much as I wanted to sing, for the pure joy of it. I wanted to make music with others. I wanted to be the kid in the bandroom playing Styx's 'Come Sail Away', while everyone sang along, which surely dates me.

And here I am now, married with child, with a totally other career, and taking up playing piano and singing again after long hiatus. Ok, it's not as though I haven't sung a note in 10 years, but after half heartedly exploring outlets for music for this long while, I'm taking voice lessons, and applying myself to overcoming any crazy issues I have with letting my voice be heard, whatever that means. So here goes.

"Avalon": schmaltzy, hits my high range in any awkward spot. Still, based on a Puccini aria from Tosca, it's worth knowing. It'd make a good tango song, too.