China nostalgia ...

Naturally I procrastinate writing by writing ...

I'm working on my tour article for the Glee Club newsletter and I was listening to some old Cornell Glee Club and Chorus music and O Magnum Mysterium (the Morten Lauridsen version) came on and it's giving me some serious de ja vu from China. It's not surprising, but I figured I'd try to narrate the connection in my mind, especially after hearing Professor Emeritus James McConkey speak so eloquently about life-writing in his lecture at President Skorton's house today.

The tour to China was something particularly unreal in my mind, both because of my mental and emotional state at the time and because of the amazing experiences we had while we were there. There is really nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, quite like the performance we gave at the Shanghai Arts Center. It was by far the most acoustically beautiful place I've ever sung (and that includes Carnegie Hall) and that night was the night we made music.

It was the most beautiful music I can remember in my life - including the best of our 4 full-performances of Brahm's Requiem (my favorite major work, it was my favorite before that night too), a magical performance of O Magnum Mysterium and a couple other pieces. We also, had two impromptu performances of note at the end of warmups, which reinforce why I love music (and the Glee Club) and the ability it has to connect people.

The O Magnum performance was as I said "magical" because it came from nowhere - we learned it for Sage Chapel Vespers in December, performing it after practicing it just twice before (not very extensively either). We didn't rehearse it again until either the week before tour, or on tour and then Professor Tucker told us we would perform it in our highest-profile concert in China. I don't really know how it came together so well, but it was one of those years for music - perhaps the best year for music in my life. The year included the ACDA Eastern Division performance in Connecticut, an excellent performance of the Brahms Reqiuem in Bailey, China Tour and then the best Homecoming in my 4 years at Cornell in Fall 2008. But despite ACDA 2008 being one of my strongest and happiest memories at Cornell, the rare musical moments in Shanghai capture my imagination in the same way that the ACDA performance captured my heart.

The experience in Shanghai was further strengthened by our warmups - at the end, a couple of us requested that we sing the Biebl Ave Maria in the concert because we thought it would be incredible in that hall. Professor Tucker refused, explaining that it would be unfair to the Chorus, who don't have a comparable piece to pair with our Ave Maria (it has a long history, dating back to the Glee Club bringing Biebl's Ave Maria to America from Germany in the 1960s and popularizing the piece). As a result, he agreed to let us sing the piece in the hall after warmups and what followed was an ethereal moment. The chorus had left the stage and were watching intently (along with the rare few men who chose to rest their voices). What followed nearly put me in tears (which has happened only once in the past 15 years) - a heart-felt performance to our close friends in a hall that had no equal. In retrospect, it was not as technically excellent as our heart-wrenching performance of it just weeks before at the ACDA convention, but this was just as emotional. Perhaps it was fair warning for what was to come (in my mind), but what followed set the tone for the rest of the night - tragic, loving, beautiful, dramatic and epic. As we started to drag ourselves offstage after the Ave Maria, Steve "Willy" Welker, a senior at the time, looked to a couple others, and started singing Danny Boy - another piece we loved, but had barely practiced (learning it after Homecoming and performing it just once, at Elmira, prior to tour). What was particularly special was that this was no ordinary Danny Boy. It was arranged by Patrick Quigley, Assistant Director of the Notre Dame Glee Club, a very similar organization to our own. It was unpublished (and still is to this date, more than two years since it was arranged) and to my knowledge the only other group to perform it has been the ND Glee Club for whom it was arranged.

When Willy started singing, people stopped moving wherever they were and one by one the Glee Clubbers around the stage and eventually around the whole theatre joined in to the point where everyone was singing when we sang "and kneel and say an ave there for me" leading into the final verse. That piece has been my second favorite Irish ballad (second to the Minstrel Boy) and is one of the prettiest and saddest melodies. It has grown to mean so much more as the years go on and the words really begin to mean something tangible to me. That moment, after we finished singing - that silence (no clapping and sighing like after the Ave Maria) was even more significant. It was the calm before the storm, the moment of readiness. For the rest of the night, I was (and I'm sure others were too) in a trance, not unlike how we felt weeks before prior to ACDA when Willy warmed up the group before Professor Tucker and John even got to our hotel to see if we were awake. We were emotionally and mentally ready and it's those performances that I look back on - when every one of us knew that something significant happened. With ACDA, our performance was a barn-burner - everyone was crying and on their feet. Many of the conductors commented and sent letters and saying that it was the best choral performance they'd ever witnessed. With Shanghai, we had our relatively small audience wrapped around our fingers, but they were not the type of audience to just out of their seats with emotions - but I'd like to think that they were aware that they were being invited into an intimate, personal performance, like our warmups. The concert meant more to us because we sang it for ourselves and needed no voice of approval to tell us otherwise. It was for us and anyone else was along for the ride, a participant in our musical catharsis, because to us, it felt like no one else but our groups were there.

When the voices cascaded, building off each other's vocal and emotion support, the hall rang. And then that last "hallelujah" came, warmer than any before it, continuing until we faded to nothing.