Schlaf, schlaf, schlaf
For the longest time time, my favorite Christmas song was “O Holy Night.” In my congregation growing up, our neighbor Janet1 would sing the majestic song in church every year for the Christmas service. Janet had a beautiful, powerful, operatic voice. Her version brought the house down every time. (Or whatever the Mormon No Clapping Allowed In Church version of “brought the house down” is.) I would tear up just a little bit every time. While I was on my LDS mission in São Paulo, when Christmastime would roll around, I’d get homesick just thinking about hearing Janet sing “O Holy Night.” It was easily in the Top 3 things I missed about being home. My first Christmas back in Utah after my mission, finally getting to hear her sing it again made it Christmas for me. I teared up that time too.
Since then, I’ve drifted between favorite Christmas songs. For awhile it was “Cradle In Bethlehem” with its cosmically gorgeous, starlike first note way up there, gleaming from the heavens. There are years where you could put on literally any song from Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and I’d be in yuletide bliss. I tend to bounce back regularly to “Silent Night”, the classic of classics. Lately, I find myself vacillating between Ron Sexsmith’s beautiful unpreachy call to kindness “Maybe This Christmas” and Darlene Love’s melancholy-but-somehow-buoyant “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”
For a good few years, though, my favorite Christmas song was “Still, Still, Still2.”
“Look,” I said, “I totally get it. On paper, it’s a no-brainer. You need a choir director…I’m a musician. Perfect fit. But, honestly, it’s a bad idea. I can lead a rock band with a nod, help the drummer know when to cut out, or signal a guitarist to know it’s time to solo. But this is different. I know why you thought it was good idea but I can assure you: you don’t want me to do this. I don’t even really read music3.”
Dismissing my protestations as false humility or a last-ditch attempt to get out of it (or both), my bishop smiled reassuringly, “You’ll be great.”
He was asking me (“calling” me, as we say in the LDS church) to be the choir director for our congregation. I reiterated that I wasn’t sandbagging, that this was genuinely a bad idea dressed in good idea’s clothing. I stopped just short of shaking my fist and muttering, “You’ll be sorry!” He smiled and thanked me for accepting. We shook hands. I left his office, a swirling human hurricane of anxiety.
The Christmas program was a month or two away, hence his urgency. It was a big deal in this neighborhood—the usual music-driven Christmas Sabbath service PLUS a cherished, well-attended, long-standing tradition in which several congregations in our geographic area gathered and each congregation’s choir performed a piece, plus some selections from Handel’s Messiah all together. I needed to come up with a plan. Fast.
The bishop had directed me to a file cabinet in the church library with sheet music for choirs. I thumbed through a dusty-sneezy pile of manila folders, desperately seeking something I could even remotely picture myself conducting. That’s when I landed on “Still, Still, Still.” Phew. A song I knew and liked. No reason to overthink it. I checked out all the copies of the song and studied them as much as someone who barely reads music can.
The day of my first rehearsal as choir director arrived. I said a little prayer that was basically, “please help me to not utterly embarrass myself” that, all things being equal, can only have been answered if the bar was far lower than even I—a professional worrier, by trade—had fretted.
Holly had kindly recruited a few friends, in an attempt to pepper the room with pro-Paul people and soften my anxiety with some familiar faces. But the only thing my anxiety thought, upon seeing their supportive faces was, “Oh great, so now the people I like are gonna see me fail too…”
It was just…a nerve-ridden mess. Our trusty accompanist was game and kind and tried her best to nudge me through it, but there was only so much she could do. When I was waving my hands like you’re supposed to as a conductor, I was far too busy splitting my attention between 1) keeping the 1-2-3-4 on time, and 2) trying to keep up with where we were in the sheet music, that I was never gonna do much actual conducting (y’know, where the maestro makes eye contact with just the altos and raises his hand dramatically to get a little more alto oomph, or subtly points towards the sopranos to get help their piano become a little more pianissimo). There would be no variations to help affect the performance. I was narrowly keeping up for myself, much less helping guide all four parts. Getting through the song in one piece would have to suffice.
At one point a tenor raised his hand with a question about the tenor part and I had no answer4. I squirmed and stuttered and tried to fake it til I made it. (I did not make it.) Rip did, though.
Rip5, the previous choir director who didn’t have the common decency to abandon the choir once he was released (like I immediately did upon my—spoiler—later release from the calling), could see and empathize with my pathetic predicament, the proverbial water starting to rise above my eyes, and tried to help, sometimes getting a little too helpful, if I’m honest. It did not exactly inspire confidence in the singers, who (like me) wondered why Rip didn’t just continue being the choir director. He had the skills and seemed interested in the calling.
The choir, like many things in the LDS church, is a volunteer choir. So you’re getting what you pay for, if you want to look at it cynically. Or, from a glass-half-full perspective, you’re getting people who love to sing, who want to spend an extra hour every Sunday singing, and have some real enthusiasm for it. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle6.
