Feeling the music through the tears

Tom Pinney

I have quite eclectic tastes in music.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about how I feel music when I’m listening to my heavy metal or playing various instruments in the worship band, but what I haven’t really touched on is what else my Apple Music account has on it.

In addition to the various hard rock, metal, some rap/hip hop, a bit of contemporary Christian and other genres is an interesting find to some: choir music.

When I was in middle school in El Paso, Texas, I went to a school that had been completed and opened the previous year. Because it was still brand new, there were a few things we were waiting on.

For instance, the school had built a beautiful round room perfect for a top-notch choir. But when the school opened with no choir teacher and no immediate plans to hire one, the room went to the orchestra.

When I went to the school to register for fifth grade, I was disappointed to learn that there was no choir. So, I decided to join band because my older brother was in it.

I picked the trumpet, which was also his instrument. But I was never really into it.

I acted like I was. For the next two years, I had a rivalry with this kid Brandon. His mom was the president of the band booster club and thought that would buy her kid first chair status.

It didn’t. No matter how many times he tried to challenge me, nothing about his playing could beat me. There was one time I came to school with a severe cold because I didn’t want to miss a test, and he chose to challenge me right away. I STILL beat him. I couldn’t even breathe right and he couldn’t take me!

He got his revenge in seventh grade, though, even if it was by default. Just before sixth grade ended, the school announced they were finally adding a choir the following academic year.

I was over the moon. I didn’t have to spend half the day smelling like metal and valve grease anymore!

From my first day in choir, I knew I was going to love it. But I never really knew how much until I got into high school.

My first year in the Americas High School choir was pretty good. We sang some good music, but it never really clicked as well as it should have for me at first. I ended up going all the way to the All-State Choir and being the first freshman in the area to do so, and that was pretty cool, but there was something missing from the dynamic of my home choir.

My sophomore year, however, the packets came out with the next slate of All-State Music, and I genuinely got excited about it.

The spotlight for me was a piece called, “The Darkling Thrush,” by Timothy Takach. The piece is performed a cappella, and the tenor part is just downright awesome.

The day it clicked was, unfortunately, five days before my family moved to Ohio in September 2006. I didn’t even get to try out for All-Region that year and my peers were getting ready. So on my last day, I asked if I and a small group of my best friends could go sing the song in the Rotunda.

The Rotunda was the center of the high school, a place where the drumline would commonly perform Friday mornings before home football games to get everyone pumped up. The acoustics were awesome and I had always wanted to sing in the middle to see how it would sound.

It was nothing short of majestic. Part of it was that a gothic piece like that required a lot of dark, rounded vowels which sounded super cool in the rotunda, but the other part of it was that I was surrounded by a bunch of outstanding singers.

Five sopranos, five altos, five tenors, and five basses. Twenty voices singing in the Rotunda. And, for the first time while singing or listening to music, I wept.

I felt the music move through my body so viscerally. I felt the pain of death in the winter, the joy of new life in the spring, the life cycle of the thrush itself. I felt the lows of the basses rumble in my gut. I felt the highs of the sopranos rattle my bones.

As we hit the last note, softer than air, and felt it resonate off the walls, we stood there for a moment, in awe of each other. A crowd had formed on the balcony above and in the hallway around us, silent as mice, as if they had felt what we had.

For a moment suspended in time itself, the world disappeared, and it was just us. I wasn’t leaving town in that moment; instead, I was surrounded by my people ready to sing once more and forever.

Then the bell rang. We stood there for another minute, soaking it in.

I couldn’t hold it in much longer. Through hot tears, I thanked all of them for doing this for me, and after exchanging hugs, I boarded my bus back to Horizon City for the last time.

Music had never felt so real to me as it did in that moment, and several times since then I have been able to replicate most of that feeling. My high school in Ohio was, as I’ve said before, an arts high school, and our top mixed choir was truly something special.

I’ve sung full Requiems. I’ve sung Alleluias, Gregorian chants and spirituals. I’ve sung canticles, madrigals and show tunes, and each one will always hold a place in my heart.

But nothing got to me like that September afternoon in the Rotunda at Americas High School. I never wanted to leave that moment behind.

That’s actually what inspired me to write my own songs.

But more on that later.

Tom Pinney is a news reporter for the Maryville Daily Forum.