SINGING ALONG
A repost of a piece I wrote for Tertulia’s new blog, Tuck In , where many musicians are sharing reflections on music, food, wine, and the passions that feed their music-making.
HANDEL: Comfort Ye and Every Valley from Messiah with Handel & Haydn Society and Masaaki Suzuki, conductor performed in November 2019
In any other year, the moment Thanksgiving arrives I’m staring down a five week tunnel of constant travel and performance, hopping from city to city singing Handel’s Messiah. There have been many years where I’ve missed Thanksgiving with my family in order to begin a run of Messiah performances on Black Friday. Rather than referring to this time of year as the “holiday season”, singers often call it “Messiah season”, as there are so many performances of Handel’s masterwork happening worldwide. As I rush home for Christmas after weeks of airports, hotel rooms, and Messiah rehearsals, I often joke with my family that my holiday gifts have all been underwritten by George Friedrich Handel. Audiences everywhere love the piece, and it sells out concert halls with extraordinary consistency.
Messiah is perhaps the only piece in the classical music repertoire where the audience’s love for the piece melts the boundary between the audience and the stage. When everyone rises for the famous Hallelujah chorus – a tradition whose origins have been lost to time – there are always many audience members audibly singing along, their passion for the music easily overcoming any self-consciousness they might feel singing in the middle of a concert. Some presenters embrace this – in my hometown of Ann Arbor, the University Musical Society used to include a copy of the score to the chorus in the program booklet. Others go so far as to produce sing-along Messiahs in which there is no professional chorus and the audience supplies the choruses for the entire piece. I once performed one of these in Chicago, and my family, not seeing assigned seats on their tickets, chose to sit in the section marked “Tenor” because they thought it meant it was the section to get the best view of me, not realizing that they had inadvertently seated themselves in the tenor section of the audience chorus.
I love this aspect of holiday music – that it normalizes the act of singing for all. While it is always a magical thing to gather people into a concert hall to hear music, it is especially miraculous to unite people through song the way Messiah and other holiday music does. This holiday season, as the pandemic rages, the inability to sing together en masse is a great loss. At a time where we have all been so bitterly divided, the balm of singing this music as an act of togetherness has never felt more necessary.
Though most of us are finding ourselves locking down and sheltering in place again as the holiday season intensifies, I hope you will still sing along, even if it’s in the comfort of your own home, with your favorite recording of Messiah or Christmas carols. To help you along, here’s a playlist of some of my favorite holiday tunes and recordings of Messiah excerpts, with perhaps a recording or two of myself snuck in for good measure.
I hope you will belt along with me, so we can keep the spirit of musical togetherness going in these extraordinary times.