A Cautionary Tale

So, it seems I left off Wednesday evening (ignore for the moment that I’ve posted Monday’s events right in between), as we were back from dinner at the Miller’s Arms.

It was very hard to believe, next morning, that it was already Thursday, already our last day. It felt like we’d just begun, and indeed like we were just beginning to get the hang of things.

Rehearsal that morning was a bit rough. Thursday’s music looked easy by comparison to Wednesday’s, and I think perhaps we’d taken it a bit for granted. I found myself wishing very much that we’d had rehearsal time the evening before.

All too soon, it was time to leave our little nest up in the south transept. We rehearsed in All Saints, which is marked as a private chapel; it isn’t customarily open and people don’t tour there. It’s very plain, with a wood floor and white walls; the furnishings aren’t fancy. There’s some decoration of the stonework in the ceiling, but the paint is fading.

In the stonework around all the windows – both the internal windows that overlook the inside of the south transept and some of the ongoing restoration work, and the external ones that open on the south lawn – was various scratched-in graffiti. Not recent – OLD graffiti, little churches and other drawings and people’s initials, and dates going back to the 1700s and 1800s.

In the side wall – on the left, as you face the altar – is an odd-shaped memorial. There’s a carved head or bust that’s clearly professional or near-professional work, roughly set, and in the stones around it were carved crudely three names, all listed as “organ blower,” with dates in the mid-1800s. Not far from it, toward the front of the room, is a small, square hole going back about a foot into the wall. The more I looked at it, as we worked in the room, the more I think that room might once upon a time have been the bellows room for one of the configurations of the organ.

There was something particularly poignant and haunting, to me, about that small memorial. The names are carved as carefully as possible, but clearly by an amateur – there’s an improvised, impromptu feel to the whole thing, as though some people just took it upon themselves to create it to honor their friends. It isn’t polished like the formal ones downstairs; it isn’t all neatly carved straight lines and perfectly aligned lettering. It is simply the best someone had to offer, to memorialize people obviously dear to those who created it. It speaks directly of the love we find in community, however humble our station.

So it was a bit sad for me to leave that room for the last time, knowing that the next day it would be someone else’s space and not ours.

We gathered early for that afternoon’s warm-up, to get a couple formal pictures of the group before our last service. One of our baritones had very thoughtfully worked out the placement, so all we had to do was go stand where he told us and stand still. You’d think it would be easier than it turned out to be.

As we gathered in the vestry chapel for our final line-up, David approached Andrew, to say that although there is a combination lock on the choir room door, it isn’t actually engaged – so the room is open and he could in fact take one of us up for a quick look and a picture. I handed off my camera, and we agreed that would happen after the service. I knew David was on a bit of a tight timeline – his wife was in the production of Cosi fan tutte taking place that evening in the Dean’s Garden, which started at 7:30 – and I was a bit concerned when we were told they wanted to do more pictures after the service…

The service itself went well enough, but the cautionary tale is this: the service is enjoyable to sing and goes smoothly in direct proportion to the prep time you put into it. I found we were really hurting for that Wednesday night rehearsal we didn’t have, in favor of a group dinner.

And then there was the herding of the cats, trying to get everyone back together and get the final pictures taken and get out of the church – complicated by the fact that we had to be quiet about it, because there was a Eucharist in progress in the Lady chapel in the Martyrdom, and sound in that great place carries everywhere.

We eventually got all that done with, and Andy made a quick pilgrimage to the choir room to snap a few pictures of the place where the Cathedral choir rehearses, and then we were off to dinner and rehearsal for Sunday morning’s service, which we were singing with the choir of St. Paul’s church – and thence the other cautionary part of the tale: when you have only an hour for dinner, opt for quick and cheap, not Mediterranean.

We went to Azouma, a restaurant directly across the street from the church where rehearsal would be (after all, we’re practically there already – how could we be late?). It’s really quite charming – the décor is lovely, and everything was very tasty. The only problem is that a Middle Eastern restaurant with couches and pillows instead of chairs is really the sort of place you go when you have three hours for dinner, not when you’re pressed for time.

This was compounded by the arrival, within minutes after we got there, of a party of forty to be served downstairs…

It was also compounded by at least two mistakes on the part of the waitress – she put in one order completely wrong, and we think she simply forgot the other one. So three of us had dinners in front of us with twenty minutes to eat – but one of those three dinners wasn’t what the gentleman ordered – and the fourth member of our party wasn’t served yet by the time we dashed out the door and across the street, intending to make his excuses to the director. His dinner arrived – already packaged for take-away, as we requested when it was clear it wouldn’t arrive in time – just about 7:55. Rehearsal was at 8.

And the rehearsal went quite well, considering. The main piece we were rehearsing is the Bairstow setting of “Let all mortal flesh keep silence.” It’s in F-sharp minor, it’s very chromatic, and all the parts divide, sometimes more than once – which is the main reason, I think, that Dom’s never had a chance to perform it; his choir is just too small for it, most of the time.

Enter Schola Cantorum on Hudson. Twenty more singers makes a tremendous difference, when all the parts split at least into firsts and seconds.

It was not an easy piece. We spent a fair amount of time wood-shedding with Dom, and fair amount more wood-shedding with Deborah – but by the time we all retired around the corner to the pub for a pint and a chat, we had it pretty well in hand.

I’d had visions of being out until all hours, but we were all pretty tired, so we headed back to the Lodge at a very tame and respectable hour, with the prospect of two full days off spread out before us.