October 2003 Issue - Essay # 2
Among
the Tenors
By
Laura Kelly
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I
AM A TENOR, and I sing in our university choir. DURING
MY FIRST week at the university, which was also my first week in
Bulgaria, posters announced auditions for the choir. A tiny italicized
sentence advised: If you are of interest, see Maestro Krotev. Living
overseas is an opportunity for reinvention, an idea I embraced with a
propulsive zeal. During my first week in Bulgaria, I fixated on visions
of a new, improved Renaissance-flavored me. Cello lessons, French,
catching up on the classic poets. I was determined to fill the free
hours that usually construct my personal life with activities that
purported to make me a more well-rounded person, but who’s zooming
who? All I was really after were nutritional distractions from a
wall-to-wall loneliness that I suspected had followed me across the
Atlantic. When
I knocked on the maestro’s office door, he extended his hand and bowed
from the waist. He wore a vest across his broad chest and exuded an air
of elegant, muted authority. “We have not had a professor with the
choir in some days. Please feel most welcome,” he said. I did feel
welcome. I also felt as if I should have curtseyed. Posters
of classical music concerts decorated his office walls. A piano sat
beside his desk and crowded the tiny room. He played some scales. I sang
the notes. I told him I had sung for a year with a large, wholesome
group that toured the U.S. and urged everyone to hold hands as a way of
initiating world peace. I was 19 then and professionally earnest. To
fill a gap in our conversation and to show the maestro I was plucky and
offbeat, I told him that because the group was light on male voices, I
had sung as a tenor. It was idle chatter, the only musically related
thing I could think of in the moment. He nodded his head and held my
gaze, as he pondered my declarative sentences more deliberately than I
had imagined he would. “This information makes good possibility for
us,” he said. THE
MAESTRO APPROACHED me in the hallway outside my office the day of the
first rehearsal and asked if I would be so kind as to please sing with
the tenors. Sure, I said immediately in my attempts to be perceived as
agreeable and easygoing. Why not? “All
the other tenors are male,” he said, almost apologetically. “This is
okay for me,” I answered. “Yes,” he replied. “I thought this
might be so. Thank you very much Professor Kelly. I am most grateful for
you,” he said, bowing as he backed away. When
I walked into the first rehearsal, I read everyone’s mind even though
their faces registered little outside the usual student spectrum of
ennui and nothingness. The maestro shook my hand, gave me a folder, and
pointed to an open seat in the tenor section. I circled to the back row.
The boys around me rose in halting, silent unison, waited until I was
seated, and then sat down again. I
sat among them, smelling their confusion. The tenors to my left and
right shuffled in their seats quite substantially, but no one said a
word or whispered a question. A casual kind of directness is par for the
course back in the States; I expect it. But here in Bulgaria, it isn’t
such a hot commodity. One culture’s definition of direct is
another’s definition of rude. What Bulgarians call polite, I call
passive. Where I see social skill, these boys see social suicide. So we
sat in silence, eyes ahead, waiting for the maestro to take us away from
the moment by telling us to sing. WE
REHEARSE TUESDAY and Thursday evenings. The maestro’s wife accompanies
on piano. She wears jackets with pronounced shoulder pads, and her
eyeglasses overpower the bones of her angular face. She speaks no
English; I speak restaurant Bulgarian. If we were to converse all I
could say after hello is please, a beer and please, the check. The
girls sit in the front row. The maestro calls them “the female
choir.” The first few times he said that, he gave a small, knowing
smile and caught my eye. A few giggled, including me. But after a couple
of rehearsals, it just wasn’t funny anymore. The
female choir sits in front of us. Their hair cascades down the back of
their chairs. Lipstick circles their mouths. They wear elaborately
produced outfits, and most of their names have at least three syllables.
The
sopranos are the largest group. Their silvery, stratospheric voices
scale melodic heights I don’t have the vocal quadriceps to climb. The
altos are a pretty big group, too, and chummy. They act like a sorority
and flutter into practice together, giggling and holding each other’s
books while they take turns rifling through the filing cabinet to find
their folders of sheet music.
The
maestro scolds the altos the most. When he gently admonishes their lack
of vocal gusto and tells them they sound like an East German marching
band at a funeral, none of them smile. They drop their heads and finger
their hair. Shame swims across their faces. The
boys sit in the back. Basses on the left, tenors on the right. There are
five tenors; we are the smallest group. Sometimes I forget that I am
here to sing boy, and when we warm up, my voice reaches an octave higher
into girl territory. When this happens, the maestro gives me a quizzical
look via his eyebrows. I read it as soft-boiled scolding and pull my
voice down to its lower rungs. The
tenor on my left is Serbian. He is 19, a small guy who is majoring in
computer science and has the pallor of someone whose only daily source
of light is a glowing screen. He doesn’t make much eye contact with
me, and I vacillate between assigning this to his shyness or his Eastern
European way of showing respect for a professor or a woman or an elder
or all three. I have to work to remember his name; it has clots of
consonants in unwieldy combinations, but I know it begins with a V. It
doesn’t matter, really. We tenors aren’t that chatty. For us it is
pretty much all business: We sit and we sing. The
tenor on my right is Bulgarian. He’s tall with beady eyes and a
pronounced nose. He wears good shoes and cologne with staying power, but
he sings off-key most of the time, and I hate him for this. And then I
hate myself for hating him. Then it ricochets back to me hating him for
showing me how quickly I can flare into hating him. His presence and his
nearness are an ongoing source of irritation and mystery. How did he
pass the audition? Sometimes
the maestro looks him in the eye while we practice and points his index
finger up up insistently as if saying, climb to the attic or look at the
sky. This has happened enough times that I think the boy is embarrassed
and if he’s not, I am embarrassed for him. We all know whom the
maestro’s finger is for. My
high regard for the maestro hasn’t been dented by this unsavory
addition to our pitch perfect ranks; instead I blame Mr. Tone Deaf. Why
can’t he just sing taller? HERE’S
THE WAY I see the situation: TOGETHER,
THE MAESTRO says gruffly. Dear colleagues, please watch my hands and
begin the note together. In the choir we are instructed to blend. No
voice stronger than another. All tones in unison, the many making one.
Our chain breathing and crescendos are meant to be synchronized. We aim
for sonic collectivism. When
we sing, I am one of many. I’m no longer a name or a title or a
nationality. I am one of 23 university choir members. I am another
voice, a set of lungs, some vocal chords. When we stop, all the others
are students, and I am the sole professor. In
the choir the front row is for the girls. The back row is the boys.
Except for me. I sit in the back with the boys. They no longer stand
when I take my seat, which makes me feel like one of them. But when the
male choir goes to the maestro’s office to practice, all the boys
collect outside the door, waiting for me to enter first, which makes me
feel like someone very different from them. Then we start to sing and I
am one of them again. And back and forth and so it goes. AFTER
A COUPLE of months, the Serbian boy missed rehearsal. He had the
sniffles the rehearsal before, so I wasn’t surprised to see his empty
chair. The tenor to the left of him, another short guy, slid over into
his seat. The maestro likes us to bunch up, a
no-voice-alone-in-the-wilderness kind of thing. While
the maestro turned his attention from the whole group and led the
sopranos through a few measures of tricky maneuvering, the unknown tenor
beside me cleared his throat and asked, “Why prefer you to play with
boys?” Had
we been on shared cultural ground and had his English language skills
been a bit sharper, I might have smiled a bit solicitously and racked my
brain for a retort that channeled Mae West. But instead, I looked at the
guileless face of a young man puzzled by my presence and emboldened
enough to ask a direct question. I answered him in unadorned sentences. There
aren’t so many tenors, I told him, and my voice is deep enough that I
can sing this part. “Yes,”
the young man said. “It is curious fact.” Then he returned his
attention to his sheet music. WOULD
HERE BE the right place to mention that I have large breasts? That my
favorite all-time movie is “The Sound of Music”? That there is
sadness sewn into my bones? IN OUR FOLDERS are songs in Russian, Latin, English, Hungarian and Bulgarian. Songs of congratulations, of well wishes. Drinking songs, traditional songs, the Beatles song, “Michelle.” Songs to lovers past and present, songs to God and the saints. Songs to animals. When
we learn a new song, I sing gingerly, trying to anchor the melody. Mr.
