15-Mar-99 Choir at Emeth

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Gennady warms up the choir’s lungs first, voices afterwards. He starts off with deep breathing, inhale and raise your arms, exhale on two counts. Inhale, exhale on three counts. Inhale, exhale on four counts; up to about seven. Then inhale and breathe out forcefully on consonants, five beats, so you can feel your diaphragm working: t-t-t-t-t, k-k-k-k-k, f-f-f-f-f, sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, s-s-s-s-s. Then humming, making lots of room inside your mouth; and finally singing. One new thing we did tonight was increasing intervals, up the scale and then down: do re do mi do fa do so; do la do ti do do. do ti do la do so do fa; do mi do re do do. After that we could work on the music for the Yom haShoah, Holocaust rememberance day, joint concert.

It had been a snow day, no school in Newton or most of the surrounding towns. Maybe the weather was why so few people showed up, though by evening the roads were merely slushy. I was the only chorister from Temple Emanuel at the Temple Emeth rehearsal tonight, and three quarters of an hour after the time the rehearsal was called for there were only eight singers total.

Gennady looks like one of the people who works underground mining jewels in a Tolkien book, short, chunky, solid, bearded. He wants energy, concentration, and smiles from his choir. We spent most of the time on a piece the Temple Emanuel cantor wrote and a setting of psalm 137 (By the rivers of Babylon) by renaissance composer Salamone Rossi. Also on the program, but not tonight, is a poem called “Ashes” which Gennady translated from the Lithuanian and set to music. We did it last year and were majorly put off by the depressing words (What’s this gray dust? It was once people) the first time we read through it, but as soon as we got the beautiful music working we were glad we were performing it.