Who arrived in September, shy and unassuming, always asking how were things done here before and honoring the tradition, whether it made sense or not and for several weeks never rehearsed us more than an hour and smiled at every stumbling attempt the men made at new music, his harshest criticism, “Let’s try that again,” then delighted with how we attempted three or four measures until we got it right.
Then in October we started to rehearse the Christmas cantata, the lovely “Winter Rose” (Joseph Martin), and we expanded our choir by a half dozen volunteers, and the first hour was brisk and more business-like, but our new director still encouraged and showed obvious delight if we improved our execution of a difficult section and would occasionally forget to lead us into our entrances, but would charmingly insist that we enter whether he remembered or not, accepting his own fallibility with such good humor that we began to savor our own fallibility, too, increasing our confidence as the performance date approached, and pretty soon was calling for confident entrances and hearty voices, whether the right notes came out or not and started using exhortations like “That blew me away” making us feel like we might actually bring this off on the final Sunday morning.
Then the four-piece orchestra arrived in December and the narrators were summoned to our dress rehearsal, along with four acquaintances of the choir director to bolster the shallow bass and tenor sections and suddenly it was a six-ring circus with so many role-players, it seemed that only a magician could keep the whole enterprise together, but the director expanded his attention to every detail and made notes in the score in the middle of directing the whole show and when it came down to the final run-through, knew where the creaky parts were, so we rehearsed with laser focus on those parts and then, the ultimate offering of music, which was embellished by a red rose set in a bouquet on the altar by our youngest choir member, and the director cued every entrance with an encouraging smile and the whole thing was over in less time than an afternoon nap and we were applauded and satisfied we had given our best . . .
And the director called the narrators, the tiny orchestra, the accompanist, the soloists and the choir, too, to take their bows and took one modest bow of his own and carried off the enterprise with the aplomb of an expert, and we felt blessed by our new choir director for his unassuming orchestration of every detail and sheer positive energy he infused, giving us joy to praise and honor You on the celebration of your amazing incarnation.
Thank you for Ethan.
Click here for the worship service featuring the Winter Rose
Copied with permission from Bill Tucker's blog
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