Journals without End

Lined up on a shelf in the back of a closet in the middle bedroom, which is basically the ironing-cum-meditation room, you will see my journals—at least the ones that happen to be roughly the same size. I prefer the oversized journals, 8.5 x 11; they give my left-handed scrawl some room to operate. I've also got quite a few of those smaller moleskin journals, which are easier to take on a trip. And there are also a few oddball volumes, either leather-bound or cloth-bound and covered with little white dots. I even have a green alligator-skin journal, though I have no recollection of where that came from.

Perhaps that's the point of "journaling"—to improve our recollections.  If so, then it doesn't work all that well. But I suspect most people who write in journals do so not to remember things later, but to process things now. There is something about writing things down that solidifies experience, and especially those inconsequential moments when nothing is really happening.

A few days ago I came to the end of a journal that I started in February of 2014. The final entry reads, in part:

"It's been beautiful all day and I really don't know what to do about it. I was worried about the tomatoes I bought. They seemed a little soft when I pulled them out of the bag. In fact, they're the best tomatoes I ever ate..."

Yesterday I felt the urge several times to note some such state of being, vacuous emotion, or idle thought, but could not. I didn't have anything to write in. It was an odd feeling of hopelessness, as if I were about to drift off to some netherworld where absolutely nothing ever gets done.  

Don't get me wrong. "Journaling" is not something I do. The word connotes a determined and regular practice, like jogging or butterfly collecting. I would even hesitate to say that I "keep" a journal. It just happens that I write in a journal  sometimes. They can be painful and embarrassing books to look back on. Sometimes unbearable.

Just now I took a look at a journal from 1989, hit upon some rocky and emotional passages, and was on the verge of tossing the volume in the trash. Flipping to another page, I came upon a reference to a book called The Four Continents by Osbert Sitwell, where he refers to the ancient Cambodian habit of exporting kingfisher wings, and how that industry necessitated the construction of canals for which the country became famous. Osbert comments that the Khmer themselves are long gone, though the kingfishers continue to thrive.

This morning I ran some errands out near Ridgedale, one of which was to pick up a new journal. There are perhaps a hundred types on sale at Barnes and Noble  but nothing works better for me than a black Canson Art Book sketchpad with unlined white paper.

I never go into a bookstore without feeling a pang of nostalgia for my years in the book industry. I like book people, though I don't really fit in to that world. It's driven by an idealistic sense, which I share, that books are intrinsically inspiring, noble, and illuminating—not only what's written in them, but the books themselves, in a strange, almost fetishistic way. Unfortunately, undercurrents of disappointment and frustration are seldom far from the surface of the book world, because there's little money to made in it.

Perhaps that will be the first thing I write in my new journal: "Books are cool."  Somehow, I don't think so. More likely it will be something about vegetables, or the glorious weather we're having, or the strange sensation of wandering the aisles of Penney's looking for light-weight pajamas and saying to myself: So this is what shopping is like. Some people do this all the time.  

All Scientists Should Be Militant Humanists

An article appeared recently in the New Yorker in which an eminent scientist, Lawrence Krause, argues that all scientists ought to be militant atheists. The reasoning is clear in many places, but Krause's familiarity with religion is evidently meager and his faith in science unfounded. As a result, his conclusions are unsound.

Krause is correct to assert that science is an atheistic enterprise. That's just a one-word way of saying that appeals to a supreme being or to transcendental causes have no part to play in scientific explanation. That's true.

But being a scientist is not the same thing as being a human being, and anyone whose self-definition is limited to his or her methodology in the lab is likely to be a sorry excuse for a human being.

Why? Because as an approach to experience, science is categorically incapable of answering the big questions. Specifically, science will never tell us why we're here or what we ought to do next. And the attempt to scoff at such questions is likely to expose a shallow and largely uneducated mind.

Krause's article contains a number of valid points, but the entire piece is predicated on a sort of liberal tolerance (a position that I and many other readers of the New Yorker would fully endorse, by the way) that has nothing to do with science. It's a religious attitude, or better yet, an ethical and metaphysical one. The laws that the Kentucky clerk refuses to follow are based on such attitudes, though their validity rests not on divine revelation but on the constitutional system that instituted them.

Krause's blindspot is exposed, for example, when he describes the clerk's position in the following terms: "The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage."

Krause is evidently so unfamiliar with religions that he thinks they are merely a bundle of ideas—something that people think about. On the contrary, all religions are prescriptive in one way or another. They tell people what the universe is like, but also how one ought to behave in it. Some of these prescriptions are usually ritualistic and even superstitious, but many go beyond such "religious" practices to provide day-to-day rules of conduct. These are the injunctions and precepts that give religion its normative value, but also make it difficult sometimes for devout individuals to do their jobs.

I agree with Krause that the religion of the law trumps any personal religious views an individual might have. To think otherwise would be treasonous. Those who can't do a given job due to religious beliefs ought to be terminated— though they remain free, or course, to believe whatever they want to believe.  But Krause's basic differentiation between actions (politics) and ideas (religion) is unsound and misleading, because it's rooted in a view that intellectualizes, and therefore trivializes religious belief.

