I’ve been looking forward to the Elton John-Billy Joel concert at the Sprint Center in Kansas City on December 1st but learned it’s been postponed till February. [insert sigh here] On a positive note, my tickets for the Kansas City Symphony’s production of Handel's Messiah with 250 voice choral accompaniment arrived in the mail yesterday! To this day I get chills down my neck when I hear the Hallelujah Chorus. Going back to grade school, we would sing this in Choir. I recall the stories – and there are many, of King George standing at the beginning of this chorus, thereby causing everyone else to stand, and how this tradition has lived for the hundreds of years since.
The funny thing about my memory of this was that my voice was high then and I was placed in the choir section with the older girls [mostly 7th and 8th graders] singing soprano. They were forever teasing me and making me blush. I became like some kind of mascot to them. The choir director [I bet most grade schools have had this position cut from their budgets long ago] preferred the term descants to soprano, or at least used it as often if not more. As a mousy little kid who hears thing but didn't always get them, I for years though she had called us “desk hands” and could never find anyone who knew what the hell I was talking about. It’s funny how such things come about and decades later you realize why no one knew what you were talking about. It’s like a light comes on and “well duh” it wasn’t desk hand! Oh, and my voice changed!
photo credit: Michael A. Wells
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