Rise Up Singing

I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of singing, and of those who sing. Minnesota is home to an almost shocking number of amateur and professional choirs, and our orchestra never goes a season without performing with at least one or two of them. Audiences here simply go nuts for the sound of the human voice, and we can always be assured of an enthusiastic response whenever we program something that includes a couple hundred singers. (This goes double if there is a children's choir involved.)

That having been said, those of us who play instrumental music for a living have a bad habit of regarding vocalists as something less than ourselves. It's a prejudice borne mainly of stylistic differences, I suspect, as well as from the simple contrast between amateur musicians (of which most large choirs are made up) singing purely for the love of music, and professionals who rely on music for both artistic satisfaction and a steady paycheck. To those of us in the orchestra, chorus people often seem unnaturally enthusiastic about absolutely everything, as if they're perpetually on the edge of either laughing or crying hysterically. To them, I'm sure we seem perplexingly casual about and unaffected by the great music we're performing together. It's an uneasy relationship, at best, and I'm sometimes amazed that our performances of choral works don't reflect that unease.

Additionally, even professional singers, vocalists who can shake the foundations of the largest concert halls with their powerful human instruments, do not share much of the musical culture that instrumentalists are brought up in, and we've been mistrustful of each other since our conservatory days. Where we spent hours in school locked away in practice rooms slaving over details, the singers always seemed to be laying about in the lounge, sipping bottled water with lemon, wrapping scarves around their necks in 70-degree weather, and whispering to each other lest their delicate vocal cords be damaged by the act of conversing normally on top of their whopping 45 minutes of daily practice. They were the divas to our backup singers, the porcelain figurines to our homemade rag dolls, the - forgive me - Truman Capote to our J.D. Salinger.

Even Osmo, at the press conference at which he was introduced as our music director back in 2002, betrayed a bit of this musician bias when he was asked by a member of the media who also sings in the Minnesota Chorale whether he planned to expand the number of choral works we play every year. I remember vividly the slightly evil smile that played across his face as he first acknowledged the importance of maintaining the orchestra's commitment to great choral music, then added slyly, "However, I don't know whether we will do more choral music. To be honest, sometimes musicians can feel that working with singers is sometimes not worth the trouble." The whole room broke up laughing, except for the reporter/singer who had asked the question.

But as I say, I've had a number of recent experiences, both as a performer and an audience member, that have gotten me thinking more deeply about singers and singing. Rather than restrict the subject to a single post, I'm planning to spend this coming week blogging about each of them in turn, just to see whether my own biases and preconceived ideas change at all during the process. As my mother would remind anyone who cared to listen, I have a long and mostly undistinguished history with singing myself, so clearly, I could stand to reengage the form. We'll see what, if anything comes of it...