Stop, Time

I got my musical score in the mail on August 13, the day before I headed back to Jordan for the beginning of this school year. On the cover of the score were the words in a big, bold font: “The Denison Singers Invade Winston-Salem, September 17-20, 2009.” I could hardly wait for that weekend to arrive—a specially timed reunion to coincide with the end of Ramadan, and the beginning of the Eid celebrations—specially timed so that I could be able to join in the festivities and journey back from the Middle East to help in the invasion of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

This was hardly the first reunion of the Denison Singers—indeed, by my count, this might be the 11th such reunion in the last 25 years, and I have been to all of them save one (in 2001 I elected to go on a trip to China, and I hated that the trip coincided with one of these reunions). It is always difficult to describe the emotions and joy at participating in these reunions, but easy to describe what we do. We visit, we laugh, and we sing.

William Osborne arrived at Denison University in Granville in 1961 and promptly started a madrigal-style singing group. Professor Osborne (once you are past the first week of college you never, ever call him that again) signed his memos “WO” for his initials, and his name is always pronounced thusly, WO. WO remained at Denison until he retired to Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 2003. In 1984, while I was a student at Denison and a member of the Denison Singers, he decided to have a reunion of anyone who had been in the group since 1961 and the participants would put on a concert. They ended up enjoying the visit, the laughter, and the singing. So, since then we have met at least 11 times in 25 years; needless to say, we love doing these reunions.

At first it did seem strange to come back for a reunion (I “came back” at the end of sophomore and senior years—I had hardly unpacked my dorm room when I came by that reunion) and spend time with people who were my mother’s age and all those 70s Singers who acted crazily during the weekend. But over the years, as life’s turns become more hairpin, and you realize the speed with which life moves, it has become among the most important things I can do.

The template has been set for these many years. We try and convene on a Thursday, start rehearsing the music WO has chosen (darn it, but he continues to challenge us with complex music that is often in Latin or German, tricky harmonies, and hardly a “swing choir ease”) and continue alternating between laughter and music-making until the concert on Sunday afternoon. Then poof—everyone scatters. One of the most striking things that happen every time is the balance of the voice parts. No one really knows if one can attend the next reunion—things come up, jobs take you farther away, family crises squash the will to come, all of the usual real-life moments that can stand between you and a utopian weekend. So it is always random who can attend these gatherings. But as it happens, the voice parts of soprano, alto, tenor, bass are almost exactly equal. It is just part of the kismet that makes these gatherings so special. This year it was numerically a perfect balance again.

In 2008 the Denison Singers had been invited back (after 2004) to participate in an arts festival in Winston-Salem. That was during my first year in Jordan, and wouldn’t you know, kismet again smiled on me and deemed that invitation at the beginning of my spring break, so that I could actually attend all the way from Jordan. It was exciting all over again to spend time with my reunion buddies. But as we gathered in WO’s apartment for what he calls an “afterglow reception” several of us decided we did not want to wait to convene until June, 2011, for a reunion marking the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of the group. We wanted to get together once before, not wanting three years to pass again to enjoy this unusual afterglow. I piped up that I thought a perfect time to gather would be September, 2009, just as Ramadan ended and I would have a week’s vacation while my Muslim friends celebrated the Eid holiday.

Reunions are tricky things—they can be tacky, they can lack meaning, they can make you feel old, empty, banal, fat, rudder-less, or worse, trying to relive some former glory days. These Denison Singers reunions avoid all of those pitfalls. Sure, in my head I do spend some time fighting ancient wrongs, humming old hit songs in my head. But these reunions do an amazing thing—it connects me to my many selves, transcending time and place and gives me a lift and an arc to really all I have been and hope to be.

I laugh with people who remember me as an 18 year old—we have the scrapbooks to remind us of the hideous clothes and glasses we thought looked good in the mid-1980s. Seriously, someone should have stopped us from the John Hughes movies-like haircuts and dull looks. We reminisce about the tours we took with Singers (I still feel sorry for the Singers who came the year after my class—will we ever stop talking about the European tour of 1983?????). But then it is not a wallowing in the past. We update each other on our lives now—a brilliant, in-person Facebook status update that sighs over struggles and rejoices in promotions, children’s achievements, and trappings that we credit as success. We are an interesting lot—some teachers, some business people, some scientists, living all over (this reunion had people from 18 states and 2 foreign countries). As we move out of our Singer eras, don’t forget this is a reunion beyond just your own era at Denison—there were people there in the late 60s, pushing 70, and the youngest are 29—we take in a vast scope of WO’s 42 years of conducting this group.

