Tired.
Worn out.
Wiped.
People don’t think twice about accepting how tired physical labor makes you. We see it in the blank eyes, the haggard faces, of any laborer after a long day. What people don’t always understand is that an incredibly intense burst of mental energy can really take it out of you, too. For someone like me, who is so easily distracted I can’t even sit still for five minutes in my writing sessions without being tempted to pop up and go do the laundry, or the dishes, or answer that email I’d forgotten about two days before, or grab a glass of water (or pee that water out half an hour later), to be so completely “ON”, with a near laser-beam focus that doesn’t waver, for ninety minutes, is like running a 5k at a full sprint (good thing I’m trained for this, hey?). After last night’s performance, I’m feeling quite logy, mentally fuzzy-foggy, and tired this morning, despite a full nine hours of sleep and a cup of coffee so strong it nearly broke through the cup and lit out to make its fortune in the world.
The Judas Passion, make no mistake, is quite possibly the most difficult piece I’ve ever done. I don’t make that claim lightly; I’ve sung some really tricky shit in my lifetime (‘throws choral gang signs’* SVADEBKA, MUTHAFUCKAS!), having covered the choral spectrum from Gregorian chant to last week’s wet ink, and this pretty much beats them all. It’s as if the composer couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to be Stravinsky or Ligeti—so she chose BOTH. It’s spiky, changes meter seemingly damn near every other bar, and has no discernable vocal lines. In addition, it’s extremely difficult to find a pitch, and then, when you do, you must hold it in place against the tone cluster being sung by the rest of the chorale (assuming they’re singing the correct notes, which is not always the case), like protecting your hoard of treasure from a band of marauding invaders, while the police (in this case, the orchestra) deliberately look in the other direction, as if to say, “Sorry—we’ve got our own troubles to deal with!” (which, to be fair—in this case, they DO).
And yet—lest you get the impression this piece is but an amorphous avant-garde blob of randomness—there’s arias! And a chaconne! And a fugue—albeit one in five-eight time, in allegretto no less, which means I’m counting with EVERY. CELL. OF. MY. BODY: “One-two-three ONE-TWO! One-two-three ONE-TWO! One-two-three ONE-TWO!!!” And so on. Jerking around in time with that fugue, I suspect I look to the audience for all the world like I’m having an epileptic fit. And I don’t care. There are no atheists in foxholes; there is no dignity on stage. In other words—whatever it takes, honey. As the philosopher once said: Git ‘er done.
So, yes, it’s exhausting. And before you make any comments about singers being pampered babies, or inferior musicians to intrumentalists, let me inform you that the orchestra—one of the finest baroque orchestras in the world, if not the finest—is struggling just as much as we are. And THEY aren’t dealing with getting the right words on top of the right rhythms and pitches. So you can just knock that shit off. Or I will find you. And I will hurt you.
There’s nothing like being grossly underprepared in performance of an extremely tricky piece, with nobody else to rely on for pitches and rhythms, to narrow the aperture of your mind’s shutter down to the very tip of a conductor’s baton (or, in Nic’s case, his hands); one, two, flutter, flap, downbeat, cue—and off we go, damn the quintuplets, full speed ahead!
My heart was pounding so hard before my first entrance (which, by the way, is also the first vocal entrance of the entire piece. No pressure, there.) I thought that it would reverberate in the cavernous space of Bing Hall, loudly enough for the audience to hear (although, in the case of a modern piece such as this, they would probably just consider it part of the percussion, so…that’s good?).
Blessedly, miraculously, we all rose to the occasion: the performance was an order of magnitude better than even the warmup had been.
(An Unfortunate Truth: Fear is a powerful motivator.)
The chorale was mostly on, with very few pitch misfires or rhythmic stutters—although, not gonna lie: there were many, many moments when it felt like we were perilously close to falling off the track. It was very much a high-wire act, but, for the most part, we bobbled and wobbled along without losing the thin, buoyant wire under our feet. I say that with some sort of battle-scarred pride; I doubt there are many orchestras and choirs who could have done what we did, on fewer than six rehearsals.
While our choir director had fretted aloud to us (albeit in the privacy of the car on the way to the venue) whether the old guard of subscribers would walk out on such an avant-garde piece, to our amazement, there were many people at Stanford who gave us a standing ovation! No reviews yet, but it will be very interesting to see what they think of our sound experiment.
—RM
* = AKA Kodaly
