April 27, 2020: Sending Back the Music
The choir had that great Zoom call a few days ago, which was truly touching (though not physically touching at all, natch). And feeling a bit teary afterward, I said, "We don't know when we will see each other again in real space," which was true.
But we DO know when we WON'T see each other again.
We won't see each other again this school year (which is also the choir year), because Portland Public Schools are not going to reopen, and choir isn't going to restart, and that's as it should be.
And we won't see each other on the summer tour, which was cancelled, so we won't sing in Canterbury Cathedral and Yorkminster, both of which are GIANT BIG DEALS for a choir, long anticipated, and not incredibly likely to come our way again.
(Cathedrals schedule visiting choirs three years out - plus our scheduled stop in Canterbury backed up on this once-every-ten-years sortof Episcopal Olympics, the Lambeth Conference. We were going to be singing IN CANTERBURY the weekend Lambeth ended, meaning people who Like That Sort of Thing would probably have come to hear us. Big big deal. Plus - I can still recite the first 14 lines of the Canterbury Tales, a standard English Major party piece, I know, but STILL, now... no Canterbury for me. Sigh, comma, heavy, as my old pal Ted used to say.)
And of course it's not just us, it's everybody everywhere, I get it, things got cancelled: weddings, funerals, reunions, trips, dirty weekends, school graduations, "elective" surgeries (I want to put quotes around "elective" for a while). That's how it goes. Some people suffered lots worse than mere cancellations.
I get it. I do.
But, and also, we were asked to mail back all our music - all our music for the rest of the year, all our music for the tour. Stick it in an envelope, print off a label, send it back.
This was at the behest of our music librarians, who will get access to the cathedral again one of these days, and who want all the music to be mailed back so they only have to do the re-shelving project once.
Our music librarians have a truly huge task, and they deserve far more thanks than they get. You should see the music library. It would blow your mind.
But it is SO HARD to mail all that music back. Not technically hard. I've got the label all printed out. It's lump in the throat HARD. It's really facing the fact that we won't see each other until September, if then, that we aren't going on tour, that it's going to be a long dry spell. It's not that I didn't know that, haven't known it for weeks. But it's such tangible proof.
Bye, music.... Godspeed.
But we DO know when we WON'T see each other again.
We won't see each other again this school year (which is also the choir year), because Portland Public Schools are not going to reopen, and choir isn't going to restart, and that's as it should be.
And we won't see each other on the summer tour, which was cancelled, so we won't sing in Canterbury Cathedral and Yorkminster, both of which are GIANT BIG DEALS for a choir, long anticipated, and not incredibly likely to come our way again.
(Cathedrals schedule visiting choirs three years out - plus our scheduled stop in Canterbury backed up on this once-every-ten-years sortof Episcopal Olympics, the Lambeth Conference. We were going to be singing IN CANTERBURY the weekend Lambeth ended, meaning people who Like That Sort of Thing would probably have come to hear us. Big big deal. Plus - I can still recite the first 14 lines of the Canterbury Tales, a standard English Major party piece, I know, but STILL, now... no Canterbury for me. Sigh, comma, heavy, as my old pal Ted used to say.)
And of course it's not just us, it's everybody everywhere, I get it, things got cancelled: weddings, funerals, reunions, trips, dirty weekends, school graduations, "elective" surgeries (I want to put quotes around "elective" for a while). That's how it goes. Some people suffered lots worse than mere cancellations.
I get it. I do.
But, and also, we were asked to mail back all our music - all our music for the rest of the year, all our music for the tour. Stick it in an envelope, print off a label, send it back.
This was at the behest of our music librarians, who will get access to the cathedral again one of these days, and who want all the music to be mailed back so they only have to do the re-shelving project once.
Our music librarians have a truly huge task, and they deserve far more thanks than they get. You should see the music library. It would blow your mind.
But it is SO HARD to mail all that music back. Not technically hard. I've got the label all printed out. It's lump in the throat HARD. It's really facing the fact that we won't see each other until September, if then, that we aren't going on tour, that it's going to be a long dry spell. It's not that I didn't know that, haven't known it for weeks. But it's such tangible proof.
Bye, music.... Godspeed.
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