OK, You Got Me

I love singing choral music. I loved it in my elementary school chorus, I loved it in junior high, I loved it in high school, I loved it in college, while I was doing graduate work, etc. It’s just so wonderful to make great music with other people. There is really and truly a physical high that you get when it goes really well. My feeling was who needs drugs when you have choral music? I have been pretty lucky in my choral experience, starting way back in junior high with Mr. Blackburn, who was a stickler for discipline but an absolute genius for teaching not only music but musicality and technique. In high school I worked with a director who taught me what great choral music sounds like and it was in his classes that my addiction for the “good stuff’ in choral works began. Sometimes this nerdy passion of mine did get a little over the top, like scheduling all my classes in college so that they wouldn’t interfere with choir, even though normal classes only  met three times a week and I had to go to choir every single day.

I am not a great singer and I never will be. But I am good enough for choirs and I am grateful for that because I never get tired of choral singing and it always makes me happy (even if temporarily I have breakdowns because of memorization pitfalls). This past year has been a great year musically. I joined the Tanglewood Festival Chorus last summer and have done a few concerts with them and with the Boston Symphony. From the first time I sang with them (Beethoven’s 9th) out at Tanglewood, I could barely contain my joy. The music is just so incredible, and every time I hear the Boston Symphony play I am astounded  by their skill and I do a yay dance inside (and sometimes outside, too, it’s just what it does to me).
Many people know I have not been extremely thrilled about living in the Northeast. My first few years here were pretty hard. If it hadn't been for my husband and a truly wonderful place to work it would have been a lot harder. A couple of weeks ago I was talking with some friends who just got a teaching job at BYU and so are moving back to Utah. I admit that for a couple of minutes I was a little bit jealous, not because of Utah per se, although I do love Utah, but because family is there and there is a lot of opportunity for great music-making.

Then the following thought popped into my head:
“Wait. If I leave this area it means no more singing with the Boston Symphony.”  And then I thought “There is NO WAY I am leaving this area!”

So it wasn’t the allure of the East Coast that has made this home. It certainly isn’t the best place to live economically speaking. The community where I live has taken some getting used to. I will say that Rhode Islanders are very nice once you get to know them. There are lots of reasons why I have felt that this was a temporary exile for a few years, which I won’t go into here.
But now it IS home, because my husband, my dog, my great job, and my music are here. Never underestimate the music.


boston.com
(of course I am on the back row so I am not in the photo, but two of the most amazing female vocalists I have EVER heard are and so is Rafael Frubeck de Burgos, whom I adore. Christine Brewer, soprano and Stephanie Blythe, mezzo)
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/04/02/mendelssohns_elijah_makes_rare_showing_at_symphony_hall/