Ahhh...the life of a choir director. You work and work and work to prepare your choirs for a concert. You slave over your singers until they have every vowel perfectly pure, every word perfectly pronounced, and every phrase perfectly structured. You coach them until they totally believe in themselves. The concert date and time finally arrive. Then, in a matter of minutes, the performance is over, never to be recaptured again.
Why do we do it? Why do we choose to spend our lives preparing ourselves and our singers for something that is lost forever after a few minutes of ecstasy? That's why -- those few minutes of ecstasy. We love taking an inanimate bunch of notes on a page and, with our singers' help, turning them into an unforgettable piece of choral music, one that will take its listeners to a new level of beauty and spirituality. One that will never again be sung or heard the same way.
That's the way it is with music. The beauty of music is in its present state -- in its here and now. Unless it is recorded music, it is constantly changing. No matter how many times it is rehearsed, how many times it is sung, or how many times it is heard, it is never the same. No matter how many times you hear the Mozart Requiem, it will never grow old, because each and every time is different in some way. No matter how many times you sing the "Hallelujah Chorus," it will never be boring, for its present beauty is always different than its past. No matter how many times you rehearse your choir for a performance of the Rutter Gloria, the sound that they make the day of the performance will be different than you've ever heard before.
So, we've prepared our singers well, and they give an outstanding performance. What do we do then? We go back to square one, with a totally new repertoire of music, and a new concert for which to prepare. It's time to make some more moments of ecstasy.
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