During my time in choir at WUMC, I learned a very strange thing, which is also a happy memory.
I like to sing in other languages.
I'm not sure anyone else really liked it though.
Every once and awhile we would sing a single song that had words that were hard to pronounce. But there was a point in time where we got to sing some really fun (according to me) pieces like Vivaldi's Gloria and Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols.
Gloria was written in Latin. Ceremony of Carols was written in mostly Middle English. Both difficult to learn. Both things I really, really enjoyed learning and singing.
It opened my eyes (and ears) to music that I probably would not have otherwise known or cared about. And in this time of rediscovering music that I love, I'm also finding copies of these pieces I haven't thought much about or even sung in so many years.
I know that there were times when my fellow choir members struggled learning the words, especially the Middle English. (I was pretty good at it because by then I had read through some of Chaucer's work in Middle English already so I was familiar with how things were said.) But we got through it and made the music sing. OH! And we did Ceremony of Carols accompanied by a HARP! Which was really cool.
Many of my happy memories are those surrounding music, as you could probably tell. Though those times long faded away and my time in choir came to an end as I wound up doing other things, I was blessed by that time of fellowship and song. And maybe someday in the future I will have that again.
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| The Chrismon Tree - WUMC Advent 2014 |
P.S. - I can't forget Rutter's Requiem which combines Latin and English! Also another good piece!
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