Carpe Diem, Carpe Musica

Okay I’ll admit it. I haven’t sung with a choir since I was in high school, and that was a very long time ago. But here, in this spacious rehearsal room at Strathmore, a center for the arts, I get to do it again – carefully pick out my part in the sheet music, then blend my voice with the sopranos on either side of me. I love that leaning-in moment when two singers are listening to one other, and I love that surround-sound feeling of many voices – nearly 100 in this case – striking full-on harmony.

It is the third rehearsal of Carpe Diem, the ad hoc chorus I wrote about here. The music is lovely – Malcolm Dalglish’s Song of the Earth, with fluid, undulating harmonies and rippling rhythms evocative of flowing rivers and breezes blown through leafy trees. It will be sung, appropriately enough, for Earth Day.

But I think I’m enjoying the comradery of singing just as much as the music itself. Just as it did in high school, the music transcends the other things that define us as individuals. In school, chorus was the one time I stepped out of tracked honors classes like chemistry and English, and into a more diverse group of kids, where we thought about voices, not grades. In this adult chorus -- with a few teens sprinkled in – singers are more interested in musical experience and tone than who’s working what job and for how much salary.

Still, I do know that the woman next to me teaches young primary schoolers music – I asked if she sang professionally, as her strong voice was nailing that high A pretty well, and she admitted her job did keep her tuned in, so to speak. On my other side is a woman I know from my neighborhood, a minister mom I run into occasionally at yoga class. Last rehearsal I met a professional story teller. My carpool buddies include a psychotherapist, and I know there’s at least one doctor in the mix, plus a midwife, a land conservationist and a landscaper.

Here, though, we categorize ourselves not by profession but by voice: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. And then by height, so the director can hear each of us, and we can each see her. That feels like another throwback to school days – tall, lanky folks in the back, so they inevitably feel gawky and awkward; short ones up front, where they can feel stumpy and small. You would think we’d have grown past all that as adults but I can see by the way people shuffle themselves around that we’re not quite over it. No matter. The music does transcend – body image¸ age, profession, all of it.

I’m looking forward to the next rehearsal – last time, our director admonished us that we must do our homework, and I’ve been dutifully sitting at the piano, practicing. And here’s an improvement over high school days: I can listen to a CD of the music and sing along or I can use an MP3 player or my computer to hear an explanation of dynamics from the composer, Malcolm Dalglish. Yes, a few things have changed – but the inspiration of the music remains.

Carpe Diem will be performing April 23 – for more info see the web site.
(Image from Oolitic Music)

The Chopins: Bringing Music and Literature Together

This week my daughter, Clara, came home from school and announced she likes Chopin. Both Kate Chopin, whose book, The Awakening, she is reading for high school English, and Frederic Chopin, the 19th century composer. Clara’s fabulous English teacher (thanks, Mr. Anderson!) had the students listen to Chopin, to see if the piece referenced in the book matches the mood of the story. Talk about value added. I love this class.

So as Clara played Chopin through Pandora (do you know about this? Tell the web site what music you like and it will play it, plus music like it, for hours), I recalled how I once played Chopin on the piano, myself. I don’t play much anymore, but, inspired, I took out the old music books.

Playing a piano is a little like riding a bike – once you’ve done it, it comes back quickly. But if you’ve been away for long, there’s a whole lot more wobbling, and if you could fall down on a piano, there would be a lot of pileups and scraped knuckles on the keyboard. The muscle memory in my fingers allows me to run pretty accurately over grace notes and trills and magically land (some of) the right chords, but precision and consistency are long gone. And if I start to actually think about the individual notes, they leave me stumbling.

Still, going through my old piano books and trying some of these pieces was a little like going through an old photo album. Things are familiar in an “oh, yeah, I remember this!” way. I was amazed at how much I could play – and so very grateful to my parents for giving me lessons (and enforcing practice time) for so many years.

