My Life with The Sound of Music

I was raised on Broadway musicals. I remember my parents buying original cast recordings of My Fair Lady and Camelot before we owned a stereo. Once we got that stereo I listened to those records endlessly. In no time I could do all of Rex Harrison’s patter songs.

When the movie version of The Sound of Music was released, my mom bought the recording and pretty soon I could lip synch all those lyrics too. At the end of my 7th grade year, I auditioned for The Confederettes, the 8th grade girl’s chorus at Jefferson Davis Junior High School. (Did I mention I lived in the South?) I don’t remember what I sang, but I was delighted when one of my classmates told me that the director of the chorus said I had, “a clear, strong soprano voice.”

A clear, strong soprano voice. Many comments have been made about my singing since, but I would never hear praise like that again.

The chorus performed many concerts. The scariest part of the class was singing a solo at the of the school year. The Sound of Music was very popular and I would estimate that 35 of my 40 fellow chorus members sang “My Favorite Things.”

“Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens…”

“Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens…”

“Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens…” over and over again.

I would have welcomed a dirge. What I heard were many versions of the song done just as Julie Andrews did it. I’ve heard Julie Andrews. I love Julie Andrews. Not one of those girls sounded like Julie Andrews.

When it was finally my turn to perform, I felt elated. Maybe I didn’t have the best voice, but at least it wouldn’t be singing you-know-what. I opened my mouth and out came “Puff the magic dragon/lived by the sea…” I didn’t sound like Mary Travers but the performance was good enough to get me an A. I may have gotten that grade based solely on what I didn’t choose to sing, but I didn’t care.

Many decades and a full embrace of Steven Sondheim musicals later, I met up with The Sound of Music again. I worked at a family service organization which kept clients entertained in the waiting area with videos. My favorite was the “What’s Opera, Doc?” Loony Tune that featured Bugs Bunny, outfitted in long blonde braids and a horned helmet, as Brunhilde. Elmer Fudd sang “Kill the Wabbit” to the tune of “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

Alas, that only took up a few minutes. What played over and over again was—you guessed it—The Sound of Music.

I was in despair. My office was very close to the T.V. My pleas that something else be played fell on sympathetic ears. Unfortunately, those people with sympathetic ears also had hands that didn’t want to be changing a VCR multiple times a day.

“Look, Stephanie, it’s a godsend. It runs for 3 hours.”

So once more it was “Rain drops on roses and whiskers on kittens” over and over again.

I sighed a lot. I endured.

I left the agency and gradually fell out of touch with my co-workers but about 18 months after I left, I came home to find the following message on my answering machine:

“Stephanie, we thought of you the minute it happened. The Sound of Music tape finally broke.”

And that voice mail became one of my favorite things.

Stephanie Patterson

The King's Men

On Tuesday evening of this week St. Andrew's, Lambertville, was host to a concert by a subset of the renowned King's College Choir. Once known as the Collegium Regale, the group now call themselves the King's Men. Having them come to our modest little church, which seats fewer than 200, was as surprising and delicious as a visitation of angels.

Choral scholars at the college, undergraduates, they sing a capella. They rehearse for three hours every day. Their ensemble is exquisite, crisp, precise. St. Andrews was built in the late nineteenth century, before electronic amplification, and designed on purpose to have excellent acoustics. It's a wonderful place to sing, even for those of us who don't sing all that well.

"From Byrd to the Beatles," their program was called, and it ranged from fifteenth century sacred music to charming arrangements of pop hits. Between numbers they clowned a little, being fun-loving young fellows. An organist came with them but did not accompany them. He played a couple of numbers by himself, brilliantly. They were all brilliant. I wish I could tell you their names. I wish I had counted them. There must have been about fifteen. There were no printed programs, and I was too stupefied by the beauty of the experience to take any notes.

Still I wanted to tell you about it in my incoherent way. They were so beautiful! They were so young! And the group was so ephemeral. Although the choir was founded during the reign of Henry VI, the young men who sing in it will graduate and be off doing other things in a very short time. Others will take their places. All the while I was listening to them I was thinking, this will never happen again in quite this way. There's no way to capture it, no way to hang onto it.

Nevertheless I offer you this YouTube recording, made in another church a couple of years ago, of some of them singing Tutti Venite Armati, which they also sang in the program at Saint Andrews. A pale shadow.

Kate Gallison

Hallelujah

I used to work in one of the great software houses of central Jersey, all during the eighties. Actually I worked in two of the great software houses. The first one, in a fit of wild prosperity, built a palatial corporate headquarters where everyone had an office with a door and all the best computer equipment. In the middle of the software palace was a huge atrium with gardens and trees, tended by a gardening service. Young women in gardening service uniforms used to come in to feed and water the trees, murmuring to them lovingly. I played opera tapes in my office with the door closed while I worked. No one could hear them but me.

I sold a couple of novels. At home I had an adorable young child with whom I wanted to spend more time. And so I left the software house for a year or so to try to make a living writing mysteries. When the money ran out I went back.

In my absence, the prosperous software house had fallen on hard times – overextended, perhaps – and another software house had bought it. New people were in charge, ruthless people, creatures from Mordor almost. The trees were gone. Three-quarters of the old employees were gone. A new crowd had joined the remnants of the old crowd, the survivors of another brutal corporate takeover. Walking the halls, wandering in the atrium, I saw shock and despair on the faces of everyone I met. If I ran into one of my old colleagues, we would greet each other like survivors of a disaster. You! You're alive!

People continued to be fired. Supervisors were forced to rank their staff and let the lowest go. Two thugs from security together with the Human Resources director in his funeral suit would appear at the door to your brand-new cubicle (the offices with doors had been torn out) and escort you to the parking lot. That was so you wouldn't trigger the virus you were presumed to have installed to bring down the company. Because of course you hated the company. Everybody hated the company.

And now Christmas was coming.

We still had an hour for lunch, and we had a large space on the ground floor off the atrium where the fitness equipment used to be before the new management got rid of it as a frivolous waste of time, a space where we could meet and sing together. A bunch of us decided to give a Christmas, or should I say holiday, concert. We rehearsed, among other things, the Hallelujah Chorus. Every lunch hour we would get together, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and sing the Hallelujah Chorus, one of the noblest expressions of human hope and joy in Western culture. We delighted in the beauty of one another's voices. It was sublime.

The day of the so-called Christmas party, or holiday party, arrived. Possibly there were company-supplied refreshments, I can't recall. Our choir assembled on the floor of the atrium, among the stumps of dead trees and ruined gardens, and sang a few secular numbers, Jingle Bells, Frosty the Snowman, Winter Wonderland. Peering down at us, impatient for everyone to get back to work, was the boss. He was not the uber-boss, for Sauron himself was squatting in his lair in the main corporate headquarters in another state. But he was the boss of that particular facility. And he was looking down on us in disapproval, because we were not at work serving the software house.

We sang the Hallelujah Chorus, as loud as we could. The sound penetrated to the farthest reaches of the building, maybe even to the Human Resources office. People came out of their cubicles and looked over the railing. You can't sit down during the Hallelujah Chorus.

I think about that event sometimes, when the state of the country looks dark. You may think you have us under your heel now, but the kingdom of our God is at hand. Everybody sing.

Kate Gallison

(reposted from kategallison.blogspot.com)