Everything becomes clearer once we acknowledge that the law of the land (politics, civil society) is itself a secular religion fraught with transcendental overtones. It doesn't conform to any specific sect or cosmology, but rather, advances a respect for individual freedom that's both deep-rooted and also brilliantly vague.

In any case, there's nothing scientific about it. 

State Fair 2015: Nature, Science, Art

We go to the state fair almost every year, but not for the food, the music, or the rides.

What keeps us coming back is the art, the animals, the informative nature exhibits, the crafts, the ingenious household gadgets, the agricultural displays, and the random encounters with the people who tend the booths.

And the colors everywhere.

It's fun to negotiate a familiar landscape that nevertheless changes year by year—a landscape unlike any other in the world, with so many wildly heterogeneous options that  no two visits end up being the same. A band might start playing, a parade might go by. One line might be too long, another might be conveniently short.  The log-rolling contest or the Pheasants Unlimited booth might catch your eye.

Someone in the education building will hand you a fan with a picture of the Pope on it. Someone in the Eco-building will give you a plastic device to time how long you spend in the shower. (Try to keep it under five minutes, please.)

All seasoned fair-goers have a strategy. Some make long journeys to the fairgrounds from the suburbs by bus, others know about secret parking stalls on the nearby St. Paul campus.

We usually approach from the west on East Hennepin, coming across Northeast Minneapolis on city streets past Surdyk's, Brasa, Eli's, the Cream of Wheat building, FinnSisu ski-sauna shop, and the old Gibbs Farm. We park in the Camel Lot (making sure not to get in the lane that gets sent down to the grandstand parking) and walk into the fairgrounds from the north, where the atmosphere is mellow and  we meet up with many of the things that interest us most before our legs get too worn out.

I don't know much about tractors, but I like to see the antique models on display on the fringes of the kiddy farm. They evoke that era when anyone who wanted to work and had some land could give farming a try.

Across the way are the hot tubs and the miniature cabins for sale.

I volunteered this year to tend the Citizen Science kiosk for an hour in the Eco-building, on the strength of having monitored the water clarity in Bassett Creek, which runs near our house, for the DNR all summer. During my sixty-minute stint I met a woman from Virginia, MN, whose mother might have taken a civics class from my grandfather. Her husband happened to a microbiologist and former president of the Minnesota Academy of Science. I also met a young man whose mother monitors the water quality on the St. Croix from the Stillwater bridge once a week. One middle-aged man I talked to, after learning about how the Viceroy and the Monarch butterflies relate to one another, asked me to explain why we only have one hummingbird species in Minnesota, while in Arizona they have ten.  And a woman from Wisconsin asked me to explain why she found a gray tree frog in her Weber grill the other day.

I'm pretty good at making things up, but that one put me to the test!

Several visitors asked me where they could buy milkweed seeds to support the migration of the  monarchs.(Prairie Restorations?)  By the time my hour was up, I was thoroughly  impressed by the levels of curiosity and awareness exhibited by passers-by.

During all this time, Hilary was at the Handicraft Building, looking at quilts and mittens and rag rugs and architecturally designed furniture. This was a good thing, because that meant  I didn't have to look at them so much later.

Once my shift was over, we spent a few minutes examining the other displays in the Eco-barn, which included a stand offering samples of an organic hot mustard dip for corn chips, and displays promoting the virtues of rain barrels and LED lights. In the lawn in front of the building we scrutinized a locally manufactured Vistabule teardrop trailer similar to one that our friends Jim and Debbie bought recently. It's a cute little trailer—basically a bed on wheels with a kitchen out back—and a Prius pulling it will still get 29 miles per gallon. 

We sat on a bench in the sun eating some mid-morning snacks—a foot long hotdog and a pronto pup— and then wandered into the art building, which was a little hotter, a little more crowded ... a little less exciting than usual? Or was I just a little more tired from having stood around for the last hour talking to strangers.

The image just inside the door, commanding an entire wall, was a lithograph of a tank. Not a good choice.

But by the time we'd finished our circuit I'd identified a number of favorites.  The works by people I know where uniformly stellar—Craig Lassig's photo of a very tired Obama, Clara Euland's intaglio print of the moon rising above a highway, Fay Passow's lithograph of a forest in crepuscular light, Mike Hazard's photo of a Hmong woman harvesting carnations.

Other works that caught my eye in a special way included a painting/collage that reminded me of William de Kooning:

 A huge black-and-white photograph of a man getting a haircut while sitting amid the roadside rubble of a village in India; a print with an animistic flavor done in the Northwest Coast style:

 A painting with German Expressionist overtones probably had the most gravity of any piece in the show:

 A delicate rendering of ice fishing seemed to capture the allure and also the boredom of that winter sport:

I was intrigued by a lovely photograph of a little girl with binoculars standing on a big rock look off at something beyond the edge of the picture, while a huge body of water vanishes into the distance right in front of her; I also liked a tall, thin, stylized rendering of some teepees and horses; and a delightful musical score covered not with notes or words, but with scribbles.

