[Magdalen] Music memories

[Jay Weigel]

Molly, I grew up in a school system with pretty extraordinary public school
music, especially in my part of the city. We began singing parts in 4th
grade (my children didn't start until grade 6 in TN, which I found
appalling) and in 5th grade were doing 3 part harmony routinely. There were
extra-curricular girls' chorus and boys' choir (by audition) in all the
schools and dedicated music teachers in all of them. The high school choirs
were also extraordinary and the one in my high school was generally
acknowledged to be the best of the lot. The director was a real martinet
and many of the students, even the ones who sang for her, didn't like her,
but I did. She always demanded, and got, the best out of you. So I did get
to grow up singing good music. The church choir, which I joined at 16, was
a slightly different animal. The director was primarily an organist, but
the choir was much enriched at the time I was in it by the addition of a
bunch of "choir gypsies" who were friends of some members. They weren't
church members but were good singers who would lend their presence for
awhile to one choir or another. Besides them, we had a really excellent
tenor who had at one time been a member of Fred Waring's choir and was
capable of doing solos. That was the year we did the Gounod mass for
Christmas midnight. Oh, the memories.....

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 11:14 PM, Molly Wolf <lupa at kos.net> wrote:
>
> Me too.  It astounds me, looking back, at the quality of choral singing I
> grew up with in Bennington.  Neither my high school choir nor my church
> choir would have thought "How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place" was out of the
> ordinary, nor "He Watching Over Israel."  We sang a lot of Benjamin
> Britten, as well as Messiah.  I still miss that long-ago quality.
>
> I remember walking down the hall by the music room, when I was in Grade 7
> and new to the junior high/senior high building, and hearing a ghostly
> girl's voice singing a plangent melody that made my heart stop in its
> tracks.  I worried for weeks that I would never find it again -- until our
> school girls' choir sang Britten's "Ceremony of Carols".  That piece still
> gets to me fifty years later.
>
> Molly
>
> The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no
> other way. -- Mark Twain
>
> > On Dec 23, 2014, at 10:48 AM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Fior me, that piece is "How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place" from the Brahms
> > "German Requiem".....not in German, however. I had just turned 15 and was
> > at the UW summer music clinic, which was a 3 week gathering of high
> school
> > musicians from all over Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and a few other
> > places. There were probably 250 of us in the chorus. It was my first
> > experience of singing Brahms other than the cradle song. I was too
> > dumb/naive to know it was difficult. It was absolutely amazing and made
> the
> > hairs on the back of my  neck stand up, and when we sang it in concert  I
> > was nearly in tears when it was over. It still has that effect on me.
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 10:36 AM, Cantor03--- via Magdalen <
> > magdalen at herberthouse.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> In a message dated 12/23/2014 10:25:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> >> gracecan at gmail.com writes:
> >>
> >> It  always takes me surprise when a piece of music triggers an
> unexpected
> >> memory.  I was just listening to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" on NPR
> and
> >> remembered  the first I ever sang it. I was absolutely there  again.>>>>
> >>
> >> This was a favorite of the Extraordinary Form RC Rite (the Tridentine
> >> Latin
> >> Rite) people locally.  Because of the rules about the integrity of  this
> >> Latin
> >> Rite, they had to develop a Latin text for the piece.
> >>
> >> Can you imagine singing "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" in Latin?   :-)
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> David Strang.
> >>
>