Rehearsal.

Today in Chamber Singers, the group that's doing Rutter's Hymn to the Creator of Light and Brahms' Schaffe in mir Gott, we rehearsed the Brahms and the Boyce Ave Maria, which I completely undercut and diminished in a post a couple of weeks ago b/c it's fantabulastic. Rehearsal didn't go so well as far as revisited notes. Under pitched and in certain circumstances completely wrong: not-even-in-the-same-zip-code-as-the-correct-pitch wrong. I could sense that Dr. Bara was not well pleased, and he did a marvelous job of not adding his unhappiness to the equation of a bad rehearsal. And he sends an email to each performer to express his disapproval. The first sentence: "Dear colleagues, We are better than today’s rehearsal suggests...." Dagger to the heart. We understand he's disappointed, but this sentence in the context of the entire email tells us that we should be too. "New music [Ave Maria - we've rehearsed it two days] must be approached with zeal, energy, curiosity, and absolute fearlessness. Who’s going be the one to nail it first? To make the first mistake and fix it? Older music must be approached with mindfulness of all that has been learned before, musical sensitivity, a vigilant ear for intonation and tone, and a renewed commitment to make it better piece than when we left it." Aside from all that I learned about being a conductor in this email, this letter enlightened not only an approach to music but an appraoch to life. Translation/ correlation/metaphor for life: We're two weeks into the new school year, the giddiness of newness has subsided...or should have. When do we decide to move from there? Do we decide to move from there? If we don't decide to move on, there is a major problem. When we approach a piece of music, Scripture, marriage, or anything that we love that is of substance to us, anything that captures our emotional attention, when do we decide to move from the "giddiness," the on-the-surface of it into the exertion or excercise or application or utilization of it? Two weeks? Two years? Two days? Two hours? I think when we can answer something like the latter, we've found something profound.

Blogged with the Flock Browser