You get pitchy tenors who are typically technically baritones punching above their weight for the greater good. Not killing it but definitely doing their best.
You get faithful altos who seem to either 1) feel “Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!7” about the sopranos being preening divas8, or 2) feel a sense of superiority about how it takes a truly talented musician to always sing “the hard parts.”
You get the ultra-loud, glass-breaking (and unspeakably9 pitchy) sopranos like a sitcom trope. Usually there’s at least one alpha. You can’t afford to not know who she is, trust me.
And you get the manly basses who seem to have broken their volume knob; they have one volume, one tone, one mode and that is: BASS. They’re like the musical version of the old Henry Ford quote, “You can have any sound you want, as long as it’s (Richter-registering Inception brrrrruuuuummmmmmphh).”
And then there was me: a clock-watching elementary school kid, bursting with nerves, dying to please while not remotely pleasing, just hoping the rehearsal will end. Falling on my face repeatedly. Out of the corner of my eye, seeing the glass-breaking sopranos roll their eyes or sigh dramatically when their trusty conductor fumbles over how to end the song. Hearing the tenors reach, reach, reach for that note, but, like a Vegas bookie, always taking the under. Not that I was one to get all judgy about failure.
I was failing the most. The choir needed a leader, not someone who could scarcely keep up. It was perhaps more disastrous than the ugly picture I’d forecast for the bishop when he called me. I was drowning.
And then, I was thrown a life preserver.
No, I didn’t wake up one morning and it all clicked. No, I didn’t receive some biblical gift of tongues-but-for-directing-choirs. No, a little musically gifted French rat didn’t secretly start using my hair to turn me into an amazing conductor. This was not going to follow the arc of The Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever.
The life preserver was that I found out that Holly and I were going to be out of town for Christmas. (YES! HALLELUJAH! But i needed to outwardly act like NO! THIS IS SUCH A BUMMER!).
I informed the bishop and the choir, with my best "BUMMER” face on. We arranged for a guy named Nate (who was, no joke, the nicest guy—taught the best Sunday School lessons, gifted his wife an entire year where she wouldn’t wash a single dish, made a killer cookie or brownie if I remember correctly) stepped in.
Beyond relieved, I muddled through the subsequent rehearsals, trying my best but also cowardly breathing easier knowing that the ultimate result was less on my shoulders than before. My goal at that point was just choir competence. The choir rose to the occasion, familiar by now with the shortcomings of their “leader.”
The week before the multi-congregational concert, we decided it would be a good idea to have Nate do a test run with the choir, so they’d be familiar with each other and could work through any wrinkles. I introduced Nate and ceded the conductor spot to him.
Before he even waved his hand once, Nate asked the accompanist to pause and proceeded to tell this really moving, heartfelt story about “Still Still Still.” He choked up a bit. The whole choir teared up. It was beautiful. And the complete opposite of the stressed-out, bad-vibes, all-nerves leader I’d been.
Story over, he wiped a tear from his cheek. Paused. Grinned. “Shall we sing it?”The choir was in the palm of his hand. I’m told the performances at the multi-congregational concert and our own congregation’s Christmas service went off without a hitch.
I was released the next month. We all sang hallelujah.
Who I found out, just googling her name today, was the Days of ‘47 Queen in the 1950’s. Which wasn’t all that surprising.
Cemented by The Lower Lights’ version, an arrangement that was Ryan Tanner’s brainchild, in its nod to Santo & Jonny’s “Sleepwalk”, and that was sung to dust by Marie Bradshaw, Kiki Jane Sieger, and Corinne Gentry. It still gets me every time I hear it sung at our shows.
Yes, I took piano lessons and I can slog my way through songs with no sharps or flats at half-speed. But it’s not the same.
In retrospect, I sincerely believe I would’ve been better off creating my own arrangement and teaching it to the choir. That’s how The Lower Lights tend to work (though with far more latitude for instrumentalists to do what they want and far less prescriptiveness). At least then I could have focused on what I wanted out of the performance rather than what the sheet music dictating to me what I was supposed to want.
Rip, a strong and congenial fellow in his 70s, lived across the street from us. The day after we moved in, he strode across the street and confidently introduced himself with a generationally firm handshake. “My name’s Leon but everyone calls me Rip.”
A few days later, my friend/cousin-in-law Jim who had lived in the neighborhood for a long time, asked how the move-in was going, if we’d met anybody, etc. I replied, “Well, we met Rip…”
Jim’s face was blank. Puzzled. “…Rip?” he asked.
“Yeah, Rip.” I said, “From across the street? White haired guy. Lives in the white house with the fake flowerpots in the window?”
“Do you mean…Leon?”
“Yeah, but he said everyone calls him Rip, so...”
“I have never once heard anyone call him Rip.”
We lived there for more than half a decade and, sure enough, nobody ever called Leon “Rip.” Not once.
I’ve heard rather impressive choirs.
And some earsores.
Like I said, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Unspeakable because, if you know what’s good for you, you will not speak it.
This is fantastic and way too relatable.