Altos to the Left, Please

The Current River Community Choir has one rule, which is that there are no auditions, and one consequence of that rule, which is that we are not very good. I want to be clear that I love it. I've been going for six years, every Wednesday, in the basement of the Lutheran church where the heating clanks like someone's trapped in the pipes. I'm an alto. I was told I was an alto in my second week by Margaret, who runs the thing, and who listened to me sing one scale and said, "Altos to the left, please," in a voice that ended the discussion. There are about thirty of us in a good week. Retired teachers, a couple of nurses off shift, a guy named Pete who drives a snowplow for the city and has the loudest bass voice in Northwestern Ontario and no ability whatsoever to find the pitch he's aiming for. He lands near it. He lands in the neighbourhood. Margaret says he "provides foundation." That winter we were doing a spring concert with an ambitious program. Margaret had chosen a piece in Latin, in eight parts, and every Wednesday from January to March we took it apart and put it back together wrong. The sopranos went sharp when they got excited. The tenors, all four of them, sang whatever the sopranos were singing but lower. We altos held our line, mostly, because alto lines are boring and you can't get lost on a road with no turns. In the third week of March, Margaret stopped us in the middle of the piece. She didn't say anything. She just put her hands down and looked at the floor, and that was worse than yelling. Thirty adults stood there in the clanking basement holding music and feeling like they'd disappointed their mother. Pete said, "Do we sound bad, Margaret?" "You sound," she said, and stopped, and started again. "You sound like thirty people singing near each other." Nobody laughed. Then she did something she had never done. She told us to close our folders. Put them on the chairs. She turned off the lights except for the one over the piano, and she said, "Sing me something you all know. Anything. No parts. Go."

There was a silence of the kind that has a lot of people in it. Then one of the nurses, quietly, started "Four Strong Winds." Just started it. And by the second line the room had it, because everyone in that basement had grown up with that song in a car, or a kitchen, or a funeral. Pete came in underneath and, for once, he was nearly on the note. The sopranos didn't go sharp because they weren't trying to impress anyone. We didn't sing in parts. We sang in a big rough unison that was slightly out of tune in exactly the same direction all at once, which is a different thing than being out of tune. Margaret didn't conduct. She sat on the piano bench with her back to us. When it finished she said, "That. Do the Latin like that," and turned the lights back on. We did not do the Latin like that. Let's be honest. At the concert in April the tenors got lost in the second section and Pete provided foundation for a chord that didn't exist. My daughter-in-law said afterwards that it was "really brave," which is what people say. But for two minutes on a Wednesday in a church basement, with the pipes clanking and the lights off, thirty people who couldn't hold a part held a song. I think about that more than I think about the concert. I don't know what it was, exactly. Margaret would probably have a word for it. I keep going. Wednesdays. Altos to the left.