Music to Shiver the Soul
Text & illustration by Mary Anne McLean

Oh rapture and bliss! The Bard College Community Chorus! An ancient sage once advised "Make sure you always have something magnificent in your life." And, didn't Proust somewhere and in some way suggest that one try to keep a patch of sky in sight? This choral music has been my something magnificent and my patch of sky. It touches me to my deepest strata, to my nucleus. I would drive home from a concert, intoxicated, much as I had run home from the Tarzan matinees when I was ten, leaping and swinging from imaginary vine to imaginary vine. Yet I could only enjoy this music as an outsider, I was not qualified to savor it as a participating member. Or, so I had thought, until . . .

Until I had accompanied an aspiring chorister to last season's first rehearsal. To sit beside her, to boost my timorous friend's confidence, to make certain she would not sissy out. When James Bagwell, the conductor, inquired as to whether she were an alto or a soprano, she replied, "an alto." He then turned to me. I said, "I'm with her, I'm alto. I couldn't believe I had said that. I had just slid myself into the chorus, an outrageous imposter.

I could easily slide out at any time though, couldn't I? But, wouldn't it be wonderful to experience the music in situ, stereophonically, to see how, little by little, a work is collaged together, to eavesdrop on this mysterious process, to be on the face side of the conductor?

Although music is not my first language, I had always had good instincts despite my modest upbringing. Hadn't I, as a youngling, expressed that I liked the organ music they played in church before the service, not the hymns, but the music without words (surely this had been Bach and Handel among others), but that I didn't like the organ music they played at the skating rink? Hadn't I also, as a girl, sung operettas endlessly, The Student Prince, The Merry Widow, The Desert Song, in spite of my brother's constant "quit your darn singing"? But, after my mother died, I went to live with a quiet Quaker family and I never sang again.

Here I was, nearing the seventh inning of my life. Was it not time to stretch some heretofore narrow confines? Hadn't I recently begun to wear my long dark, dramatic French cape with confidence? Hadn't George Plimpton, the participatory journalist, plopped himself onto a football team, and into a symphony orchestra, and learned to play the game and the cymbals? Right there, in the spirit of George Plimpton, I decided to give it a try.

I was sitting like Dylan Thomas's aunts were sitting "...on the edges of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break like faded cups and saucers." When I finally dared to sing, it was again as in another of Thomas's memories, "A small dry voice like the voice of someone who hadn't spoken for a long time joined in, a small dry eggshell voice."

I had thought that reading music might be like the child's game of follow-the-dots. I immediately found that it wouldn't be quite so simple. I also realized that Harold Hill's "Think System" in The Music Man would not be enough either. Hadn't James Bagwell said that this was definitely not a sing-along? If I were to do this, I would do it whole-souledly. Hadn't he said that the quality he most looks for is the willingness to work hard?

I wanted to find a toy piano like Schroeder's upon which I could pick out the alto part of Mozart's Te Deum and Pergolesi's Magnificat. Alack, no nice little wooden piano to be found, except for a wee baby grand, and even I knew that to be too plinky in spite of its charm and its matching bench. I succumbed to a rudely worldly, electric keyboard.

The library scouted out fifteen books on the subject of learning to read music and to sing, the most useful of which was written by someone named Peter Seeger. Oh, Pete Seeger! The first page began with a picture of a note. It read "This is a note..." Indeed, my velocity! I tape-recorded the rehearsals. I studied my notes. I drenched myself in the music, it permeated the house. At any moment, I might issue forth so Latin a passage as "...non confundar in aeternum" (let me never be confounded).

It is inherent in the Bard College mission to serve the community. Besides, Bard knows the benefits of juxtaposing the turquoise-haired student and the village elder who share the same enthusiasms. James Bagwell, our conductor, is an absolute treasure; passionate in his work, loved by his students, and so impressively accomplished and experienced. He has conducted and trained choruses for major orchestras: the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Pops, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, the Tulsa Philharmonic, and the Capella Festiva Chorus and Orchestra in New York are a few among the many.

Standing before us, making poetry with his hands, James shepherded the performance to just where he wanted it. He was affability itself. He was able, in his own earnest and winning way, to establish and maintain the highest of standards. The closest he ever came to a scold was when a few sopranos slurred a passage. He responded: "If anyone has that proclivity, desist." He offered bits of historical enlightenment and things to reflect upon, such as suggesting that there may be a similarity between the structure of a chant and the structural ratio of a cathedral dome in Florence.

It was devilish hard being an alto, to resist being swooped along with the melodic sopranos. At some moments I was struck with the thought that the alto may not be just the "straight man" to the soprano, not just the under-painting which makes the chiaroscuro possible, but vital along with the tenor and bass to the skeletal system of the music--that the soprano may need shoulders to stand upon.

What had begun as something of a lark for me--what fun, a chorus girl in my sixties!--had become a nourishing, more exhilarating experience than I could have imagined. To be in the epicenter of the music, to reverberate on a visceral level, to be a breathing part of something so grand, something both literal and abstract! The Birds in the play by Aristophanes had hoped for a feast; instead they were offered oratory: "A dinner of words, a fat and succulent haunch of speech, a meal to shiver the soul." I had expected perhaps a light repast, but I received music to shiver the soul.

Mary Anne McLean is author and artist of a book of botanical time-lapse studies, Mary Anne's Garden, published by Harry N. Abrams in New York. She has nearly completed a second volume entitled Wildlings in Fields, Woods, and Watery Places.

This season's first rehearsal for the choral performance of Haydn's Theresienmesse is September 7th, 7:30 at Olin Hall on the Bard College campus in Annandale.