Today in music

Today was a big musical day for the family. First of all, even though I set all our clocks forward, I still was late to choir practice this morning. Important lesson learned: no matter what the time on the clock is, you still have to set the alarm if you want to wake up.

Today is Palm Sunday for Christians, and Monkey was going to sing a song with the children's choir.

I don't know if I got into this completely with my last choir post, but Monkey is a fairly devout Christian. She really loves Jesus and Bible stories, and she hates to miss church. She's not a fundamentalist - she is quite skeptical about Adam and Eve not having parents, because she's never met a kid who didn't get here without having a parent at some point. Anyway, she loves God and Jesus, and she is an enthusiastic participant in all church related activities, like the Children's Choir.

Our adult choir is pretty loaded with ringers like me, and we were all zonked. One of the soprano ringers had a show close last night, so she basically came straight from the cast party to church. I didn't sleep well because the weather is killing my hip. And, of course, we were all missing an hour. We were jet lagged.

So we weren't so great today. We had to sing a hymn in Spanish that none of us had set eyes on until our bleary, bloodshot peepers got it today. That's never good. Latin we can handle in our sleep, but anything else can be tricky, particularly something like Spanish where you have to allide the syllables together. It's too late to make a long story short, but we sucked today.

But the Children's Choir, oh my! Monkey was so excited about singing today, she wore her "rock star" shirt (black shirt with the words "rock star" written on it in shiny pink glitter.) They were singing a very typical Palm Sunday type of song "Lo He Comes, Sing We Hosanna". (Palm Sunday: big on the hosannas). Before Monkey was old enough to join the choir last year, the Children's Choir was always silent. They would stand there, the kids lips would be moving, but you could only hear the conductor sing.

But Monkey loooves to sing and they always put the microphone right in front of her. So today, "Lo He Comes, Sing We Hosanna" became a solo instead of a chorus. It was Monkey and the Pips. She belted it out American Idol style. Up in the choir loft, we all woke up. Sweetness and I were laughing so hard we were crying.

Monkey was very pleased with her performance, and everyone was complimenting her. She told me that she sang it like that because she had joy in her heart and she wanted everyone to feel it. (When she says stuff like that, it just kills me.)

The next big musical thing was that Sweetness *had* *to* attend a musical event of some kind before tomorrow. So we ended up driving an hour (just like the one I lost yesterday) to Torrington to go to a church (I must be the churchiest atheist ever) and listen to Gaudeamus (yes, more religious music). They are a professional choir conducted by Paul Halley, a multi Grammy-winning composer for his contributions to the Paul Winter Consort - most definitely not my idea of good music, but his pieces are enjoyable for choirs to sing (provided you aren't a soprano who has to sing one of his frighteningly high, for dogs ears only descants). Sweetness has to attend one musical event a quarter for her Chorale teacher (who is also a composer, IMO, a much better one than Paul Halley, although not nearly as successful). So that was it. We sat in a very lovely, but very cold, Episcopal church listening to God music for an hour and a half.

On the drive home, I decided I needed something appropriately blasphemous to balance out all the religious music I heard today, so I put on Tenacious D (skipping over all the tracks that involve kielbasa sausage, gentle fucking, Cleveland Steamers, and munching on tasty bushes - Sweetness would be mortified if I listened to that kind of stuff in front of her.)

So that was my day in music.