Singing With the Choir

I’m one of those unfortunate people who have a great love of music but very little aptitude for it. My singing voice is marginal at very best. I long ago gave up any hope of having a good voice, and consider any effort at singing a success if I can stay on pitch fairly consistently.

For the past year or two my wife and I have been going to Mass at the local cathedral on most Sundays. The cathedral has wonderful acoustics, an organ, and a very good choir, so the building is filled with sound. With this support I find myself attempting to sing more often than I usually do in church. Anyone with a similarly uncertain voice will know what I mean by “support” here: it’s not just the psychological effect of feeling that my mistakes won’t be noticed, but also a very literal physical support. I’m not quite sure how to explain this, but somehow the sheer volume and presence of sound seems to communicate itself to my whole body and to make it easier for me to find and hold the pitch. It’s fairly loud, but it’s a human level of sound, not the bludgeoning volume of a rock concert that overloads your system and makes it insensible of any other sound, even one you’re trying to make.

I’ve discovered something that I suppose good singers, especially those who sing in groups, have always known. When I’m exactly on pitch, I cease to hear my own voice; it disappears into the larger sound. I can feel it, but I don’t hear it, except insofar as it may be contributing to the total sound. It’s as if my whole body is in tune with the choir. Or perhaps it’s as if I’m one small pipe in a large organ.

It occurs to me that this might be an image of how the unfallen self would have related to other selves. The Fall is a mysterious event; we know that the first conscious human beings disobeyed God and immediately became ashamed of themselves in some fundamental way: they were “ashamed of their nakedness,” which was not limited to their physical nakedness. One imagines that they had trouble looking each other in the eye. And they were suddenly afraid of God, who had been their companion. Walker Percy, in Lost in the Cosmos and other works, offers an explanation of this phenomenon as having to do with self-consciousness in the negative sense: the self “falling into itself,” alone and uncertain and afraid that there is something wrong with it, something which it must at all costs conceal from the other selves which it encounters. Thus lying, among other sins, is born.

This is interesting and something like it is undoubtedly true, but I find it difficult or impossible to imagine any other way of being. The fallen and fearful condition which we call original sin is now intrinsic to us, and, as the Church teaches, we’re born with it and are powerless to get ourselves out of it. We can imagine it ending only with the end of our existence itself. We want to live, but we can’t imagine life without this miserable self-consciousness. Some religions resolve this dilemma by accepting that individual consciousness is itself the problem, and proposing its disappearance into the One as the solution. But I don’t see the difference between that and death.

When I experience the sound of my own voice as something separate from the sound of the choir and the organ, it means that my voice is not quite perfectly integrated with the others; it’s in conflict with them, fighting with them. But when I hit the note with the choir and the organ and cease to hear myself, I don’t feel that my voice has disappeared. I can still feel myself singing, but the sound is now both within me and outside of me. It seems to be all one sound, yet my individual voice does not cease to exist; it remains distinct, though I feel it as a pleasant physical sensation more than hear it. It not only produces sound, but also takes it in; it adds something to the greater sound and simultaneously receives something from it. The sound is for others, while the pleasure of making it is for me. But this can only happen if the voice is on pitch. Paradoxically, it’s my out-of-tune notes that I perceive as existing only outside me; in other words, my out-of-tune singing disconnects me not only from the choir but from myself. So the idea that I would somehow be more true to myself, more fully an individual, by singing off-key thus is pure nonsense; it would be like an auto racer asserting his individuality by hitting a wall.

Perhaps this is a hint of how the paradox of the individual consciousness will be resolved, and of what it might be like to live as an unfallen consciousness.

Solo singing presents a different set of questions and metaphors.