I don't think that there was even a small chicken in the birdhouse.
So, now that we've established that the photo is as pointless as usual, let's get on with the story.
Apropos of nothing but a bad sleep and the apparent need for a little nostalgia, let's have a brief look at my choral singing career. I love choral music... or at least I used to. I probably still do, come to it, but for various reasons (including having a childrens' choir of my own for a number of years) I haven't sung in a choir for ages. I grew up doing it, though, and continued for a while as an adult.
When I was a kid I sang in choirs, plural. Not an easy feat to find choirS when you're growing up in a small town, but I did it. I sang alto because that's what my voice thought it should be doing at the time. It wasn't always like that; when I was quite young I had a pretty decent soprano voice, but when I hit puberty I lost half an octave in the space of a summer.
Yeah. Don't ever let anyone tell you that girls' voices don't change. It's just not as extreme as the boys, folks.
Unfortunately one of my choir directors either didn't know that or didn't believe it, and called me out in the middle of a practice (in front of everyone, yes) for being lazy when I couldn't hit the notes I could hit last spring. Me being the stubborn sort and not appreciating the embarrassment (and, let's face it, not trusting my voice anymore at that point), I abruptly quit that choir. Um, just by not showing up ever again. In retrospect I maybe should have given notice or something, but at the time I was too pissed and hurt to want to be anywhere near the woman.
I stayed with my other choir, though. It was directed by my voice teacher. She let me sing alto.
I was a great alto. I have a good ear for harmony, and I'm pretty good at holding a part even if the chords sound a bit weird. Alto was a good place for me, especially since it took a helluva long time for my adult singing voice to develop. I used to compete at the local music festival (which... small town, remember. This wasn't exactly a gigantic competition) and all through my teens never won a damned thing in a solo category. Duets, trios, quartets? Absolutely. I was a fantastic supporting player. And I guess that if you can accept that you're going to be a fantastic alto supporting player and never be much of a soloist, you can still enjoy yourself, right?
I genuinely learned to enjoy myself. No, really. I sang alto in the choir and in competitions, I sang character roles in our amateur productions, and I had a lot of fun.
Enough fun, in fact, that when I went to university -- and even with a heavy lab schedule -- I decided that I wanted to keep up the choral singing and auditioned for the Mixed Chorus.
It was my first ever audition. One of the advantages of the small town thing is that if you want to be in something you're generally going to be in it without having to prove that you should be in it. But this was a different sort of animal, so I gathered my courage and headed to the audition room. The choir director was the one doing the auditions. Since the choir was a club rather than a credit course, the whole thing wasn't too strenuous. Some scales, some finding notes in chords, singing a song (O Canada, if I remember right). It was all going pretty well... until he turned away from the piano, looked straight at me, and said
You're a big chicken.
Huh.
Not what I was expecting from my first ever audition, and I was thrown. See, what I hadn't noticed but the director easily did was that during all those years of singing alto my voice grew up. I'd gotten my range back (and, through working pretty hard afterwards, got even more). I'd developed my adult tone. But I was so busy being the alto supporting player that I hadn't seen it coming. I was a lyric mezzo who was hiding in the alto section.
I should say here that the choir director wasn't being mean, even if it sounds that way. I found out later that he was a fantastic man with a wonderfully sarcastic sense of humour. What I think he saw in me was someone with a decent music education who wasn't using it properly. And he was right, of course.
So what happened? Well, he made me a First Alto.
But Dee! Wasn't this story supposed to be about you gloriously becoming the choir's featured soprano soloist and showing your childhood choir director that she was an ignorant witch (or whatever word you want to use there)? Well, no. Not really. See, all that alto time growing up had turned me into a good alto, and choirs need good altos. And good sopranos, good tenors, good baritones, good basses... without all of them, you don't have a good choir. I continued to enjoy being a choral alto, but in my private practice time I worked on becoming the mezzo soloist that I was capable of being. And a few years later when my former vocal teacher encouraged me to enter the adult solo section of that small-town music festival, I won!
And was the first person at the festival to ever sing jazz, but that's completely a different story.
And this is definitely enough typing for today. Go find something else to read now, ok?
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