RSCM Report: Part One

Répands sur nous le feu de ta grâce puissante.
Que tout l’enfer fuie au son de ta voix.
Dissipe le sommeil d’une âme languissante,
Qui la conduit à l’oubli de tes lois.

Pour on us the fire of your powerful grace,
That all hell may flee at the sound of your voice;
Banish the slumber of a weary soul,
That brings forgetfulness of your laws.
(Jean Racine, from Cantique de Jean Racine [G. Fauré])

One of the adult choirmen said to me on the last evening of the RSCM Course: “The trebles were singing the Phos Hilaron [Andrew Walker, a fine setting which we learned during the week], and I prayed ‘Lord, let me do this forever.’ And I got an answer: ‘You already are.’”

We were standing behind the building where the adults were staying, looking out at the trees in the early evening, after the Saturday evensong. Most of the adults had gone out to dinner; the choristers were cleaning up the common room of the building where they were staying and having the award presentation for the week. It was a time for thoughts of eternity, and its presence here and now in the Song.

I began the week wondering whether this would be my last Course. I have watched older singers in other venues make the choral experience all about their own pleasure from singing, sometimes about the food and accommodations and other aspects of their own physical comfort at the expense of others. I pray that I may never be like this in any aspect of my life but most of all in a choir. The RSCM Courses are not about the adults. They are for the choristers.



The Lord’s Day, July 14

Service above Self (Tulsi Gabbard)

In a sense, my Course begins tonight. We are hosting a concert by a semi-professional chamber choir on this, the night before we travel to RSCM. They were bumped from their scheduled venue only a few days ago and desperately needed a place to perform. Given the timing and my desire for a good night’s sleep, I wished it were otherwise.

The choir is highly skilled. It is a group of well-trained young adult singers from this half of the state who rehearse briefly, sing a complex program in multiple cities (three in thirty hours this weekend, ours being the last) and return to their duties until the next time. They clearly enjoy singing together, and the music is polished, beautiful, gorgeous in our good acoustic (which they loved). It was almost too much sound in their fortissimos; I had to hold my ears. Neither they nor I are used to that in this space.

It is after 11 pm by the time I get home, with an early start tomorrow. And it was clearly the right thing to do.

Monday, July 15

We leave home under a clear hot morning sky, driving south into the remnants of a tropical storm working its way up the Mississippi. First come high wispy clouds, growing thicker and lower, then the rain, hardly a mist at first but steady and growing.

After several years at capacity, this time the Course is again small. There are only two boy trebles, only a small handful of adults. There are plenty of teenage choirmen – a row of eleven bass/baritones, only one of them over the age of twenty-five, and four strong teenage tenors. And there are a sufficient number of girl trebles, eight of them from our parish. Seven of these girls are seated in front of me all week; three directly in front in the second row, four more in the front row. The other trebles, boys and girls, are equally strong and committed to the work at hand, but these seven girls are a special delight to me throughout the week, watching them work hard and be leaders.

By the end of vespers, I am exhausted. In my room, I drink tea and write for a few minutes, then lights out.

Tuesday, July 16

But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise. (J. R. R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, a passage from the House of Tom Bombadil)

During the morning’s ATB rehearsal, the rain falls steadily outside, a silver curtain almost like snow, falling with a gentleness unlike a typical summer rain in this part of the country. I think of Frodo, and how this might be my last time for singing intensively in this life. By afternoon and the full rehearsal with trebles, I am glad that it might be so. I become short-tempered in our work on the Preces and Responses, a setting which I do not like. I angrily scribble reminders into my score:

FASTER.
PUSH AHEAD.
PROPEL.
WATCH.
LONG EE, NOT SHORT.

It is a lesson in Humility. And Obedience. For most of the year, I am the organist/choirmaster and it is others who must sing the music I select, and sing it mostly the way I tell them. It is very good for me to be here, on the other side of the podium, missing notes and entrances, increasingly frustrated at my bad vocal production and mistakes.

It proved to be our most difficult rehearsal of the week, laying the groundwork for good singing in the coming days. I should know this, but it was hard to see it on this day.

What saves me is seeing the trebles, especially those seven girls from our parish in front of me, watching their discipline and energy, working hard from beginning to end much better than I.

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have relighted the flame within us. (Albert Schweitzer)

“Thank you for teaching us Music,” one of my choristers from the 1980’s scrawled on a postcard in her childish script, with a hand-drawn bit of treble staff and a few notes for illustration. It has been given me to do this work for two generations of boys and girls. “Teach the Story and the Song,” my Credo sheet says, hanging on the side of my computer: “It is a treasure of inestimable value.”

Tuesday is the first of three midweek Choral Evensongs: the responses (which I still dislike), the Andrew Walker setting of the Phos Hilaron, Psalm 121, the Magnificat. Afterward, I walk as in the old days, enjoying the cool of the evening. Ten or fifteen years ago, I might have walked for an hour or more in the darkness, up the road to the highway, for I never much liked going to the adult gatherings in the evenings; my heart was too full from the music and liturgy to be with others.

No longer can I afford such a walk. It is Tuesday, there is a long way to go, and I am still exhausted from the weekend. After a few minutes, I go to my room and straight to bed.

Wednesday, July 17

I speak of retirement with two of my long-time friends, directors at other churches. It is tempting to tell them “Yes, I’ll come back,” and think that in retirement it can be as it has always been. When the time comes, these farewells will be hard.

In the afternoon rehearsal, there are long stretches when I can listen to the trebles and watch them. A farewell to this sound, these young people, may be hardest of all.

By the end of supper, a wall of black clouds towers above the big house (a former private residence with chapel and pipe organ at one end, where we rehearse). The thunderstorm arrives during rehearsal with lightning, thunder, and heavy rain; it continues through evensong. I am not at all Connected, singing poorly in the responses and the Fauré Cantique de Jean Racine, a piece that I hate to sing so badly. The group sings it well enough for this point in the week, but not me. I am emotionally dead, in a service where I am usually deeply moved.

To be continued.