Four long hours of driving
Geoff H. had a roundsing today, up in Sebastopol. It was lovely.
The main problem with Sebastopol from my point of view is that it takes a little over two hours for me to drive there from my place, if traffic is relatively light (as it was today). But I brought along a portable tape player and listened to music in the car (my car stereo is still broken; some day I need to get it fixed or replace it), and it was a pretty straightforward drive, and traffic wasn't bad, and I got there almost on time.
Roundsings at Swarthmore are usually my favorite parts of visits there, but the roundsing at reunion the other week (at some point I may still write up some of my thoughts about reunion, but not now) wasn't as spectacular as I'd hoped. I mean, it was fine, but most of the regular singers had already spent a couple of days talking and playing games and weren't up for singing for more than about 20 minutes. Which is barely enough to get warmed up in my book. We did keep going a while longer after most people went inside, but it was still a bit disappointing, just 'cause I'd had such high expectations.
Today's wasn't perfect, but it was well worth the four and a half hours of driving. (There's a round to which the words go "Four long hours of driving for one short swim in the ocean; miserere nobis." These four long hours of driving were much more worthwhile than that.) It was in a big lovely house in Sebastopol, a semi-rural town in Sonoma County where I lived for a while when I was growing up. There were about ten adults there, and two kids. (I'm learning to ignore background noise, somehow. At reunion we had a story reading in a large and very noisy room, and I managed to enjoy it against all expectations; at the roundsing, the kids had the potential to be disruptive, but didn't bother me. It helped that the parents regularly took them outside and gave them enough attention to keep them occupied. And that they're cool kids.)
Most of the adults were pretty good singers, and maybe half of us had done roundsings before. I had my keyboard and, thanks to Joel M., an almost complete set of sheet music for the rounds that are sung at Swarthmore; that helped tremendously. Various people taught rounds, and requested others to be taught. Ben Newman's setting of an Ursula Le Guin poem ("The Creation of Ea") was a particular hit. People had the attention and interest to learn "Gaudeamus Hodie" despite the fact that the words for the three lines are almost identical (last time I tried to teach it, the other participants revolted and told me it was too hard because of the repeated words). There were some of the silly rounds that I'm not so fond of ("I sat next to the duchess at tea" and such), but not many. Lots of pretty rounds sung well. Friendly happy people. Good stuff.
I should note that I in no way object to less-than-excellent singers attending roundsings; I'm such a singer myself. One of the great things about rounds is that they demonstrate the power of repetition: after five or ten times through, with some focused teaching attention on the difficult spots, most people can pick up a round enough to sing it. But I'm not a strong enough or confident enough singer myself to anchor a part—that is, to be the one person who knows the song well enough to lead it in a group singing one part—if the other people in that part aren't pretty good singers. I get easily swayed; if I hear someone next to me singing the same part with a slightly different note, I'll shift to what they're singing, because they're more likely to be right. But if you put two or more people like me in a part without someone really good to anchor us, we fall to pieces.
But in this case, most of the people were good enough singers (and I chose familiar enough rounds to teach) that I could anchor parts sometimes. That felt good.
And having the keyboard there, plus sheet music, meant that I could plunk a note on the keyboard every now and then while I was teaching, to make sure I stayed on-pitch; if I don't have some sort of accompaniment, the chances of my staying on-pitch throughout a song are sadly slim.
. . . Really, it just felt good to sing. Another great thing about rounds is that they can let non-spectacular singers like me sound really good as part of a group. One of my very favorite activities. I have a halfway decent voice and a good range, but because I'm not so good about keeping to a given note (particularly on unaccented words), I don't do so much public singing. Except in roundsings.
Sing a song of glory, and you will be the glory.
Naught are you but song, and as you sing you are.—The Sufi Choir
We sang for nearly four hours. I could probably have gone another hour, but the host had to leave.
So I packed up my stuff and came back home, singing along with Angels in Daring (one of my favorite albums, which I never listen to any more because it's on cassette) (apparently it was part of an early experiment in online music, but that site hasn't been updated in four years, so it seems unlikely that the whole album will be made available for download, alas) for the second half of the trip. "Lay your course steady, these dreams take time. . . ." Yeah.
And now I'm off to a party for a while.