We spent the rest of the morning fighting our way to the carousel area in front of the grandstand, where a panel of local chefs underscored the importance of using fresh ingredients--for the ten-thousandth time. We bought some crab cakes and gumbo at a Caribbean restaurant/bar offering live Peruvian music, and watched a video of some iron ore being blasted out of an open-pit mine in the DNR building.

BWCA Visit

It's worth asking:

Why would anyone drive for six hours, then pile into a very small and tippy watercraft, paddle into the wind for a hour in misty  50 degree weather, then stop on some rocks and string up a tarp to block the wind and drizzle—all for the purpose of reading a book?

Why? because it's fun. It's expansive. It's challenging. It's elemental.

It's also unpredictable, which adds to the drama.

In the BWCA, you never know where you're going to camp. Campsites are sometimes spaced miles apart, and if the one you're counting on is occupied, you have no choice but to move on.

Our recent trip to the BWCA was somewhat different because we spent the first night in Superior, Wisconsin. That made it easier to move up the North Shore at an unhurried pace the next morning on our way to the Gunflint Trail. We pulled in to the outfitter at Gunflint Lodge to buy a few fire-starters. (It had been raining a lot and dry firewood might be hard to come by in the woods.)  The woman behind the counter gave me a whole bag of brown, oily, bubble-gum-like slabs...for free. That's the late-season discount, I guess.

As we continued west toward trail's end, past luscious green swamps (no moose) and huge pillows of white granitic bedrock (the Saganaga Batholith), we passed a sign pointing to a "Seagull Landing" that I'd seen many times before but never had the time to follow.  I'd seen the road on maps and  knew roughly where it came out onto the lake, however, and considering the direction and force of the wind, it occurred to me it might be a better place to embark from than the channel we usually use. At least it was worth exploring.

Thus we found ourselves a few minutes later paddling across a part of Seagull Lake we'd never seen before. Once having pulled ourselves into the protection of a cluster of islands, we spotted a campsite open , and took it.

It was 1 pm. Our paddling was over. My camp notes (in part) read as follows:

"Spent about an hour rigging up our tarp amid a grove of mid-sized cedar tees—an awkward enterprise and an awkward result, but it served us well, keeping off both the wind and the intermittent mist and drizzle. Patches of blue sky appeared three or four times during the afternoon, but they were fleeting. It was mostly gray and a little bit cold. I was happy I'd bought a sweater at the thrift shop in Grand Marais on the way up.

"We sat on our chairs reading at the edge of the woods, where the wind was less severe, then scampered down the hill to the tarp when the mist started in. (Some people wouldn't think this was much fun.) I had my stocking cap on all afternoon. At one point I went off into the woods to get some firewood and came upon a spruce grouse. Bright red eyebrow. Otherwise hard to see, though he was standing on a log ten feet in front of me."

It was a pleasant afternoon, and it got better when the wind died down and bigger patches of blue sky started to appear overhead about 6 p.m. I took down the tarp; it had been flapping all afternoon and was no longer of much use. We were enjoying the evening sun in the clouds and never got around to making a fire, though we heated water on the stove for our traditional mug of powdered Swiss mocha.

It was deadly still and quiet after the sun went down. Then the loons in the channel in front of the tent started to call loudly, maybe five birds (but maybe only two or three) exchanging their hilarity in an overlapping call and response.

"The stars last night were amazing. The crescent moon had set by the time I went out to pee and the entire sky was illuminated  by stars of great intensity and size. They  looked like holes poked in the blue-black firmament with a blunt instrument, through which blazing white light was pouring. Every part of the sky was filled, but I'd just woken up and the dimmer stars didn't register. It was a thrilling sight and I should have lingered to appreciate it more fully, but I was barefoot, the ground was wet, and it was maybe 50 degrees.

"The wind has shifted. It's now milder, coming from the south. We took a two-and-a-half hour paddle through the warren of islands out to the Palisades and then south into the wind around Three Mile Island, where most of the countryside is in wretched shape due to a forest fire that passed through in 2007.

When we got back we rigged up the tarp at the other end of the campsite. Then lunch. Then more sitting. Listening to the chatter of the kingfishers. Watching a family of six mergansers fishing together along the shoreline.

Now the water in the channel shimmers with golden sunlight muted by the haze, and everything has  a blue-green caste. I've picked up a book a Zen poems I brought along. Reading or not reading, it's largely the same.

And now I hear voices in the distance, though only one canoe has passed this way in the last 24 hours, and those voices are sometimes an illusion, a trick of the wind.

When you're in camp, you spend a lot of time doing nothing. The campsite is huge, open, and grassy. You can look to the west for at least a mile, and we sometimes see parties of distant canoes heading out from the channel we were planning to embark from.

Right now I'm staring at a clump of birch trees that's maybe five years old. 

Further down the hill, I see a solitary tree that might have taken root just last year.

Leonardo and the Leicester Codex

If you happen to go to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this August, you'll have the opportunity to see something most people never get a chance to see—some pages full of writing, with drawings in the margins, by Leonardo Da Vinci. A few years ago Bill Gates paid thirty million dollars for these eighteen sheets of paper, and since then he's allowed them to go on display from time to time.

The pages are encased in Plexiglas (or some such thing), mounted in free-standing kiosks scattered amid four low-lit exhibition rooms, and carefully illuminated to make it possible for you to see both sides. Most viewers won't be able to read anything Leonardo wrote because he wrote in Italian—and in the "wrong" direction, moving from right to left. But the drawings in the margins are interesting and the interpretive signs under each display explain the gist of what Leonardo is exploring on any given two-page spread.

It  would be easy to look at three or four of these pages and say, "This would be  a lot easier if I were sitting in a chair, holding a Dover reprint in my lap." It takes a bit of effort to take a step back and see the "thing"—the sheet of paper that Leonardo actually dragged his pen across five-hundred years ago. Yes, there it is, right before your eyes, albeit tucked safely behind a few thick panes of transparent protective material.

This is the "aura" that Walter Benjamin made such a big deal about with regard to original works of art as opposed to reproductions. It's a form of sympathetic magic. You see,  I never met Leonardo personally, but I have examined the very sheets of paper upon which he recorded his passing thoughts. Cool.

Leonardo crossed out some things, and he sometimes wrote additional comments above and below the lines, but the sheets are remarkable "clean," as if he usually wrote precisely what he was thinking, or was adept at modifying and qualifying his thoughts on the fly, rather than crossing them out and beginning anew.

The drawings, though invariably small, are also remarkably clean. The lines are straight, the shading delicate.

In the last room of kiosks, half-hidden by a couple of protruding walls, there are two illuminated displays with benches in front of them. They add  immeasurably to the impact of the exhibit. You can sit in front of either display and flip electronically through the pages of the codex, reading them in English with the aid of a lens that magically translates the lines into English as you drag it across the screen. This is very cool.

Is the text interesting? Not really, unless you're wondering how water eddies around obstacles or how light bounces off the moon. Leonardo was interested in a great many things, such as how spring water can issue forth from the earth high up in the mountains, and how aquatic shells reached those elevations. Is there water on the moon, and if so, why doesn't fall down to earth? It's fun to see a fertile mind at work, examining various hypotheses, rejecting this one, accepting that one, and giving us the reason why.

But we now know the answers to most of the questions Leonardo pondered. And we know that many of the answers he came up with were wrong. Sure, he got lucky every now and then, with ideas like earthshine, and plate techtonics, and helicopters. Still.

It would be pointless to deny Leonardo's remarkable industry and perhaps unparalleled curiosity. But to portray him as a "genius" of the first order seem like a publicity ploy and doesn't tell us much about him. Aristotle, to take a comparable example, wrote works on aesthetics, formal logic, ethics, and metaphysics each of which forms the bedrock of its respective discipline. I don't think anything similar could be said of Leonardo. He was basically an artist of the first rank and a speculative engineer. He observed, analyzed, and imagined things, and drew many of them with great precision, but he seldom turned any of his work along this line into genuine poetry. I, for one, find it hard to warm to him as a painter, a scientist, or a person.

What I liked best about the Leicester Codex is the note-taking effort itself. Page after page, we find ourselves in the presence of a mind in the act of uninhibited description, analysis, and speculation.  The thought is right there on the page. Leonardo tended to overwork his paintings, but when he jotted down his seemingly boundless ideas he just kept moving ahead.

A stroke of genius on the part of the exhibition curators was to cap the multi-room display of Leonardo's incomprehensible writing with a room filled with huge reproductions of coral reefs made out of colored yarn by members of the Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring. The pairing is irreverent and gutsy, yet it makes a certain amount of sense, in so far as the intricacy of the crocheting patterns gives the created forms a natural and organic look—just the sort of thing that might have fascinated Leonardo. And the garish colors provide a refreshing contrast to the dimly lit pages of the monotone codex.

The final room of the exhibit is even further removed from the spirit of Leonardo...but it also happens to be engaging. It exhibits a video, projected on an enormous screen, called "The Raft" by Bill Viola that runs perhaps fifteen minutes. For much of the time we watch a group of people who seem to be waiting for a bus. No one talks, no one moves. One by one, a few other individuals show up and muscle their way into the crowd without too much effort or resistance.m(The man reading a book barged his way in a few minutes ago; the woman in red and blue on the right is starting to weaver her way through the crowd.)  The only sound is an ominous off-stage rumbling.

Everything changes when enormous blasts of water appear from either side and continue to pour over the waiting people for several minutes, battering them brutally. Some fall to the floor almost immediately, others hold their own impassively as best they can.

Finally the deluge comes to an end and the individuals either try to help one another up, or don't. Viola claims to have been inspired by Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa," and in the final panel above you can see a faint resemblance.

It's a bizarre scenario, but for some reason I found it mesmerizing.  

Perfect Combo - Zen Box and Source Song Festival

Not quite sure what to do with ourselves after a month of serious choral singing, we decided to spend some time listening to other people sing. The McPhail Center for Music happened to be hosting a week-long festival called Source Song. Many of the events were workshops and master classes designed for advanced students and professional singers, composers, and accompanists, but some of the evening recitals were free, the programs looked enticing, and best of all, they were only an hour long.

I'm a big fan of the art song, whether it be eighteen-century Italian, nineteenth-century German, or twentieth-century French. In the first place, the naked human voice is a lovely instrument, and due to that fact, even the most astringent modern compositions for voice can hardly avoid being lyrical. It also seems that the poems chosen for text often take on added depth or poignancy in a musical setting.

One added feature of these recitals was that they started at 6:15. This meant that we could park down near the river—plenty of meters available at that time of day—and check out the Happy Hour at Zen Box Izakaya, which runs from five to six.

The items we sampled at Zen Box were uniformly fresh and tasty, from the Moyashi Itame (Bean sprouts, carrots, onion stir-fry) to the Age Gyoza (crispy pot-stickers with Kamikaze sauce). I loved the Daigaku Imo (fried sweet yams) and the Chicken Kara-Age (boneless pieces of fried chicken Japanese style). The seaweed salad tasted like the salad they serve on the pier in Morro Bay, California (that is to say, very good) and the Chashu (flame-grilled pork belly) was like limp flavorful rounds of thin bacon sitting in a bowl of rice covered in citrus soy.

The wait-staff at Zen Box all wear t-shirts and headbands, as if they've just stepped in from the rice paddies, or were trying out to be extras in The Seven Samurai. The house wines and sake are served in beakers from which you can refill your little shot glass again and again.

Refreshed and invigorated by an array of bright but not overly spicy flavors, we walked a block and a half to the McPhail Center, stopping along the way to plug a few more quarters into our meter.

The McPhail's Antonello Hall is one of my favorite venues. The chairs aren't great, but the theater space is smallish while opening out to the city via an enormous window behind the stage. The wood paneling on the walls is an added pleasure.

And we were in select company—among the privileged few.  There were eleven artists set to perform (including the pianists, of course), and by my count, there were thirty people in the audience. If we add to the list of artists the four composers in the audience who stood up to receive a share of the applause as their presence was acknowledged by the singer on stage who'd just performed their work, then the ratio between artist and listener becomes more balanced yet.

We ducked into the recital hall too late to read the program, and throughout the set I was thinking that these students were very talented indeed. Only later did I learn that they'd flown in from Maryland, Philadelphia, Delaware, and North Dakota. (Maybe she drove down.) They'd come to study with the composers and vocalists involved with Source Song, including French baritone Francois Le Roux and Russian baritone Anton Belov. It was great fun listening to them sing.

The recital we attended that first night was devoted to compositions by living composers from Minnesota, but thinking back on them now, I couldn't tell you anything much about stylistic differences between composers or individual pieces. The personalities of the singers made a much stronger impression, not only though their voices by also through their choice of clothing, their postures, and their facial expressions. The next night we returned again to hear the same vocalists perform Brahms, Wolf, deFalla and other venerable composers.

Superficial impressions: One soprano had a confident bearing on stage, a warm tone, curly black hair, and great strength in the upper register, but I was troubled by the glittery collar on her black dress. Another had stout legs and bold posturing, but her voice seemed to be beaming from outer space, pure and clear, and the variety of expressions that passed across her face as she sang was extraordinary. One had a pinched and plaintive face that came to life when she sang Poulenc.  And another had the appearance of a well-heeled former soccer mom who'd taken up a new career to find fulfillment—and discovered she had the pipes to pull it off.

Whether it was me, or the hall, or the Daigaku Imo, I don't know, but I also found the pianists very pleasant to listen to. Rather than focusing intensely on their own expressive power, they were focusing on something less predictable—the vocalist's pace. And freed of the burden of relentlessly carrying the tune, they could let the textures flow.   

We ran into our friend Athena Kildegaard after the performance, and I asked her if she might, by chance, be related to the Anika Kildegaard who had just sung so beautifully.

"She's my daughter," she said proudly. "But did you happen to see the recital Wednesday night by Francois Le Roux? I don't speak French, but it was magnificent."

"I'll tell you what," I said. "I have the compete songs of Faure and Poulenc on eight CDs. How would you like I burn you a selection? "

"That would be great," she said. 

And so I did.

On Singing in a Choir - Oratorio Society Summer Chorus

Sure, I can belt out "Blue skies, shining on me" from the stern of a canoe, and I can sing "Away, away, with rum, by gum" around a campfire with the best of them. But singing in a choir, in parts, is not something I have done or had a burning desire to do in recent years. But Hilary thought it might be fun. Perhaps a church choir—though we haven't been to church in years—or one of the many local choral societies.  

On our first foray into that realm together—a December sing-along Messiah at Central Lutheran Church downtown—I got caught up in the majesty of standing in the midst of a few hundred powerful voices, even if mine wasn't one of them.

Then we heard from our friend Debbie that the Oratorio Society Choir was sponsoring a Summer Chorus (along with the U of M's School of Music) that might fit the bill. Auditions were not required, though the promo literature made it clear that prior experience singing in a choir was essential. The commitment would consist of two-and-a-half-hour rehearsals twice a week for a month, followed by one Saturday dress rehearsal with full orchestra and a performance later that same evening. Could be done.

To my mind the crowning virtue of the program was the repertoire—opera choruses!

I hadn't sung in a choir since my teen years, so I sent the organizers what I considered to be a delicately phrased email. My question was this:  If you loved opera but hadn't sung in a choir in forty years, weren't good at sight-singing, and didn't sing very loud at any rate, would it be appropriate for you to sign up?

The reply was pleasant and to the point. Sight-singing wasn't really required because they would send you Youtube videos of the choruses and Mp3 files of your specific parts to listen to. Nor was it important that you sing loud. (Probably just the reverse!) In short, if you could read music, carry a tune, and were willing to put in the time (and send in the entry fee) you would certainly be welcome to participate.

Thus I found myself one hot summer evening sitting on a chair in a large rehearsal hall at the University of Minnesota with 150 strangers. Hilary had also signed up, and so had Debbie, along with her daughter, and Becca, another good friend, so there were a few friendly faces in the crowd. I learned via Facebook that the sister of a friend was singing across the room in the soprano section, and I went over to chat with her during break once or twice. And I soon made the acquaintance of Doug, a mild-mannered man sitting next to me in the back row.

After a few relaxing warm-up exercises that first night, we dispersed into "sectionals," where the first thing we did was divide ourselves into 1s and 2s. When asked, I reported that I was a "tenor 2." I had no previous knowledge of this concept, but figured lower was the better place to hide. In the only choir I'd ever sung in there were only two tenors—me and my dad; dividing us in two would have been easy, but it probably wouldn't have been a good idea.

That first night the tenors and basses went over a few of the pieces in the program with Alex, one of the student conductors, at the piano. We were asked to sing a crisp "pom-pom-pa-pom" rather than the words in the score— S’intrecci il loto al lauro. This made it easier to move ahead without struggling with the Italian, and also more difficult to swoop lazily up to the proper pitch. "Hear the note in your mind," Alex advised us, "so when you open your mouth, it comes out clear." Easier said than done.

Later that evening we regrouped with the altos and sopranos, and several other grad students also took a turn at the podium. I was immediately impressed with how cheerful and competent most of them were.  I believe they may have learned this from maestro Matthew Mehaffey, who had a buoyant sense of humor and a vast assortment of one-liners, always delivered in a cheerful voice. "Don't sing it like you heard it in the movies; sing it like it's written on the page." "That was fair: Now sing it with your 'pretty' voice." "I'm getting paid to do this, and when you don't sing at my tempo, it hurts my feeling." "Altos, you have a whole measure to take a deep breath; don't wait 'til the last second."

Though I'm sure Matt had used many of these lines before, he was also clearly adept at developing humorous remarks on the spot to sugar-coat the bitter pill of any and every suggestion for improvement--and there were many.    

A key element of these rehearsals was to avoid wasting time. We were advised not to ask questions among ourselves; it was a distraction to others. And we were advised not to ask questions of the conductor, either. There wasn't enough time. They'd be available during breaks to help us with whatever questions we had.  

The rehearsals invariably started slowly, but then went by in a flash, and afterward, as we walked with our friends across the pedestrian bridge from Ferguson Hall to the parking lot through the warm summer night, I was twice as alert and not nearly so tired as when we'd arrived three hours earlier.

At the second rehearsal I was distressed to find that Doug, who had been sitting beside me the first night, was down in the third row. "What are you doing down there," I lamented. "I was leaning on you all the way."

"No, I was leaning on you," he replied, and we both laughed. (At the next rehearsal Doug was gone.)

I was now sitting next to Tony and Dale, who were long-time buddies. They were cordial but mostly interested in talking to one another rather than me. Little by little I gained Tony's ear, and that was important because he was an experienced singer. In the course of later rehearsals I learned that he used to rebuild pianos for a living and was once a choir director himself. So when Lukas, the German specialist among our student conductors, would slow the music down and then say, "Put a fermata in there," I would glance over Tony's shoulder to see what he was doing. I know what it means to slow down; Tony knew what a fermata looks like.

One thing I found it hard to accept was how high Tony was singing the first few bars of Wagner's "Treulich Gefuhrt." The note was a D above middle C, eventually rising to a G. Tenors could not be expected to sing that high, could they?

Working it out on a piano when we got home that night, I discovered that he'd been right. And a little online research led to the discovery that tenors are expected to sing far higher than that. I started to wonder if perhaps, over the years, I'd become a baritone.

Practicing at home proved to be more difficult than I expected. The Mp3 for the grand finale of Aida, to take an example, started at a place where we weren't actually supposed to sing. They'd included the solo part.  The score for Pirates of Penzance had about twelve staffs, and I had no idea if I was supposed to be singing the Tenor, the tenors, or the chorus of pirates. And the two tenor lines in Tannhauser's "Pilgerchor" were both on the same Mp3 file, making it difficult to hear the lower line I was supposed to be singing. (Admittedly, it all became easier once I figured out that on the score the second tenor part was marked with staffs pointing down rather than up.)

At times it seemed we lived in a madhouse, with Hilary pounding out an alto line on the piano in the living room and me in the office, two closed doors beyond, trying to figure out how to parse "Gloria all’Egitto, ad Iside, Che il sacro suol protegge!" among fifteen notes of varying length and emphasis.

Somehow, everything became easier once we'd reassembled with the group. In part this was because we were once again focused on very small sections of a score, but it was also sometimes easier to find the correct path with confidence in the aural context of the fuller harmonies all around you. And who knows? Maybe the at-home practicing also made a difference.

By the end of our second rehearsal, the complexity of the task ahead had largely been revealed. We were set to learn eleven choruses. And it wasn't merely a matter of hitting the right notes. Phrasing (in German, French, or Italian), emphasis, dynamics, diction, mood—they all needed to be attended to, as well as the vocal "sound." The appropriate staffs of my score were soon highlighted in yellow. I scribbled Ks over the Italian "che"s, and "oink" above the German "euch." The pages were littered with "stop," "go to the top of 13," "breathe," "staccato," "quick page turn," "same as soprano end-note here," "dramatic volume," "sing piano, but with fortissimo consonants," and numerous other bits of advice, some of them incomprehensible to me now.    

Several of the student conductors were with us during the last part of the third rehearsal, listening, conferring. As it came to an end and I walked slowly down the risers, I had a vision of Matt, the Oratorio Society's director, pulling a few twenties out of his wallet (my entry fee) and handing them back to me.

"You did your best," he'd say in his kindliest voice, trying for once to suppress his exuberance, "But we really can't use you. It's not working out."

No such event took place, and in time things started to gel a little. Or so it seemed to me. At the next men's sectional, I had the good fortune to be joined by one of the graduate students. He strode up behind me and took the empty chair next to mine. "What section is this?" he asked quietly. "Second tenor? Do you mind if I join you? I don't really have much to do tonight." He had a beautiful voice and with his help I made my way for the first time fairly convincingly through the rich inner textures of Tannhauser's  "Pilgrim's Choir."

Had he been sent to check me out? To help me along? To blot out the singing of Brad, the eager but fidgety  baritone to my left? Maybe he was telling the truth, just killing time.

When the rehearsal was over, I said, "You can sing with us any time." He asked me if I was in the regular Oratorio Choir (I had to chuckle at that) and when I told him I hadn't sung in a choir in forty years, he asked, "Are you enjoying it?" And I found myself answering, "It's a riot."

Of course, many members of this ad hoc summer choir were seasoned singers. Quite a few were members of the regular Oratorio Society Chorus. Hilary was sitting next to a woman who sang regularly  in the Twin Cities' Women's Choir. Tony's friend Dale had sung for years with the Edina Choir. I learned by chance from the tenor sitting in front of me that seven members of his church choir had joined up. These were the people that moved the music ahead and gave it body.

Yet there were certain places where everyone sounded terrible. For example, in the finale to Act II of Borodin's Polovtsian Dances, there's a lot of shouting and fascistic, march-like exclamations, with everyone blaring out "Fearless, mighty, ruthless warrior, Hail!" The "Hail" is held for three and a half bars on a dissonant triad. Then, after a two-beat rest, the tenors and basses come in with "Sing his praise,"  starting on A-sharps an octave apart. That A-sharp is somewhat out of context harmonically with what has come before, and no one seemed to know quite where it was. A few courageous voices forged boldly ahead with rough approximations while the rest of us limped along behind, but the little phrase "Sing his praise" ended up sounding hesitant and slightly pathetic rather than boisterous and celebratory, as if they were being sung, not by enthusiastic followers but by salaries apparatchiks.

However, the next day I downloaded that piece as performed by Torgny Sporsen, Neeme Järvi, and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. I wanted to burn a CD of the choruses included in the program, and I owned most of them, but not the Borodin (and not the Wagner). As I listened, it occurred to me that the Gothenburg Chorus didn't sound so hot on that passage, either. Indeed, listening to the choruses on my CD from Aida and Nabucco, I came to the conclusion that many professional choirs sound like holy hell when you really stop to listen.  

I shared that theory with Tony at the next rehearsal and he politely rejected it with a shake of the head. "It's not easy to record such things," he said, "but you can tell a good chorus when you hear one."

As a sentimental aside, I ought to mention that Borodin's Polovtsian Dances holds a special place in my heart. When I was a wee lad, my parents would occasionally build a fire in the fireplace on a winter night, put that LP on the hi-fi, and turn out the lights, at which point my big brother and I would dance in front of the flames. That's one of the most peaceful and enchanting memory from my early childhood. And even today, the tuneful sections of that piece sound lovely to me.

By the time we'd entered the fourth and final week of rehearsals, I was confident that the concert would go okay, that no one was going to kick me out ... and that I still needed to work on quite a few things.

As we began to rehearse larger segments and then entire pieces, things started to sound better. (Or could it be that things sounded better as the conductor less often stopped us to fix things?) But just when all seemed to be going well, yet another complication was added. During the last Wednesday rehearsal, several of the conductors made it clear that they expected us to look at them, more than occasionally, rather than at the notes and markings in our score.

How were we supposed to follow the notes, remember the weird phrasing, and make use of all the scribbling on our score, if we were looking at them? But of course it was necessary. They were providing the tempi, signaling the crescendos and the dramatic delays. The final touches of expressiveness came from the conductor's gestures. If you weren't paying attention, you could screw things up big time.

"I would rather that you mispronounced every Italian word while looking up, projecting your voice, and sharing your enthusiasm with the audience," Matt told us, "than sing every word perfectly with your nose buried in the score." This is something you tell the choir on the last day of rehearsal, not the first.

On the Saturday morning of the performance Hil and I were back at work at our parts. A few lines of Italian were still bothering me. They appear at the start of a movement, when I should be looking at the conductor, but they still weren't matching up very well with the tune, though at our previous rehearsal, Catherine, one of the student conductors, had made it clear we should long since have memorized the passage.

I typed out the phrases, and then highlighted the points of emphasis.  

"sembra una vedova che al-fin si togli-e i bruni panni ond’ e-ra involta."

An even more phonetic rendering would have looked like this.

sem-broo-na vey-do-va Kal-fin-si tow-ley-ee ...

But time was getting short, the lines amounted to about five seconds in a ninety-minute performance—and I was getting a little sick to my stomach. So I decided to drop the effort and read a book for a while.

When we arrived at the theater that afternoon, whatever butterflies I'd experienced fluttered off for good. It was fun sitting in the empty seats of the theater watching Matt, Alex, Catherine, and others rearrange the kettle drums and move the music stands here and there. The performance was still six hours away but there was already a hint of electricity in the air.  

Orchestra members started to arrive, among them my friend Dave, a trombonist who performs regularly with the Minnesota Opera. We got to talking about the Borodin piece, the shouting harmonies of which I characterized as "Sythian." I was thinking less about the Sythian mode than about Prokofiev's bizarre and seldom-performed Sythian Suite. Dave is an expert at sustaining a conversation on the strength of half-truths, puns, and imaginative digressions and he asked me where the Sythians came from. I replied "central Turkey," though it occurs to me now that "central Asia" might have been a better response. Dave had just finished reading a book about the origins of the fez, and  we were on the verge of extending our conversation in new directions when the time came to take our seats for the final rehearsal.

I was relieved to find I was still seated in the back row next to Tony and Dale, with Brad the Baritone to my immediate left. (During rehearsals Brad and I had always had a chair or two in between us.) I'd gotten to like Brad during our month of singing together. All the conductors knew him because he sang in one of the university choirs, and he told me he also gave saxophone lessons to kids. I was especially pleased to note that the tie he'd chosen for the performance was much louder than mine.  

Tony had looked a little bedraggled at some of the rehearsals but he now looked well-rested and sharp. "I enjoy the rehearsals a lot more than the performance," he told me with a sigh. I also learned that he'd once taught English in Thief River Falls, though he was now in IT. When I mentioned that I edited and designed books for a living, he said, "You should talk to Dale, here. That's what his daughter does."

Leaning over I said, "Dale, what's your daughter's name?"

When he told me I said, "I've known Kelley for years. She was with Beaver's Pond, then went to Lerner, as I recall. She even brought an intern over to the house once—I'm self-employed—to introduce her to a 'designer' at work."

Small world.

Such incidental familiarities may be uninteresting to a seasoned vocalist, but to me they were important, in so far as I had no idea how I was actually doing; rehearsal time is largely spent singing or listening and responding as a group to bits of advice. Personal interactions are only likely to take place with the people you already know and the people sitting next you.

In the end, I found that I enjoyed the rehearsals, but perhaps enjoyed the performance even more. This may have been because during rehearsals, one part of your brain is removed, gathering information about what went wrong and how little things can be improved upon. During the performance that chunk of brain power is released from such tasks and can turn itself toward the job at hand—singing expressively. If you flub a line or lose track of a pitch there's nothing to be done but move on ahead, and that's a liberating feeling. Most of the things I'd learned during rehearsal seemed to be coming back to me unbidden (though all the pencil markings helped) as part of the natural flow of the music.

The addition of an orchestra didn't hurt either. The soloists and conductors in tuxedos gave the event a touch of class. And with seven hundred people in the audience, I couldn't help feeling that, aside from being a lot of fun, what was about to take place was really going to mean something, with everyone contributing freely, anonymously, to a single powerful and pleasing effect.

We met some friends in the lobby after the performance and I was pleased to see that even Sheila, who sang opera professionally in Germany for twenty years, now gives voice lessons, and refers to herself as "hypercritical," claimed to have loved the show.

"I cried all the way through Puccini's 'humming chorus,' " she said. In fact, her eyes still looked a little moist. Maybe the encore sing-along of "Va Pensiero" had also gotten to her.