Those who wish to sing always find a song. ~ Swedish proverb
When I was in fourth grade, we got a new teacher at our Catholic school: Dr. Leone. She had tight, permed curls and a gruff voice. In the beginning I was a little afraid of her. We all were. She wasn’t mean to us, but her voice made her sound mad all the time, even when she wasn’t.
I had never met a woman doctor, and I had never met a doctor who didn’t take care of sick people. Dr. Leone told us she was a doctor because she had gone to school for a very long time. I grew to love her pretty quickly. She was extra smart, she wasn’t a nun and all we did was sing in her class—a solid trifecta.
One day Dr. Leone told us we were going to have a concert in the West Palm Beach Mall. I was 9, and this classified as living large. But children, she told us, you have to audition to get into the chorus.
She took us to the cafeteria. Tables and chairs had been pushed aside to make a clearing for a microphone on a stand. Dr. Leone called our names, and one by one we approached the mic and sang a few lines from a song we knew well: “The night the angels sang/to the shepherds on the plain/the earth and heavens rang/with their sweet and sad refrain.”
I was nervous; it was my first time singing into a microphone. When my name was called, and I took my place, the mic was too tall for me, so I tilted my chin. The metallic orb filled my view. I sang, and I was chosen, as were we all.
Our concert theme was Hawaiian Splendors, which meant our repertoire veered from the usual menu of Jesus-y songs we sang in class. Instead, we sang about seashells, the ocean and the hula. The boys sported Hawaiian shirts, and the girls wore shapeless sacks called muu muus that some moms made out of enthusiastically floral cotton. As we clustered on some risers in front of a JC Penney store, I was initiated into what never fails to transport me to where I feel beauty alive all around me—singing with people.
I come from a family of idle singers. We’re not performers, per se. Rather, we are the people who sing absentmindedly when we drive or fold laundry. We are the hummers, the ones cutting cucumbers while we muddle through the lyrics of a Beatles tune. We don’t care. Nobody’s listening, and we aren’t either.
My brother Andrew favors country songs. My father used to sing under his breath when he puttered around in his shop or mowed the lawn. Those who spend the most time with me tell me I favor “Fly Me To The Moon” and other lounge standards, but we idle singers sing alone and often move about unaware that a tune has come forth as some kind of overlookable sonic wallpaper for whatever we are doing.
That kind of singing looks and sounds and feels nothing like singing with people. I began with my fourth-grade chorus, segued into hymns in church bolstered by organ music, graduated to touring the States with a singing group the year after high school and landed onto singing tenor in the university choir where I teach. These groups and times of shared singing illuminate the line of my life.
When I sing with a group of people our voices make a web of velvet. The curly ribbon of melody elongates like taffy, like falling. I nestle inside the notes I sing. Inside the notes we sing together. Then the singing coaxes me upward, and while our voices entwine, I am hopeful, exalted, above. Above any sadness or self-pity, above the contours of my life, up in a shared, benevolent place where time, space and language have no meaning. I am not alone, and yet I am gorgeously, brutally alone.
A few weeks ago, our university hosted a festival of singing groups. The children’s choir from Russia stole the show. A couple of dozen children in folkloric costumes stood on stage in perfect formation. One girl in the front row seemed to live the music, her expressions more dramatic, and her gestures more emphatic. She was alive in a way she wasn’t when the group singing stopped.
I wonder who she will become.
