A Voice In The Choir

Last Sunday was Stake Conference for my little Mormon neighborhood. A bunch of single kids 18-30 years old gathered in a big room to be told how much they need to get married (spoiler: they need to get married thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much). I was in the choir, so I sat up on the stand the whole time. Apparently, my face was in the monitor the whole time, so I got projected up on the screen with all the speakers. That may be a problem, because my ability to express sarcasm with my face is inversely proportionate to my ability to gauge how appropriate it is to express sarcasm with my face in a given scenario.

Anyway, being in the choir was kinda cool. I actually LOVE singing, and, now that I’m not involved in school choirs and musicals as much as I used to be, I have very few opportunities to sing in quality productions. Thankfully, the stake choir had the talent and direction to be a powerful, positive singing experience. We sang some pretty standard Mormon musical numbers, including a hymn arranged by Mack Wilberg, considered by some to be the LDS equivalent of Handel (and others the LDS equivalent of Randy Newman).


The NICE thing about Wilberg (and Handel, for that matter) is that he really knows how to write good bass parts. Most of the Mack Wilberg pieces I’ve ever sung have really strong closing chords. The basses frequently wind up on a middle C, which isn’t too high in the bass range to be difficult to sing, but high enough that they get the high note rush that explains why most tenors I know are emaciated stoners.

Just kidding. Tenors are great people. Hardly stoned at all. I just like to incite bass/tenor rivalries everywhere I go. I’m probably the only person in the world who thinks it’s funny.

Really, there’s a bit of a rush that comes when you get to sing the high notes in your register at full voice and hold them for a long time. That’s the moment when you realize that, as a singer, you’re not really the artist at all. You’re the instrument. Your entire body is designed to transport and transform this air you breathe into a sound worth listening to. Your vocal chords vibrate with the passing air, much like the strings in a piano or the reed in a saxophone. Truly, the singer is like God’s Clarinet. Or, in my case, God’s Kazoo.