April 29, 2013

Durufle Requiem yesterday afternoon. Rain fell hard, but the crowd was large, and the singing was, after all, fulfilling. Many people who had never been to rehearsal (all of them Joel’s Mars Hill students) appeared, so there was much fussing with seating, but I ended up in the best place–as far as seeing the conductor–I’d ever had. The Mars Hill boy beside me hadn’t brought his music, and replied when I asked if he needed to share mine, “Oh, I’m pretty confident with it,” and ended up singing maybe a tenth of the time. He was a “low bass” with nothing below a G. We discovered that we were both Eagle Scouts; all his male relatives back to God knows when had been as well, whereas I stood in lonely majesty. Charming, young, feckless. So far as I could tell, the singing was excellent, but what everyone will remember was that a college girl collapsed during the Sanctus and everything stopped for a considerable time while she was looked to and eventually hauled out. She was a very large girl, and the hauling out was no mean task. DJ said God had struck her down because she had been texting behind her music. In any event, I do not need to hear that piece again for a long time.

Mostly sleep the last few days, though I did sit in Edna's–where the music was, blessedly, off– and wrote, and the rain fell, and all was well.