up on yonder mountain

Driven by a restless, consuming curiosity, and a desperate need to grow up, I've accumulated a lot of good stories. Some of them belong inside other stories, like the saga of the aloe plants an unstoppably enthusiastic Mexican woman in Baja gave us, even though we were living on a sailboat. This one came up at work recently.

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.

making music

I've been singing this week, as I walk down the street. I get occasional compliments from passers-by. I sometimes forget there was a long stretch where I was performing regularly as a singer. By "long", I mean about 10 years.

• 1992-1995: Concert Choir and Chamber Singers
• 1993-1995: A Cappelicans (still active, it seems)
• 1995-1999: Skidmore Dynamics
• 2000-2002?: The Irrationals (Berkeley, CA)
• 2005?: Peninsula Cantare (Woodside, CA)

And, of course, along with almost every other singer at my college, I joined the choir for the semester we performed the complete Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. (I think the chorus was double its normal size that term--it's a challenging piece and a rare opportunity.)

This is interesting not only because it's mostly in the past and a lot of people don't know that about me--it does get me the chicks at parties--but also because somehow I never quite got around to seeing myself as a musician, even though I helped found the Dynamics and led the organizational stuff for the first few years. It's mostly just insecurity: I have a very good voice, but it's not generally a soloist's voice, and most of the people I sang with during the intense years were much more talented than me.

At my school, the Concert Choir was a course that anyone could take, while the Chamber Singers were a subset of the Concert Choir, taken by audition. Everyone auditioned, whether for the Chamber Singers or not, so Mr. Gottschalk could hear every individual and know what voices he had for the term: an artist inventorying the materials he was required to work with.

It gets harder to imagine the more recently you've met me, but I was shy. This is what happens with many inexperienced singers.

"Okay, Chris. Please sing 'Happy Birthday' with the piano."

I did.

"All right. Please sing it again, as loud as you can."

I did.

"Never sing any quieter than that."

Singing is a curious thing. It's very personal: our voice is how it is. We can always learn to use it better, but you can't switch it out like you can with a man-made instrument. When I bought a nicer guitar, my guitar playing instantly sounded better, because the instrument made a vastly better sound and was easier to play. Your voice is your body; it's you. Using our voice well is a physical way of being, breathing properly and supporting the sound and figuring out how to configure our mouth and throat. Most of us can't manipulate those things directly, so voice teachers have an array of mind tricks for us, like "open up the space between your back teeth." That's not actually possible, but it does relax and open our throat. Mr. Gottschalk was getting me to stop being shy, to put some strength behind my voice.

The Chamber Singers were regularly recruited for school events, alumni fundraisers and the like. We performed almost entirely from memory; we were extremely well-rehearsed by a demanding and competent semi-tyrant, we performed often, and we loved singing. When we went to Europe in 1993, we had a 6-hour wait in JFK, some of which we spent singing for other waiting passengers. Just because we could. Because sitting around with a group of people you mostly like, when all of you together can create something beautiful just by opening your mouths, why wouldn't you?

When we went again in 1995, I was one of the seniors, so this was a capping experience as we careened steadily toward graduation. We visited Neuschwanstein, one of mad King Ludwig's many fairy-tale projects (and the model for Disneyland's Magic Castle), based on the mythology of Wagner's operas. Among other things, there's a room near the top that's built as a theater for opera, though I don't know if it was ever actually used as one.

When we entered, we did what most a cappella singers do in a performance space: started snapping our fingers to check the acoustics.

"Can we sing in here?"

"I can't imagine they'd care, it's not like it'll hurt the artwork."

"We should ask, so we don't get kicked out of the castle."

The tour guide was a little perplexed, and once we got the idea across, I think a little skeptical. Rightly so: if a bunch of American high school students told me they were going to sing something in a random room in my castle, I'd probably give them the same look. You certainly don't expect a polished semi-professional performance.

But that's what they got. We picked a starting pitch, someone conducted, and we sang "Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal," an exuberant, resonant arrangement of an American spiritual. (The group Anonymous 4 has a version on their American Angels album, with very different harmonies; check out the audio sample.) Lots of powerful open fourths and fifths, and all the parts are sitting right in the meat of their ranges, where we can control our volume and tonality.

The guide was a little surprised. The sound filled up the hall and spread down the stone staircases on either side. Tourists and guides started to filter in. Singing a cappella in public is like Improv Everywhere: suddenly, a mysterious order perturbs the ordinary flow of chaos. Everyone applauded at the end.

Performing is complicated. It's important to do it for yourself, but as soon as you have an audience, you have to do it for them, too. It's like sharing something beautiful with someone you love: look at this really cool stone I found! Look at that deer over there!

Neuschwanstein doesn't get much music these days: you trundle through on the tours, echoing through the stone hallways and stairwells, but it's a museum, a relic, a stunning monument to one monarch's madness and obsession, at the tail end of the age of autocracy.

For a brief few minutes, we made it alive again.