But as I catch up with people, we always talk about the next one, the next time we have this opportunity to visit, laugh, and sing. There was lots of talk about 2011, and what that reunion back at Denison will be like. You can’t help but keep an eye on your own future. That will be the end of four years in Jordan for me at that point—will I be packing up and marking a return to the United States at that point? What goals do I have before the next time I see these wonderful people? Who do I want to be when we re-convene? In the next 21 months when next we make music together, who do I see myself becoming? This is the thing about these reunions, it brings together a rosy, now-set-in-amber 1980s of college time, a current assessment of your own personal present, and a chance to look invitingly to a future of growth and transformation.

I often joke that these Denison Singers reunions are like the village in the Lerner/Loewe musical, Brigadoon. This enchanting village magically comes to life once in a great while, and when that moment passes, and the day ends, the village is no more. But while the village was there—you couldn’t imagine a more exciting place! Our reunions are like that Brigadoon—few of us spend much time in contact during the many months in between reunions—real life calls on us and weighs on us. But when the music starts, WO’s lazy circles in the sky, those motets, or the Brahms, or the Schuetz, or the Copland or the Bach or the Haydn—we leave the world for a few days and visit, laugh, and sing.

We rehearse about 10-12 hours for the concert over the course of several days. There are always compositions by some of the talented in-house composers who have been in the group (this year we repeated one entitled, “I Celebrate Myself and Sing Myself”); there is always at least one big piece with the organ, and pieces designed to pique our interest and remind us that as singers there is always work to be done. WO is eccentric, to say the least, and one of the thrills of the reunions is writing down some of the great phrases he utters during rehearsals, comments either in derision or joy. He never says things as blandly as “Keep the tempo up”—no, I remember a quotation from 1984 when he bid us to sing the Mozart movement, “as if Charlton Heston were charging up the main drag!” In one piece this time he reminded us, “Ja, be a bit more legato here and less narcissistic,” and shouted, “Ah, we found a vowel in that phrase!” I think my favorite comment this time was during a new piece written for us at this reunion, and WO stated, “This is a chance for you to wag your musical behinds here.”

I could go on and on about the friends who come to this reunion—there are always people from the 1960s here and always the young ones, we call them “the babies,” and always will—from his last group in 2003. My era, the Singers of the 80s as we proudly exclaim, comprised 40% of this reunion group. We are a loud, proud group! Since the group only had 16 members at a time, we are not a huge, huge group. But let the record show that all the seniors from my freshman year were in attendance, and all the seniors from my senior year were there. We toasted our dear friend Tracy on her birthday on Saturday (one of the babies remarked that it was the birthday that never ended since we ushered it in at midnight, and bid the day adieu the following midnight…oh, and when we sang to her in rich harmony, it made the entire trip worthwhile right then and there—I wanted to plead, stop, time) and participated in our parody of show tunes skewering WO in our traditional “Talent Cavalcade,” as WO calls it.

During one of the parties at WO’s apartment I saw on his wall a cross-stitch of some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on “Art” and they touched me so: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

Maybe that is the greatest legacy of this group. How do we find the beautiful? WO invited us to travel the world (when we went to Salzburg on that legendary 1983 tour I knew I had to go back there) and through music, and difficult, challenging music at that, we could plumb the depths to perhaps find the beautiful. As I arrived at the Greensboro airport last Thursday, 25 hours after I left my apartment in Jordan, I knew I would find the beautiful. I knew I would see it in the faces of these dear friends. I knew I would be reminded of the beautiful from my youth, celebrate the beautiful in my present circumstances and look toward the beautiful I will still encounter.

How grateful I am to these Singers—these men and women, these former school boys and school girls who all happened to meet twice a week across 42 years in college times and plunk out some notes.

We wagged our musical behinds a little, and found the beautiful.

You know, I am not through with my postcard from Winston-Salem. I think I must continue this tomorrow and introduce you to some of these Singers.