A Return to Choral Music

When I arrived in Los Angeles in September and realized that six months of free time lay between me and my job at the law firm, it seemed I would never make it unless I found some kind of organization or activity in which I could participate. Music used to be an enormous part of my life - I sang in choirs all through high school and college, and did a short stint with a women’s choir in St. Louis while I was working as a legal assistant. During law school, I really had very little time to do anything but study, prepare for class, study, and go to class, with the occasional break for a beer or two, so I never got around to joining a choir. And I really, really missed it. So, I typed “Los Angeles Choirs” into Google, hoping to find a choir nearby that had not yet finished auditioning for the season. I came across the Angeles Chorale, a 100 something auditioned group of singers that performs several times a year, and found that auditions were, in fact, happening in three days. I called to set up an audition time, pulled out my copy of Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias, and started trying to remember how to sing. The audition information stated that candidates must submit a “choral resume,” something I have never even contemplated needing before. When I attempted to write down choral works I had performed with my previous choirs, I found that I could only remember a handful. My audition took place in the music building at UCLA and consisted of one prepared piece, some sight reading, and some vocal exercises for the sake of determining my vocal range. When my turn came, I was trembling like a leaf and just hoping that my voice was not. I botched the sight reading exercise (three years away from choral music had left me kind of rusty), but the director stopped me in the middle of my aria and welcomed me to the chorale.

So far I’ve performed with the Angeles Chorale twice – the main performance to which we devoted fall rehearsals was The Messiah. Several friends came to hear the performance, and it went fantastically. The Messiah is an intricate and interesting work – I never fully appreciated it until I learned it for this performance, and I feel it is often underappreciated, perhaps because the most popular bits are so overused and do not necessarily reflect how stunning the rest of the work is.

The other performance with the Chorale is one of my favorite L.A. memories so far - performing in the Holiday Sing Along at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. About forty singers from my choir performed with a few jazz musicians. The concert is a yearly tradition specifically designed to bring in entire families for about an hour and a half of singing favorite holiday songs. I have to admit I was a little skeptical at first, thinking the idea bordered on cheesy, but the audience loved it and the opportunity to sing on the stage at Disney concert hall was worth any residual feelings of ridiculousness that might have stemmed from the Santa Claus hat I was wearing. Before the performance, someone described the venue as the inside of a large ship, and he was absolutely right. The curves and tiers on the inside are as interesting as those on the outside, and result in an acoustically pleasing and oddly seaworthy experience. The best moment of the performance was probably when we did The Twelve Days of Christmas, for which the director, from the stage, split the hall into eleven different sections and assigned them each a different part to sing (everyone sang "five golden rings" together). Seeing everyone in a sold out Disney Concert Hall popping up out of their seats to sing their assigned phrase was quite the spectacle. I was definitely in the Christmas spirit after that.