Concert Choir (Part Two)

So the day of the city-wide ninth grade wrestling tournament finally came around and I was the top seed in my bracket. I was winning my first-round match 4-0 and it was late in the last period. I figured I’d make a token effort at a pinning move to satisfy my buddies who had been harassing me all season long about not having a pin to my name. You can probably guess what happened. I screwed up in my half-hearted attempt at the pinning move. The other kid reversed me for 2 points, and in the process of the reversal I ended up on my back giving up another 3 points, and lost 5-4 in the closing seconds of the match. The lowest seeded kid in the bracket beat me, the highest seed in the bracket, and I was out of the tournament.

I was devastated. I was inconsolable. I had lost the one thing I wanted most in the world by making the stupid decision to placate my teammates. I went to the farthest reaches of the gym and cried my eyes out. This is the point at which Mr. Quinn shows up in the gymnasium to find me - great timing.

I was sitting on the floor sobbing with my head between my knees, and my arms wrapped over my head, trying to hide myself from the world. What I could not accomplish was hide what I had done from myself. It was at this moment that Mr. Quinn showed up to ask, “Are you Tom?” At that moment I wished I wasn’t. I wished I was somebody else and just wanted to be left alone in my misery, but I had said I would do this audition, and this man had come into the high school on a Saturday, his day off, as a special favor to Ms. Kauffman (at last, I remember her name now!) so of course I had to do the responsible thing and fulfill my promise.

The choir room was at the farthest end of the high school from the gymnasium, so we had a pretty long walk. We made some small talk along the way, and it became clear that Mr. Quinn couldn’t care less about athletics. Losing the 9th grade tournament, which was the most important thing in the world to me, was the least consequential thing in the world in his mind, and he made that clearly known. Perhaps the architects knew what they were doing when they put the athletic complex and the music rooms at opposite ends of the campus.

I eventually found myself standing next to a piano at the bottom level of the tiered choir room. I was still wearing my wrestling gear under a sweatshirt and sweatpants, all of it ancient moth-eaten equipment from the 1950s. It was wintertime in Iowa, so even though I’d been dripping hot with sweat after losing my match (Did I mention I lost?) 15 minutes earlier, I was now dripping wet and freezing cold.

Mr. Quinn gave me a note on the piano and had me sing a series of 5-note up and down scales working my way up the scale a whole note at a time. Along the way he dictated the vowels and consonants I was to use. “Na” became “La”, which became “Nu”, as he checked my diction and tone. He had me change volume. When he reached the top of my range he worked me back down to the bottom, and eventually quit giving me the note for each scale to see if I could hold pitch reliably over time while singing a capella. Finally, he gave me a piece of music to sight read, which is really tough. When the audition was over I had no idea how I had done.

I learned from Ms. Kauffman several weeks later that I was accepted into the high school concert choir and would need to drop biology from my sophomore schedule. I was one of only two sophomores to make it into the choir, the other being a soprano, Odessa Paulson. Notice how I name her but never name myself? Curious thing, that.

So what’s the point? Maybe there are two points. I can’t say definitively that this ninth grade wrestling loss affected me, but I suspect it did. I was already a cautious kid, and this caused me to be even more cautious. You cannot be cautious and wrestle well. I never accomplished anything great in wrestling. Perhaps it is just as well. I found my way to cross country and track where I was fairly successful, and I’ve spent my entire life happily competing in long distance road races.

The second point is that those three years of high school choral music were the most satisfying years of my musical life. We practiced and performed the most challenging and beautiful pieces of music. We perfected every consonant and vowel of every piece until we were exhausted from the effort. The diction, tone, volume, stage presence, all of it, pursued to the finest detail, pursued to perfection. The music we produced was exquisitely beautiful, and when the sound dissipated in the air there was nothing left behind but our exhausted bodies and souls that had been profoundly touched.

Music is the language of the soul –