Tone Deaf’s voice curls into my right ear, and at times it hijacks
mine, dragging it off key with his, making the path to the correct pitch
muddy and hard to find. Even when I know I have hit the melody dead on,
having him nearby spooks me, and I spiral into self doubt: What if
singing off-key is like B.O. or bad breath--one of those things other
people notice but never really tell you about? I
wonder: Could it be me? Me with the high heels and the flat tone? To
calm my occasional burps of panic, I’ve learned how to check. You
stick your finger in your ear while you are singing, and voila. You can
listen to yourself from inside your own head. Wherever you go, there you
are. And even in places where you don’t know you are, I guess you are
there, too. DURING
PRACTICE I’VE begun to lean to the left toward the shy Serb. I’ve
scooched my chair over toward him as far and as nonchalantly as I can. I
practice visualizing the sonic equalizer in my brain, trying to shut
down the reception in my right ear and boost the input from the left.
I’ve also decided that I love the Serb, even though truthfully, he
might want to brush his teeth a bit more often or he’ll never get a
girl to kiss him. When
the Serb and I sing, our voices marry neatly like a flat-water
confluence of two rivers. No froth, just strong and clear running water.
It probably sounds crazy, but I can see our voices merging in the air in
front of our mouths. I can feel them pull and coax, lead and follow. We
find our way together while we memorize the song. Sometimes at
rehearsal, when we sing a line or two in seamless synchronicity, he and
I know it and we grin shyly at one another for a little bit. We rarely
speak. Just a goodbye or a hello now and then. No small talk, no large
talk, either. We just sing; this is the sole basis of my love. MORE-NO
MORE-NO. Ptitch-koo rah-neh bood-nah. Ish-kee nah-zee sveel-en poy-us.
Hi day day. Hi day day. I
scribble my phonetic interpretations on the sheet music beneath the
inscrutable Cyrillic lyrics. What am I singing? According to Mr. Tone
Deaf, we are asking a small bird not to sing too loudly because we want
to sleep late. Or something like that. His English is shaky, and I
didn’t ask clarifying questions. I grow more vexed when he is helpful.
Sometimes he offers his pen or sees I am lost and points to our place on
the sheet music. These small and unsolicited acts of kindness make it
harder to continue to hate him. Maybe this is dissonant harmony. One
of the songs in our folders is a classic Southern spiritual called
“Deep River.” The melody is lingering and mournful, giving our
voices time to fill the notes with round power and purpose. The tenor
part takes me to the deepest earth-tone notes my voice can reach, and
the lyrics speak of a home that lies across the water and a singer who
aches to be there. Every time we sing the tune, I register melancholy in
such a lovely color that I am moved to tears. Once, at the end of the
song, the Serbian boy looked over at me and my wet eyes. “Also me,”
he said. THE
CHOIR SINGS AND our voices make a web of velvet. The curly ribbon of
melody elongates like taffy or falling. During those minutes, I nestle
inside the note I sing and the harmonies I hear. Like a womb? Maybe a
crawl space, a bomb shelter, a cocoon. How can anything be wrong in the
world when voices join to produce such effortless and naive beauty? The
music urges me upward, and while our voices entwine, I am above,
rounded, exalted. Above my life, above the earth, up in a benevolent
place where manmade forms are unknown. I am not alone, and yet I am
gorgeously, brutally alone. When
we stop singing, I am back among the tenors in the cavernous and
underheated auditorium, sitting on a rickety chair up on the stage while
industrial strength chandeliers bleat their kilowatts onto our
photocopied sheet music and hum their electrical monotone. During
a lull in rehearsal last week, a line from a song bubbled up blurry from
my memory, a sonic crypt-o-gram sent from my subconscious. It’s from a
song that was popular during my university days. I don’t remember the
singer; it was the melody I was drawn to back then. Of all the lyrics, I
recall only this phrase: “to be living and dying in three-quarter
time.” Twenty
five years later, I now know what it means. The transcendent and the
banal, the high notes and the low ones side by side, measure by measure,
day by day.
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Author's Biography I
am a poet, a teacher, and a global pilgrim who lives in Bulgaria part of
the year and Miami Beach part of the year. I am my most beautiful in the
water.
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Essay
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