Back to Music, Part 3: Reaching Out

I realized, at some point, that I'd completely abandoned music as I pursued writing.

Still, every now and then, a TV producer or journalist trying to figure out what box they should put me in when reporting on my blogging about crime would use the phrase, "former opera singer." That always bugged me.

'You don't leave opera,' I'd tell them, 'It's like the Mafia that way.'

And I meant it.

Opera, once it takes hold of you, becomes something of an addiction--especially, I think, if you discover you can sing it. It's like having the ability to bite into some deliciously ripe fruit at any time. Who could resist such a thing?

I couldn't.

Sacred music, for me, has a similar place, though it's a different sort of food (to extend the whole 'eating things' analogy). There is a deep and sometimes disturbingly profound thrill to using your voice in worship, if you're a singer. All writerly remove from faith, all cynicism can be erased as you take joy in singing in a clear and ringing voice through a spiritual or one of the great English church anthems. No matter how much an agnostic or even atheist you insist you are, the moment you apply breath and voice to music celebrating the sacred, something in your heart begins to slip toward a feeling of worship, even if you don't want it to.

At least in my experience, anyway.

These things were tumbling through my mind tonight as I queried a church music director and the head of a small, local opera company about singing opportunities in church and on the stage. One part of my brain was saying, 'just see how you do with the chorus,' but another part was saying, 'just go for it. You took all those years of voice lessons and high-powered voice coaching for a reason, dipwad. Use them.'

I may not hear back from the Episcopal church music director or the soprano behind the local opera company at all. And that will be fine. But if I do hear from them, I'll go sing for them.

And just go from there.

We're all raised with some arbitrary idea that we have some individual and narrow destiny. That we must find this one thing and settle on it. I certainly was.

But as I've found my way as a writer (so far, admittedly, in journalism and blogging) I've begun to believe we are multitudes, just like Whitman said, and don't have to just settle on one thing.

I can write. I can sing. I can run.

I am about to turn 45 and I can still do any damn thing I put my mind to.

So I will.