As a rule, concert halls, church sanctuaries, and auditoriums are built to encourage sound to travel, but only one way. That’s the point. The people making noises at the business end of the room are there to be heard. The audience is not. Singing from the house, as all professional singers discover at some point, is kind of a pain in the ass.
When my fiancé and I took our seats in the church where I had come to take part in a sing-along Messiah — and thereby sing in public for the first time since leaving a professional classical singing career more than a decade prior — I figured my voice would disappear into a sonic mush in a room like that, milk into mashed potatoes. I couldn’t have been more pleased.
Anonymity was the point, for me, in going to a Messiah sing-along. It was everything professional singing was not: casual, open to everyone, no auditions or rehearsals or soloists. Even the arias were to be sung en masse by anyone who wanted to sing along, each caterwauling along after our own fashion, flaws obscured by the crowd. The audience was the performer and we had paid for the privilege, singing a work we loved as it was never intended to be performed. A sing-along was a version of Handel’s Messiah I would not have gotten out of bed for, when I was a professional singer. Not when I could get paid to be a soloist in a proper performance instead.
Had it not been so different from my former experience, I would not have been able to do it at all. Yet at the same time it was still, and blessedly, familiar. The dog-eared piano-vocal score in my hand felt right; the unchanging constancy of sitting in choral formation grounded me. As the organist, standing in for what would normally be an orchestra, played the overture, I felt myself relaxing into a deeply familiar sensation of reassuring inevitability. The show had gone on.
Then the tenors stood for the famous recitative and aria, normally a solo, with which Messiah opens. They opened their mouths… and sounded like they were inhaling. Doubtless they all sang along lustily enough with their CDs at home, but now they were timid, breathy and feeble.
Oh, for Pete’s sake, I thought, they’re singing like they’re in church. The fact that we were in a church was neither here nor there. This was Messiah. It was not that obscure hymn everyone in church sings in stumbling, hesitant sotto voce half a beat behind the organist for fear of being the person who gets it wrong out loud. Everyone in the hall knew the piece.
I was suddenly, irascibly furious. They’ve got to be kidding, I thought. Let me sing it. At least I won’t sound like all the air’s been let out of me. Had the tenors given their balls to charity? Weren’t they there to sing? “Ev’ry valley shall be exalted” was about as jubilant as the line at the post office.
Instantly I felt guilty. What did I expect? They were just there to enjoy themselves. And who the hell was I to criticize, given that I’d dropped the mic and walked off the stage of my own singing career to the point where I’d deliberately chosen to come to an event like this one precisely because no one would hear me?
You can take the girl out of the expectations of professional performance, it seems, but you can’t take the expectations of professional performance out of the girl. Even if she hasn’t performed in more than a decade. Even if she’s scared shitless because in a minute or two, she was going to have to stand up and sing.
In my own defense, I can say I was not any worse than the tenors. But I wasn’t necessarily much better. Over and over, especially in the choruses, I fell off the horse of the alto line. Fortunately, falling off but soldiering on was a skill I’d honed as a child chorister, something I could still do without thinking. The spirit was insistent, demanding, furious at all the failings, all the shortcomings. The flesh was rusty, unpracticed, frankly inept, struggling to do the things it remembered being able to do even if it could no longer remember precisely how. My phrasing was crap. My breath control had gone to hell. What I sounded like, I don’t know. Turns out that the flaw in my “hide my voice in an anonymous crowd” plan was that I couldn’t hear myself, either.
My face burned with rage, with shame, with humiliation. I was failing openly, blatantly, at the one thing I still somehow, in the back of my mind, expected to be perfectly capable of doing after more than a decade’s silence. After all, I always had been.
With a sort of bitter clarity I reflected that it is a mercy that Messiah is a near-indestructible classic, so well crafted it can survive almost any performance. I could not be the crack chorister the work deserved. I had been that kind of musician from the time I was 7 until I was nearly 30, but not now. This Messiah wasn’t going to be right.
But maybe, I thought, it could still contain some music. If no one could hear me anyhow, did it matter how I sang it? What the hell, I thought, and started to sing it not as I had been trained, not with an eye to being a professional, but just as best, as close to the version in my head, as I could. By the time “For Unto Us A Child is Born” rolled around it began to feel easier. I swayed gently as I sang.
Then I saw them. They were looking at me, the women around me, stealing glances with “who the hell is that?” looks on their faces. I slapped the self-consciousness down hard. It’s not about you. Ignore them. Just sing the fucker. Just sing.
Blinders on, then. Mouth open. Don’t stop. Oh, God, such a long time it had been. Yet it was there, the ineffable merging of body and breath, reflex and sense that makes the music and the musician one thing, a thing with its own deep reason, its own wild grace. How ancient, how humbling and elemental it is to be part of something so much larger than yourself, something that is not you and yet that could not be without you helping to make it so. We reached the “Hallelujah” chorus, a piece whose numbingly dull alto part I’ve never enjoyed, and I sang that boring fill-in-the-middle line like it were the most important thing I’d ever sung. On that rainy Sunday, the “hallelujah” was real.
And then it was done. In the pews, we all went back to being strangers. My fiancé and I gathered our things. And then it happened. They had heard me after all. The side-eyes I had noticed had not been hostile, it seemed, just surprised. Now people approached me, asked me to join their choirs, told me I had “such a beautiful voice.” One woman gestured to the elderly lady next to her and said, “she wanted me to tell you you have a gorgeous voice. She used to be a singer, she had a masters degree in voice.” I could not bring myself to say “me too.”
No, I wanted to say, it was not beautiful. Not the performance, not the singing, and not my voice. It was — I was — shabby and shoddy and incompetent, and now I was ashamed to have been heard, humiliated that I had not realized I would be. But it is unkind and unprofessional to refuse those who hear you sing whatever pleasure they take in it, no matter what you thought of your own performance. A long-ago voice teacher taught me that. I smiled while my throat tightened.
My fiancé told me I was gracious. I tried to be. I managed to wait until we had reached the parking lot to weep, hunched under my umbrella in the cold thick rain, sobbing into the extra handkerchief my fiancé, who is very smart about these things, had brought along. People streamed out of the church and kindly ignored me. The cars rolled out and away, and eventually I calmed enough to get in the car, to turn the key in the ignition and drive through the gray midwinter.
For better or worse it was done. I had sung again, after so very long. I had sung again in public, with other people, had once again been part of the music, and the music part of me, and Leonard Cohen was right. Holy or broken, it was still a hallelujah.
***
Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.
