Domine ad adjuvandum me festina

In these past two weeks, at Worship and Music conferences (which are now over), I've been thinking a lot about my experiences as a Montreat Worship and Music conferee, and particularly my experience singing under one conductor; Granville Oldham.

The name "Granville Oldham" tends to conjure up the image of a elderly gentleman, at least past 70, who probably walks with a stoop and a cane, with a long, white beard.

This is Granville. Crappy picture from Montreat 2004.

When I came to Montreat for the second time, it was my first year in the senior high choir. This meant that I was eligible to audition for the Youth Chamber Choir, a smaller choir I could sing in in addition to the main Youth choir (conducted by the same person). When they mentioned Chamber Choir auditions at the registration table, we asked about the conductor. They said that everyone here last week (we came week 2 of the conference) absolutely loved him. I decided to go ahead and audition. Not knowing what "auditioning" would entail, I grabbed my copy of Leavitt's Missa Festiva (which I'd sung the week before at Lake Junaluska), and figured I could sing the "Kyrie" or "Agnus Dei" if I needed to prepare a song.

I don't remember too much about the audition. I'm sure there were scales and arpeggios, range testing and a basic song. The two things I remember clearly were the music theory questions he asked (lots about keys, and I didn't do too well on that), and pitch repetition. He would play three or four random notes on the piano, and I would sing them back. They got more and more difficult as he went along, but this is the kind of thing I excel at, and I met each of his notes with an exact repetition. (My senior year of high school I ended up being graded on this. I thought of Granville every time this test came up.) I found out the next day, I believe, that I had been selected to be one of four second sopranos in Chamber Choir, and thus I started my week of being in two choirs conducted by Granville Oldham.

I have sung under many choir directors. At least over twenty. I have sung under a great many incredible directors.

Granville is the best.

Granville knows how to reach youth. He doesn't reach us by choosing music that he thinks we'll "like", by pandering to us; instead, he shows us why this music that he chose, which probably seems stuffy to us at first glance, is actually awesome. He would explain what the pieces were saying in language that we knew. He'd talk about Mozart only caring about opera, only caring about the big show. He would also break it down to Mozart. He'd bodyroll to Brahms. He brought attitude back to these pieces as opposed to letting them sit in the moth-eaten realm of academia. ("You've got to give it ATTITUDE! Like, 'FESTINA. Yeah, I said it.'")

Granville also puts a lot of value on knowledge. One day early in the week, he asked a question. Now, what tends to happen in situations like these, where a bunch of youth are herded together until the direction of an adult and have not gotten to know each other or the adult is: the adult asks a question, and no one responds. In fact, everyone averts their eyes. This is, indeed, what happened. Eventually, someone produced the answer, and Granville pulled a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to the person, saying, "People will pay you for what you know." I've seen him do this many, many times since then. I don't think I ever got a dollar from him, despite how many times I offered him German pronunciations.

He would constantly tell us, "Write this down! You don't have to remember it if you write it down!" Sure enough, I have old folders of music where I have the circle of fifths written down. I brought some music with me, and in it are several of piece of music from the choirs at Montreat that year. My copy of Brahms' "Lass Dich Nur Nichts Nicht Dauren" has notes that have turned out to be more significant than I could have ever, EVER guessed. There is a drawing of the tongue, labeling the tip, the front, and the back. There is a note that says, "v = voiced frickative". On one page I have written the word "sibilant" and "schwa..." Yes. Granville Oldham the first person to mention classification of speech to me. This is significant because I'm almost irrationally obsessed with this stuff now. NOW I'd tell you that v = labio-dental voiced frickative, that "f" is its cognate, and that a bunch of people, myself included, sometimes articulate the consonant "r" sound in the same place as the "v" sound, instead of making it a retroflexed lingua-alveolar sound. (I didn't realize it at the time, but it was Granville, too, that introduced me to the [ɔ] sound, a difficult sound for many American speakers, and that sound is closer to the proper pronunciation of the choral latin vowel "o", as opposed to the diphthong [oʊ]. I'm curious now whether the [o] sound, NOT as a diphthong, is the closest to proper pronunciation.)

But two things really pushed Granville above the other directors I've sung under.

