choir

[cellio]

This Pennsic the Debatable Choir will mark its 25th anniversary. (Whether this is actually the 25th anniversary depends on how you count some early proto-choir formations, but this doesn't really matter. It's 25th anniversary observed. :-) ) We've started working on the music for it and I am jazzed. This is going to be fun, and is looking to be a longer concert than we usually do, which makes me happy.

ariannawyn asked me to direct one piece, which we started last week. Somewhere around a third of the choir (maybe a little more) has sung it before though not recently, and at least one person who hasn't is an excellent sight-reader, so after two practices at which we also did other music, people know it well enough that we can start putting some shape to it next week (dynamics, paying attention to what the words mean, that sort of thing). Except I short-changed the altos this week on going through parts, so I'll have to make it up to them.

I've lost track of how long I've been in the choir. I was one of the original members, but I took two breaks. I think I've been there for about 20 of the 25 years, but it never seemed important back then to track such things. There are two other original members, also with gaps (for moves to other cities, in their cases). But we manage to have a good supply of newer members too, so even though the choir is approximately a quarter-century old, we have plenty of vim and vigor and lots of fun.

But I must admit that even after that many years of choral singing, I just cannot wrap my head around French. Italian? Sure, no problem -- I don't speak the language at all but I don't think you'd know that from my singing of it. Latin? I understand a little of it but it's basically like Italian in my brain. Hebrew (we're doing one Hebrew piece)? I understand what we're singing; no problems there. English? Mostly fine; the 12th-century stuff is rough but we're not working on any of that right now. German? Eh, I can make it work. But French, on the other hand, to my brain is nothing but a sequence of random-ish phonemes with "eur" sounds mixed in. Memorizing French songs really challenges me. I don't know why. Fortunately for me, currently the Italian songs outnumber the French ones in the concert list. :-)

Comments

[cellio]

You're right; medieval French is easier. Most of what we sing is renaissance, by which time bad language habits had settled in. :-)

Old Church Slavonic? I find I have no expectations of that; I'm not sure I've ever heard any.

[(Anonymous)]

It's pretty much exclusive to Byzantine Catholic (Greek Rite Catholic, which is not the same as Greek Orthodox) churches. Holy Spirit church in Oakland is a Byzantine church you're probably familiar with. It's the one next to Rodef Shalom with the big mosaic on front.

OCS was pretty much created to be a liturgical language when two Greek saints started missions trips into Eastern Europe in the 800s. Because of this, it has roots common to many different Slavic languages. It originally was written in the Glagolitic alphabet (which looks like pre-Cyrillic), but in the U.S. you see it written in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets, depending on where the immigrants who founded the church came from.

I used to go to mass with my grandparents sometimes when I was a girl. I know a bit of the mass without having to read it, but the fun part was sight-reading all of the 12-letter long vowel-deficient words. :-) I just opened my grandma's prayer book for examples:

tvorjs'c'ich (the apostrophes represent the diacritics that look like the little "v"s; s'=/sh/ and c'=/ch/)
nepokolebimych
prichod'as'c'ich

You get the idea. I have a theory that the reason why the tones (music) in Byzantine churches are so slow is so the congregation can work their way through all the words. ;-)

Sadly, as people are getting further from the immigrant generations, the masses are being sung almost exclusively in English. The liturgy books have pretty much always been printed with English in one column, OCS in the other, and frequently the service would shift (unexpectedly!) from one to the other. There was also a period where larger churches would have two masses, one in English and one in OCS. The last few times I've been to a service, only a few of the really common responses have been in OCS. The rest is in English. I'm all for people knowing what they're saying in church, but it was easy to see with the two-column approach. It's a bit of a shame, because the OCS really was beautiful to listen to (in a mournful, Eastern European sort of way), and English just doesn't have the same flow. Of course, we say the same with Latin liturgical music, too, I guess.

There. Now that's _way_ more than you wanted to know. ;-)

--Pamela

[cellio]

There. Now that's _way_ more than you wanted to know. ;-)

No it's not! I enjoy learning about these things. And the language controversy doesn't seem any different then the kerfuffle over switching from Latin to English in the Roman Catholic church, or in some of the arguments about English versus Hebrew in (liberal) Judaism (in traditional strains the question likely wouldn't come up).

Sorry about the comment screening; I've been getting a lot of spam via anonymous comments lately.