It all started with a family visit. We had dinner with some former students of my dad's (including the lady behind this tasty food blog) who moved out here last year, and one of them told me about the choir she found in their neighborhood. They needed people; did I want to audition?
I hadn't sung that kind of music since high school, when my a capella group was strong-armed into performing with the guys' group at Christmas Vespers and graduation every year, so I wasn't sure it would be my kind of thing.
But doing any music is better than none, and it's been a while since the band went on hiatus. So, I drank a bunch of tea and headed for the audition with a minor case of nerves and the beginnings of a nasty brochial infection. Even with those strikes against me, it went pretty well. Turns out my range is still on the hefty side, so that's good. I can't sight read worth a damn, but the director said I could join up if I agreed to learn the music via CD for their spring concert.
So far (two rehearsals), it's like taking a class. We're working on Carl Orff's version of Carmina Burana, a long, crashing piece you'd recognize from a thousand movies. The music is beautiful in an exhausting way, and Middle High German is bizarre but interesting. It sounds like the love child of Latin and Italian, with some guttural hacking thrown in for good measure.
The concert is sometime in March, so I'll let you know by then if I've drunk the Kool-Aid and become a total choir freak, or if the weekly commute to make formal noises in a freezing cold Mission church with a group of strangers has done me in.
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