Challenge Yourself!

Many choral singers joke about being in Hell Week during the days immediately preceding a performance. I have posted on Facebook that I'm in "Brahms Req Hell Week", as we are performing the Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem on Thursday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoon this week. Those performances are preceded by back-to-back rehearsals. Last night we had the Conductor's Piano Rehearsal with the chorus and Maestro Welser-Möst. Tonight we have our first orchestra rehearsal, which will be attended by invited guests of chorus members and invited Cleveland Orchestra donors. Tomorrow night we have dress rehearsal, and—too soon— 5:00 p.m. on Sunday will arrive and the excitement will have concluded.

I love choral singing. I love becoming so intimately acquainted with a piece of music, whether it's Bach or Beethoven or Vivaldi or Brahms or Verdi or Britten. I may not love the work for the first two or three rehearsals, but the longer I listen to the notes, the harmonies, the exquisite work of the composer, the more I grow to love the music.

And it stays with me for years and has emotional attachments that last and last. Any time I hear the Vivaldi "Gloria", I am transported instantly to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, where John and I sang with the Oratorio Society of Washington in 1996, three months after our wedding and three months before his diagnosis with metastatic prostate cancer. The Fauré Requiem that we performed on that same tour is one of my most beloved works, and members of that chorus sang the work at John's memorial service twenty-one months post-diagnosis.

I could probably tell you indiosyncracies of each choral performance in which I've participated since 1984 when I joined the Oratorio Society.

I'm blessed to have performed for years with first-rate choruses. I'm a perfectionist, and I like to perform with like-minded singers. I don't have any desire to perform with, or patience for, singers who simply don't care. The chorus with which I sang last year was filled with singers who had been in that chorus for forty years and seemingly used it simply as a social outlet. When I would find myself, rehearsal after rehearsal, tweeting and posting on Facebook about the agony of that particular rehearsal, I knew it was time to rethink my choral membership for the coming year.

In that chorus, I knew I was one of the best musicians in the alto section. I wasn't being egotistical—I was just listening to what was going on around me.

This year I am singing with the most talented and committed and musical group of singers it has ever been my good fortune to be a part of. I know, for certain, that I'm not one of the best musicians there. And it's humbling. It's challenging.

I'm challenged to keep rehearsing and perfect my technique. I'm challenged to exercise my ear. I'm challenged to listen to the incredible alto voices around me and try to analyze what they're doing that I could adopt to make my voice more beautiful.

This is a good thing. Challenge, to me, equals growth.

I don't want to stagnate. I don't want to become complacent. I don't want to just get along. I want to be better and better, to recognize growth in myself.

So I drive to Cleveland a minimum of once a week—or in weeks like this, six times— and I put aside all other interests for three or four hours. No knitting, no tweeting, no reading, no surfing the Web. Just total focus and undivided attention to the conductor and the lessons he wishes to teach us.

And I'm a better musician because of it.

In what ways do you challenge yourself?