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Sing Sing SingSeptember 13, 2005 Last night the Island Community Chorus regrouped after its summer layoff and started rehearsing for its December concert. I managed to get there in good time, instead of under-the-wire. Except on school holidays, we practice in the rehearsal room of the regional high school, a high-ceilinged white-cinderblock cube. Against the south wall sit the sopranos, against the north wall the altos, and against the west, outside, wall the tenors and basses and whatever sopranos and altos spill over from the south and north. Since about half the tenors are women, it's not always easy to tell where the sections end. The chorus gets incrementally bigger by the year. Last night the figure "120" was mentioned, which is to say that no one would notice if I sang or not. I'm a rank-and-file first alto. Not a soloist, not a soloist wannabe, not a musician. I never studied voice; my sight-singing skills are rudimentary -- and that's better than they were a few years ago. I love to sing; I sing because my life is poorer if I don't. The concerts are secondary. Last spring I made every rehearsal, though I knew almost from the start that when the chorus performed its annual season opener at the Tabernacle in early July, I would be yammering about science fiction at Gaylaxicon 2005. I sing in the Island Community Chorus mainly because I haven't discovered an alternative for an amateur singer who doesn't write songs, doesn't play the guitar, can't improvise harmonies, and wouldn't be caught dead in a church choir. There are some good ones on Martha's Vineyard, but absorbing that much Christian doctrine every Sunday morning would turn me into one of those tedious anti-ecclesiastical ranters. The music for the upcoming concert -- notwithstanding the valiant efforts of some chorus members to call it "our winter concert" or "the holiday concert" -- is overwhelmingly Christian. I can more or less deal with this: whatever the text and the inspiration, the music is art; an allowance I could not make for the prayers and sermons I'd have to listen to if I sang in a church choir. It helps that two pieces -- Daniel Pinkham's Christmas Cantata and John Rutter's Gloria -- are in Latin. In December 1994 the holiday concert consisted, as it had for many years, of part 1 of Handel's Messiah, plus the "Hallelujah" and the glorious "Amen." Nanu was about two weeks away from giving birth, and one of her puppies was going to be mine. My visual imagery for "For Unto Us a Child Is Born" was decidedly canine. Last night the director -- whose excellence as a teaching conductor is largely responsible for the burgeoning of the chorus -- announced that this was our tenth anniversary year. That's a tad misleading. More precisely it's the tenth anniversary year of his directorship. The Island Community Chorus is the very direct descendant of the pick-up ensemble that rehearsed and presented the Christmas portion of Messiah to the Vineyard every December. When I joined in for the first time in 1989, the tradition was well established; my program for 1993 notes that "For twenty-two consecutive years, Grace Church has sponsored the annual presentation of Handel's Messiah on Martha's Vineyard." The pick-up chorus didn't have an official name, not that I remember, though in 1992 a spinoff group performed a spring concert at the Whaling Church, under the name "Martha's Vineyard Community Chorus." But if you compare the rosters of the early 1990s Messiah performances with those of the first "Island Community Chorus" concerts, it's hard to argue that the Island Community Chorus appeared out of nowhere in 1995/96. Not to mention that it was the Island Community Chorus that performed Messiah every December thereafter through 1999. At Easter 2000 we sang the entire Messiah, all three parts. Then the plug was pulled. The chorus leadership decided we weren't going to do Messiah for Christmas anymore: Messiah is an old chestnut, after all, and look at all the other great Christmas music out there for the singing. That December there was a open Messiah sing at St Augustine's, and after that -- nada. As losses go, maybe it's not much, but I still miss it.
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