My parents were kind enough to send me to Europe a few times, including twice with my high school choir. Both trips were to the Bavaria/Bohemia/Austria area, where it's always worthwhile to visit a palace or two of the unfortunate King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886). Schloss Linderhof is lovely, even in winter, but clearly arose from a "I wish I had my own Versailles" kind of impulse. Much more interesting...
...is Schloss Neuschwanstein. It looks like a fairy-tale castle because it's meant to, and because it's the pattern for Disney's various Magic Castles and logos.
It may or may not be fair to call Ludwig "mad," but he certainly wasn't well-adjusted or mentally well. Bavaria is not a big place, and he spent a lot of money building these things, which didn't get much use before his extremely mysterious death at age 40. He was a huge fan of the problematic composer Richard "There's A Reason The Nazis Loved Him" Wagner, and up several flights of stairs, at the top of the building, is the Hall of the Singers:
It's unclear to me if any of Wagner's work was ever performed here, but that was the intention.
One of the magic things about traveling with a talented group of a cappella singers is the ability to just make music whenever you get the urge: during a long layover at JFK, for example. People appreciate two dozen high school students singing beautiful songs, in a way that they may not appreciate my violin playing. We walk into an acoustically interesting room and start snapping, to test the sound. We want just the right amount of reverb, for a room to be "live" by not deadening the sound. If there's an actual echo, the sound will be muddy and vague, and we won't be able to hear each other.
The Hall of the Singers is a good room.
I don't know who had the idea. We sang all the time, rehearsing and performing. It was just what we did. While some other kids made sure we had all the voice parts, I asked our guide if it would be okay. Clearly no one had ever asked this before--and probably has not since--but if I interpreted her thought process correctly, she wasn't entirely sure what I meant, but couldn't think of a rule against it, and said it was probably fine. She was prepared for the worst, but she had no way to know.
We were really good. Like, it wouldn't be outlandish to buy tickets to see us, kinds of good. We had a tyrannical but brutally effective director, forged in the merciless fires of Midwestern chorale culture. Our standard was not that of New England prep schools, but of competitive college choirs.
I'm not sure which song we sang. It was either "Hark, I Hear The Harps Eternal" (there's the St. Olaf Choir, a solid approximation of how we sounded and how our director conducted) or "Sing To The Lord," both being famous-ish (the legendary Robert Shaw) arrangements of a particularly resonant kind of American a cappella folk song.
(It's called "shape-note" music, after its notation devised to include more diverse levels of musical literacy. To be honest, I find recordings of it intolerable to listen to: except in extraordinary cases, it sounds like people barking in unison.)
We picked a plausible starting note, and we sang. Some of us had been performing that song for 3 years, and not infrequently, either: we did standalone concerts of our own, but also did short sets for any number of trustee and alumni and parent and faculty events. The men performed in tuxedos, which were rented for us--for the whole school year. We were pros.
We sang with all our power, in that bizarre performance hall, built by a somewhat unhinged prince for a racist composer genius. It was gorgeous. The building is like a Bose Wave stereo built out of stone. They could hear us down in the kitchens. People inched up the stone stairways to find the sound.
It's a weird thing, a cappella music. You carry it with you, always. Your singing voice is like if God handed you a violin or a guitar or a drum, and told you what kind of instrument it was, but not what it was made of, or how to use it well. My first guitar, with its laminated rather than solid wood soundboard, was constrained by its ingredients: no matter what techniques I learned or how much I practiced, it would never make great music. At best, if I learned on better instruments, I could go back and sound like a great musician playing a crappy guitar (though probably not having a lot of fun with it). But you've only got the one voice, and the best singer you can be is the best you can be with the voice you got. For each of us individually, that may be much or it may be little; but together, we change our sound. We can create a voice bigger than just our singing together. That's the voice we gave to whoever was there to listen.
This was sort of our group's theme song, which I think is an objectively stunning piece of music.
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