These occasional forays into reviving my piano playing always bring to mind the salons of the 19th century, when instead of turning on the television, people would play music for one another in the parlor. I get the feeling that most people (of a certain stature) learned music of some sort. And I often wind up thinking about how much more beautiful our world would be, if we chucked the t.v. and instead played music and read novels and poetry to one another each evening (a little needlework, anyone?)

On our Chopin night, Clara wound up turning off Pandora and I played for her (and, admittedly, myself) while she did her homework. Turns out that in addition to Chopin, she likes Mozart, too. Later, she dug up “Bastien Piano Basics, Primer Level,” and reviewed what she’d learned at around age 11, when I (briefly) sat her down on the piano bench and gave her lessons. And yesterday, she came home from school and made a beeline for the piano to play some more. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to sit in my office and hear I’m a Little Teapot, Skip to My Lou and Scarborough Fair drifting up the stairs.

First blossoms, all over again

It has been a long winter. The longest in memory for me and my Maryland neighbors – but perhaps that’s just the way it feels in the wake of weeks of snow and ice, followed by an uplifting but too-brief peak of sun, then bone-chilling dampness and rain for days. Cold, again? Yes. So the garden gloves go back on the shelf and we pull on our sweaters and wait it out.

And, in this grey landscape, we cherish the bright spots: like the first daffodils! I saw them just days ago. They were still tight in their buds, but like a lesson learned over and over again, I knew they would emerge, and today, here they are, open to the first sun we've had in a what seems like a very long time. Spring, I think, is the very origin of faith.

Other signs whisper of warmth and color to come: patches of purple crocuses (does anyone ever plant these, or do they just come up on their own every year?), an early spray of yellow forsythia down the block, a sprinkling of snow drops in my own front yard.

Last week (in that brief sunny period) I watched as my neighbor crouched in his curbside garden with his two young daughters (ages 2 and 4), showing them how to draw a line in the soil and sprinkle lettuce seeds in a (relatively) straight line, then gently cover them up. When the tender leaves emerge, and the girls taste what they’ve planted, it will be an epiphany – look at what we did! Even though I have sprinkled lettuce seeds year after year in my own garden, when the babies appear like green fuzz on the soil, it still seems like a miracle. And it is.

The twist to this lesson in faith: Planting a garden only underscores the promise of spring. The earth will come around, whether we believe in it or not.

Play It Again

Yesterday I slid a CD into the player and selected my favorite track and just as it began to play, was filled up with missing my son, it was like he’d gotten in the car after a long time away and we were both grinning over the opening riff of a Dave Matthews song, and then that piercing vocal interval, and the lyric, “I’d like to show you what’s inside, but I sure don’t care if you do or you don’t like it.”

What do I miss about Tyler, as he travels the world? I could tell you I miss his creativity, his fearlessness and disregard for convention. But words don’t quite get at the way we miss our loved ones. Thank God, then, for music.

There’s another tune running around in my head that brings me back to when the children were slippery fish in the bath tub, and I was a young mama singing to them: “You’re my little potato... my sweet potato, dug you up, you come from underground.” I thought it was just a quirky tune from a children’s cassette but now I realize that (of course) someone wrote it and arranged it and, imagine this, will be performing it April 23 at the grand Music Hall at Strathmore. And – surprise! -- I’ll be singing it there, too.

As a member of Carpe Diem, an ad hoc chorus pulled together to perform at specific events, I’ll be singing with Malcolm Dalglish, the very man who wrote “Little Potato” – and a plethora of other songs for dulcimer, drums and voice. The event celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, so while I may have visions of bathtime, most of the music will evoke the rhythms and beauty of the natural world – another grand subject difficult to capture with just words.

The potato song goes on -- “The world is big, so big, so very big – it’s new to you, it’s new to you.” Its bounce and upbeat melody convey the simple joy of discovery – or rediscovery, the privilege of parents everywhere who see the world anew when they look through the eyes of their children. Happy travels, Tyler. Happy Earth Day, all.