A joyful noise.
Dec. 12th, 2002 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ambitious_wenchI said recently in a comment that movies don't really make me react quite the way they do Jazz. But, now when I think on it, I do get that way when I sing in a choir, and it comes off perfectly.
Hours and hours of practice, rehersals where you begin to hallucinate from lack of sleep, and the hallucinations seem to be more violent, ending in seeing your hands throttling the idiots in the tenor section for their assinine bullsh*t, or possibly disembowling the alto next to you who simply cannot find the key the song was written in.
When the director is stretched too tight, and the individual strands of the tendons holding her together are snapping one at a time.
When you are focused on the same 4 measures of music so tightly for the last half hour that you forget the rest of the song exists.
When you have heard the same slightly off note on the piano for so long that you could walk over and press the key in your sleep.
When it all finaly falls into place--the tenor section pulls their collective self up from their knuckle-dragging posture, and sing with a clarity that would make angels weep for their own inhumanity.
When that alto next to you latches onto the key with both hands like the bar of a hang glider, and leaps from the cliff to soar into the sky of song
When you hear your own hesitant talent stand strong amid the voices, supporting, adding to the gestalt, blending in harmony with precision.
For that one performance, that one shining moment, that utter loss of self in The Music. All the cliches in the world cannot capture it. All the bad prose, all the hacknied description cannot convey the feeling. And it is precious beyond measure.
Dammit, I miss it.
Hours and hours of practice, rehersals where you begin to hallucinate from lack of sleep, and the hallucinations seem to be more violent, ending in seeing your hands throttling the idiots in the tenor section for their assinine bullsh*t, or possibly disembowling the alto next to you who simply cannot find the key the song was written in.
When the director is stretched too tight, and the individual strands of the tendons holding her together are snapping one at a time.
When you are focused on the same 4 measures of music so tightly for the last half hour that you forget the rest of the song exists.
When you have heard the same slightly off note on the piano for so long that you could walk over and press the key in your sleep.
When it all finaly falls into place--the tenor section pulls their collective self up from their knuckle-dragging posture, and sing with a clarity that would make angels weep for their own inhumanity.
When that alto next to you latches onto the key with both hands like the bar of a hang glider, and leaps from the cliff to soar into the sky of song
When you hear your own hesitant talent stand strong amid the voices, supporting, adding to the gestalt, blending in harmony with precision.
For that one performance, that one shining moment, that utter loss of self in The Music. All the cliches in the world cannot capture it. All the bad prose, all the hacknied description cannot convey the feeling. And it is precious beyond measure.
Dammit, I miss it.