First, he held us up to extraordinarily high standards. The highest I've ever been held to in a choir. He was serious about what he did. He'd laugh and joke and dance but he was serious, all the while, and he expected us to be serious, too. Both in Chamber Choir and the normal choir. And as such, he spared nothing and no one. He would never humilate anyone, but if someone was singing something wrong, he would find out who it was and fix it. Most choir directors euphemize in this situation. Most choir directors will say, "One of the basses is singing this note an octave down." But rarely does that bass ever jump back up the octave when they say that. Granville went around to every bass, having them sing it individually, and he would find the one bass singing an octave down, and then work with that bass to help them get up to the right octave. This singling out would shock other conductors in these situations, but with Granville, it was about getting the best sound out of all of us. Period.

In conjunction with this, he had absolute faith in us. Or, even if he didn't, he showed us that he had absolute faith in us. I never saw any sliver of doubt that we couldn't do what he expected us to do. And he never took it easy on us. The hardest music I have ever sung was in that Chamber Choir. Especially for the amount of time we had. Bloch's "Avodath Hakodesh", which we sang in Drama Cantorum my first semester of college, was probably the hardest piece of music I've sung, but we had a whole semester for that. For Chamber Choir, we had three days. Six rehearsals, really. Martini's "Domine, ad adjuvantum me festina" and Sweelinck's "Venite, exultemus Domino", were HARD. The first one, my father sung - in GRADUATE school. We were HIGH SCHOOLERS. This choir, this music, was the only time I worried that I was not going to be able to do it. In my entire singing career, including a lot of week or weekend-long festivals I have never, ever doubted that I would be able to learn the music and be ready. I'm such a choral overachiever that I try to have all of my music not just learned, but memorized. I've never, ever worried about it - except this time. This was the only time I thought, "This is too hard, I can't do it."

But I did. We all did. And I can still sing most of those pieces by memory. It was trust in Granville that kept me sane. He believed that all of us could do it, and I think it was that that enabled us to be able to do it. A friend of mine has been going through a rough time lately, because all she has left to offer a friend of hers who is struggling is "shreds of hope". In the conversations that have ensued (and many have, as I did a huge design project about the potential destructiveness of altruism, which she's facing right now), I pointed out that sometimes what the help we need to get through something is knowing that someone else believes that we can.

This is something for me to keep close to me, as I go into directing. This rigorous belief in others that can be so enabling.

The other thing that Granville did that worked to elevate the experience of singing in his choirs was he never let us forget why we were singing. His spirituality ran deep, he was not ashamed of it, and it was clear that everything he did, and we did, was to glorify God. We weren't there to have a good time and sing songs and learn how to pronounce German. That happened, yes. But we were there to glorify God through music. He never forgot it, and he never let us forget it.

The simplist definition I've heard of the Christian's duty, and the one that resounds in me deeply to this day, came from Granville. He said, "Because I am a Christian, I love. It is like, 'Because I am a tree, I give shade.' A tree doesn't move its shade because someone it doesn't like is sitting there." As Christians, we must love, like trees give shade. It is not just our duty, but our life.

Granville never let us forget why. It wasn't just a prayer tacked on at the end of the rehearsal. It was everything about the rehearsal. That made our singing so much more potent. We can have beautiful technique, we can hit high E's, but if there's nothing underneath, it doesn't matter. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have nothing to say, all the skills I have to say it don't matter. It's the same thing Kapp impressed upon me so early.

After Montreat, I was priviledged enough to be able to sing under Granville Oldham again, at my final (I think my final, right, parents?) Youth Choir JAM, a local music weekend. It was delightful. We sang Mark Miller's "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing", and at one rehearsal, he stopped during the crazy piano introduction and said, "I remember what this reminds me of!" and proceeded to sing "Little Shop of Horrors".

I recently reread Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, by Orson Scott Card, too of my favorite books. Besides pondering the similarities between Battle School and PHTS (because after all, saving the world and training the next generation of artists are basically the same thing), I paid close attention to the ideas of "what makes a good commander". If we were translating this into military terms, Granville Oldham is the kind of commander who I'd follow to the ends of the earth. All of this will be extremely important as I prepare to direct a show. There is so much I can learn from him, and all of the choir directors I've sung under. After all, they're directors too.

And now, for an accurate photo description of my 4th of July/summer in general: