Confessions of a choirgirl

The first time I sang in a church choir, I was six or seven years old. I was going to a Lutheran church at the time, the same church where my sister had gone and where she had been confirmed. I was actually younger than the minimum age requirement, but they let me join anyway; I think it must have been because I was able to read the words of the hymns as well as match pitch on the tunes. We rehearsed every week but only sang during the service every once in a while, which seems very odd now. I seem to remember that we wore red robes and little red skullcaps.

I began going to an Episcopal church after my sister married and stopped going to church altogether. The Church of the Advent was only a block away from my house, but my mother insisted that I be escorted by an elderly neighbor of ours who was a member there. Every Sunday morning Miss Johnson knocked at our front door and I walked with her to the corner, crossed one way, then the other, and went in the door of the parish hall.

I think I had been at church for a year or two when I auditioned for the choir. The organist at that time, Miss Ruby, was an elderly woman with a bent back and gnarled fingers who played everything very, very sedately. She nodded enthusiastically and said, “Oh yes,” after I sang for her, and that was that, I suppose.

Our choir was composed solely of girls and women, a strange thing in an Anglican church. Men and boys were acolytes; women and girls sang. When I was a teenager, one boy was allowed to cross into feminine territory, but by the time I moved out of the neighborhood and ceased to attend the Advent, no woman or girl had yet become an acolyte, if memory serves. We wore red skirts, sleeveless white cottas, and chapel caps, that is, little lace doilies pinned to our hair. Some of the oldest women in the parish, like Mrs. Dearmer, were never without a chapel cap in the church building, even if they were just cleaning up in the sanctuary. If you walked too fast (or ran, oh no), the front of the lace would flip up and fold back on your hair.

I went through four more choir directors and over ten years of singing after Miss Ruby (the chapel caps were dropped at some point, and we garnered a bass and a tenor). I learned at least half of the hymns in the 1940 Hymnal, quite a few bad anthems written for two soprano parts and an alto, and the basics of Gregorian chant notation and performance. (I can still read neumes fairly well, thank you, Maud.) It shaped my voice, my tastes in music, and my expectations in liturgy and liturgical music.

In my twenties I became a pagan, more or less. For most of that decade I sang with a small non-liturgical choir directed by my husband and not in a church, in a chancel, as part of the Sunday service. Even though we did a good deal of sacred music, such as the polyphonic masses of Palestrina, Hassler, and Byrd, it wasn’t the same as performing in a liturgical context. Then one year my husband invited me to sing a Thanksgiving service at his new parish. For the first time in over a decade, I struggled into an actual cassock, pulled on a surplice, and took my place in a choir stall with The Hymnal 1940 in front of me.

It was as if I had never left. I had the strongest feeling of rightness, of knowing that this was something I was meant to do. I get that feeling every time I put on a cassock and surplice and open my hymnal, or sing a polyphonic Mass by Byrd or a Communion service by an English composer, or perform an unaccompanied anthem where my voice is used to its best effect. Whether by accident, by genetics, by training, by whatever means, it happens that my voice, a straight-tone soprano that is closer to the sound of a boy treble than anything else, is extremely well suited for the musical heritage of the Anglo-Catholic Church, and not for much else. I am a group singer rather than a soloist, good at filling a vaulted space but not at using a microphone, easily overwhelmed by instrumental accompaniment but unafraid of unaccompanied singing. I am a chorister. If there is anything in my life which brings up for me the idea of “past life connections”, it is my intuitive grasp of the English Church’s repertoire and my feeling of belonging in a church choir.

It’s also the case that singing is a form of exercise. It gets oxygen into the lungs and into the brain. It stimulates the mind and the body; it is work, but happy work, good work, that leaves a joyful tiredness. I feel better physically, emotionally, psychically, when I sing regularly. It keeps me in tune and in tone.

All of which goes to explain why I have returned to singing with my husband’s choir. The blending of voices is joyful, and the money doesn’t hurt, either. I feel somewhat guilty not to be practicing with my Buddhist sangha, yet in the choir is where I must be right now. We are practicing Mozart for the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass.