zk/writing/3/sonata/when-we-sang.md

You are not, it turns out, supposed to sing in an airport. If you and your choir gather around in a loose semicircle with your director standing in focal point and begin to sing, however quietly, they will let your choir finish the song and then one of the gate agents will come and gently request that you stop immediately. Your directory will then smile sheepishly at you --- as sheepishly as a man such as he can manage --- and explain that oops, we were not supposed to do that.

And yet your sense of camaraderie will not be diminished. You will find yourselves sharing those perennial in-jokes all throughout the flight, wherein one of you will remember a song that you sang and say a few words and then others will complete the line, and then you will bust out giggling.

You will find yourselves making your way out of the San Antonio airport to gather around the bus to head to the hotel and then you will find that you are one ticket short after a newcomer to the choir joined in time for the trip, a delightful tenor you are thankful to have, and so you, lucky you, will pile into your partner's car and you two will drive to the hotel, because he lived in Waco and was excited to come up and see you anyway.

You will find yourself falling in love with the riverwalk and will spend as much time as you can down there, because the restaurants are good and the walk is pretty and you can feel the tension building between you and your partner after so many strained conversations as the sensibilities you bear around him clash with those you bare around your fellow singers.

And you will find yourself on Saturday listlessly watching the various choirs performing at the festival and thinking, gosh, some of these folks are not as good as I thought, because there are the BYU singers, whose recordings of Eric Whitacre's music helped solidify your love of choir music, and they are far rougher here in the concert hall than they are on their recordings, and it's not that pleasant sort of rough that younger voices have that leads to a velveteen sound when they join together, but instead an unpracticed or tired sound that makes you feel almost sorry for them.

And when you go back to the hotel that night where your partner has secured a room with a king bed so that you can stay with him, you will find yourself unable to truly feel the bed beneath you, because there is a thin space between you and the sheets, perhaps only enough to slide a piece of paper through, but you suspect that it is a space borne of your excitement for the next day.

Because the next day is your time to shine.

The next day is your day.

The next day, you are the last choir to hit the stage, and you will close out the entire festival, and you are finally at the point in your career when you can allow yourself to feel a sense of pride and readiness, after all of the countless hours that you practiced. Is there risk? There is always risk.

And yet you know you have this.

And so you get up the next morning and you and your choir miss the first performance and lecture of the day solely to practice once more, and then you hear the second-to-last choir from behind the acoustic shell, and then you file out on stage and begin to sing.

You begin with the Debussy, which is fine. It's fine. You enjoy that bit in the middle of the first song, the *Par de ça, ne de là, la mer* part where you sink beneath the waves kind of like in "La cathédrale englutie", but the rest of the three songs is take it or leave it.

Still, there you are, you and your choir, standing now an inch above the risers, with enough space between your feet and the carpeted stands to slide your music folders, if you had them.

And you don't, because those hours and hours of practice have paid off and you've got it all memorized. You could sing this music in your sleep. You almost certainly have. And so you transition smoothly into the little nothing piece that is the Stroope, and that's fine because this is technically a conference for choral conductors who do expect to hear some of the standards that are making their way through the choir world these days. You heard it sang at All-State and it was fine. It's fine.

But then you hit them with a quick one-two-three. You hit them with the Kernis, where the virtuosity is in the rapidly alternating notes evoking the feeling of whirling, and you can feel the air pick up on it. You can feel the breeze start. You can sense the circular momentum of the air building up around you. It's hardly cyclonic. Just enough of a breeze to prick the ears and tease the hair, maybe, but no more.

And then you hit them with the Walton, those clashing, jarring chords and obsessively precise rhythms drawing them forward. It's dissonant, discordant, but in the frenetically organized way that modern music is. Virtuosity of a different sort, praising brother sun, sister moon.

But then it's time. It's time for *Friede auf Erden*. It's time for that vision of peace on earth that is beautifully intricate in its structure, perfectly suited to the more operatic voices without necessarily leaving the lyric, choral voices behind. That vision that is not wholly tonal but certainly not atonal, draped lace-like across an eight-minute-long I-IV-I progression.

And when you sing, they lift into the air with such grace as would make the albatross envious. They have joined you in the air there, buoyed up by the sound of your collective voices, rich and bright, soft and hard, quiet and loud, and now the movement of the air *is* cyclonic. They stay suspended, buffeted, swirling, and as you belt out the four-note motif at the climax, their eyes close as one, and when that denouement converges into a single plagal cadence, no one breathes, for the sound is coming from somewhere else. It is a platonic sound. It comes from the idea of Choir rather than from you, the chorus. It is a sound that resonates through the hall, from no central source following its signal path to no specific sink as, yes, the audience has become one platonic listener in turn.

And then the sound stops and so does the tornadic motion as the air is frozen in place, thick, honeyed, and the conductor's hands stay up for an achingly long time, and then when he brings them down, you can breathe again, and the audience can breathe again, and the air is once more free to move.

And the audience applauds and cheers with a startling suddenness, and you notice that as you settle back down to the risers and the audience settles back down into the seats, you never quite touch the ground again. Not for weeks. It's ages before you can feel the concrete or carpet beneath your bare feet again.