Coaching
One of my favorite quotes is "some people come into out lives, make footprints on out hearts and we are never the same". This is how I feel about the woman who came to coach the chorus today.
Generally, I dread coaching (especially when it’s for five hours on a Saturday), but when this person comes it’s as if she brings with her all the joy I’ve ever felt when I’m singing and lets it all fly out of me. About five years ago, when we were without a permanent director she would fly up from New Jersey every weekend and we would have extra rehearsals, then she took us to contest. We came in second, but everyone in the region believed that we should have one. It’s our theory that the judges didn’t want an interim director to win.
It was the most fabulous singing experience that I’ve ever had. She is just the most amazing person, and has such a close connection with us as a chorus. Being with her is always uplifting.
The main purpose of her coming was to work on our two contest numbers. So after forty-five minutes of excruciatingly boring vocal warm-ups, we sang the ballad for her.
She sat in a chair facing the chorus. And cried.
It nearly did me in. She thought that we sounded wonderful and that we had shown improvement since she’d been here in February. I don’t think it was just the sound of our voices that got to her, though, I think it was the lyrics of the song. Granted, she’s heard it a zillion times, but I think the emotion came through and it got to her.
The song is called "Old Songs, Old Friends" and was written in memory of five women from a chorus in Denver who were killed when their plane crashed on the way to our international contest. Their chorus went on to win that year, but it was emotionally devastating for all.
The lyrics are :
The song may be over, and good friends may part
But they’ll never be gone from out hearts.
Where are the old songs we sang long ago, when our voices were young and we stole the show
Where is that melody simple but grand, as the ribbon now faded, I hold in my hand
Where are the old friends who sang by my side who smiled crossed the footlights and cried when I cried
In each pretty picture their faces I see
Now the years have left only me.
But I can still hear the music,
I still know my part
The love and the laughter are locked in my heart
A drawer full of memories is this how it ends?
For the old songs and my old friends."
Needless to say it can be emotional if you sing it thinking of the reason it was written. But even without that background story it can be emotional for those of us who have been in the organization for any length of time and who have memories of friends who are no longer with us, or ribbons that meant so much.
That’s what singing for this coach is like. I remember the best year I ever had as an Adeline, even beating the year we won our region. She gave me more joy in music than I had ever had before.
The year we came in second under her direction we were asked to sing in an even called "The Show of Champions", which features the top three choruses and quartets from that contest. We were the last chorus to enter Symphony Hall that night and as we were filing in to take our seats in the audience we were given a standing ovation! We hadn’t sung a note, but it was an acknowledgement from all the other members of the region that we should have won.
I cherish that memory.
So today was also full of joy. She had us sing the contest stuff over and over, but also had us perform other things from our repertoire. She varied the day to such an extent that the time flew.
The emotional peak of the day for me came when she told our director to stop directing, and to move to the chorus to sing with us. This is not an unusual technique, as they will often have the director do this so she can see that she doesn’t have to over-direct and that we have the interpretation internalized. The coach then sat in front of us to listen.
I wept.
All I could think of was how much I had once loved singing for her and how much I now miss that joy. I couldn’t get through the song. I wasn’t the only one, though.
After rehearsal a few of us (including the coach) went out to dinner and they had a birthday cake for me. It was pretty humorous because of course all my friends sang in harmony, and the manager had to come over to find out who we were, as he knew it couldn’t have been his staff.
I sat across from the coach and we spent a lot of time chatting. I think she may come to our contest in May, which would be wonderful. She would be such a positive influence on all of us. Especially the director.
I hope she comes. I even volunteered to pick her up at the airport.
Today was a nice day.
Listening to: Meat Loaf’s Best of
Reading:New York the Apple of My Eye Helene Hanff
Weather: 68, sunny
Trivia: How do the two poles of Mars differ?
Recent discoveries made by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft show that the two poles of Mars are very different, indicating that the climate may have been different at the two poles for quite a long time. The south pole has a permanent cap of frozen carbon dioxide mixed with layers of other material. Since the carbon dioxide ice evaporates directly into the thin Martian air, rather than melting the way water ice does on Earth, the landscape shows features unlike anything on Earth. There are flat-bottomed circular depressions and round-walled plateaus, and complex fingerprint-like whorls of grooves. The north pole's ice cap, while about the same size, is simply a layer on top of the ground, with small pits probably caused by evaporation of the ice. Its structure seems simpler, and it may be composed mainly of water ice rather than frozen carbon dioxide. Why are the two poles of Mars so different? Scientists hope to discover the answer as exploration of the red planet continues.
Cool word: jetsam [n. JET-suhm]
Anything that sinks and remains underwater after being thrown overboard to lighten a ship in distress is called jetsam. The discarded or abandoned objects can include cargo, ship parts, or equipment. Jetsam came to be used in the late 16th century. It was a variation on jetson, a contraction of the Middle English jetteson (throw something overboard) which was derived from the Latin jactare (throw). Jetsam is often used in conjunction with flotsam. This word's buoyant roots help distinguish it from jetsam since it originates in the Old French floter (to float). Flotsam is cargo that floats on water after a shipwreck. Lagan (Old French from the root of lie, lay) is cargo that sinks when thrown overboard but that is marked with a buoy for later retrieval.
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