Musically Mixed UP !!
Musically Mixed UP !!
Today has been a SERIOUSLY mixed up day, musically.
I had spent all night surfing YouTube, looking up Christmas music and other pieces from the old college days. I found lots of old favorites, and was humming along most of the night. By dawn I was on an “Ave Maria” kick. The problem here is that I know BOTH of the popular versions, but I prefer one over the other - the Schubert, which is the more well-known. But, I vastly prefer it in German, which is quite harder to find. I loved the challenge of singing in German in college. Latin and Italian were too easy - the vowels too pure and easy. French too hard - I mean, how do you make a lovely non-nasal singing tone when so many of the vowels are supposed to come out of your nose and sound so ugly? But German - so fun to get all those crisp consonants and NOT spit at people in the process. OK, so I have a privately warped idea of fun.
The problem got worse once I had to turn off the computer music for awhile (to have one of my new 6 or 7 a.m. DAWN chats with my son, while he drives to work at his new job... I mean, who ELSE can you chat to at that horrendous hour except Mom?). Now I find out that I only know some parts of “Ave Maria” in German, and the other parts in Latin. That gets a bit weird. Add to that the fact that I'm a Protestant, and “Ave Maria” doesn't come naturally to me in the first place. It was looking like a musically weird day shaping up.
Hmmm....maybe I shouldn't have stayed up all night for that third night in a row on YouTube after all......
Then, I discovered the catchy secular tune “Ding Dong Merrily on High” with that great, bubbly, long “Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ria! Hosanna in Excelsis!”
So now, half the morning I was spouting this ditty, getting dressed, unloading the dishwasher, even while getting the mail, and out in public pumping GAS !! I couldn't stop. Worse thing was....I don't really KNOW that piece. So I couldn't get the song to END. It was just a cyclical bit that went round and round, but I couldn't resolve it. Ah...No biggie, I was happy just bubbling out the funnest part anyway.
Then things went downhill for me musically. AND I was no longer alone.
I had picked up my disabled neighbor to take him to the bank, a couple of stops and then grocery shopping. But every time he got out of the car, the song started bubbling up again. I barely got it shut up by each time he sat down in my car.
And it wasn't shutting off in the beginning of the grocery store either! Have any of you found on YouTube, those “Random Acts of Culture” or whatever, where suddenly, in a mall food court, 4-8 people stand up on the tables and start belting out the “Hallelujah Chorus”? I was seriously close to this something like this all by my lonesome. Scary!! I was Doo-doo-doodling and hum-hum- humming, while squeezing the tomatoes and the one sane voice in my head was telling me to shut UP before someone notices - and calls the nice men in the white coats!
Then things went downhill even further!
Somewhere deep in the cobwebs of my mind, I just knew there was a favorite SACRED Christmas Hymn with long, fun “Glo-o-o-o-ria” passages. What WAS that tune? Yeah, I know....NObody else tortures themselves like this - nobody!
It took me half an hour to remember the “other” favorite piece with the long, somewhat difficult Gloria passage, and it was like pulling teeth. I can't believe how thick were the cobwebs in my brain!
But - all I could remember were these 2 passages -
“Glo-o-o-o-o-o-ria in excelsis deo. Glo-o-o-o-o-o-ria in excelsis de-e-o.”
And you certainly can't look just THAT up in Google with any expectation of success now, can you?
I had fallen in love with this Christmas Hymn at a young age because it took considerable time and effort before I could master enough breath support to make it to the end of that long phrase, and also keep all those notes in tune without separate syllables. It also straddled the time in my development from when “they” thought I was an Alto, until I went to college and learned I was a first Soprano. So I know both parts. (Just so you know.....Altos are “smarter” and better musicians. Sopranos are lucky enough to be lazy musicians but their parts are the MOST FUN!) And it's a lovely piece of music also, of course.
MUCH more mental anguish, and several more supermarket aisles later finally brought verses two and three to mind. Good Baptist that my mother raised me to be - we always know all the verses, and sing them all, right?
So now I could add -
“Shepherds why this jubilee? Why your joyous strains prolong?...”
And -
“Come to Bethlehem and see Him whose birth the angels sing...”
But for the LIFE of me, I couldn't remember the FIRST verse, and hence the TITLE!
All through the grocery store - over and over and over and over. I tried SO hard, first to grasp that first verse, and then later to just get the accursed thing OUT of my head! Buuut NNNoooooo!!!! I was LITERALLY pulling at my hair in frustration and starting to get a headache. But I was also, at the same time, still bubbly happy and with an almost uncontrollable urge to keep singing or humming the Stupid Thing !
I had even started to go so far as to start looking at other shoppers, trying to somehow size up, by their appearance, whether they just MIGHT know the first verse to this Christmas hymn if I sang it to them. How ridiculous is this??? But I was at the point of doing nearly ANYthing to make it STOP !
A few aisles later, in the frozen foods, I took my chance.
An older woman, about 65, did that “woman thing” and jumped into the conversation she heard me and my neighbor in his wheelchair having. (We were just mentioning how women can have two conversations at once and even think of a third thing, like the groceries, and usually men can't because they're just not as good at multi-tasking, particularly with word-things.) So...I took my chance with this friendly lady. I asked her if she just might know the first verse to.... - and I started singing - starting with the “Glo-o-o-o-o-ria” and jumping quickly to a verse. Nice Lady wracked her brain, too, and came up with a different, beautiful hymn that I had long forgotten, and then she promised to keep thinking about it during her shopping. I apologized to the poor gal, commiserating that I had now spread my musical problem into someone else's head! Then I thanked her for trying and told her that at least I could shut off my “NOISE” for a few minutes by replacing it with her suggested hymn (“Angels from the Realms of Glory”).
It was a couple of hours later, after many trips puffing up and down stairs with groceries that I got a chance to get to the world's finest invention - GOOGLE !!!
You all probably have figured out long ago what my “Problem Hymn” was, but I typed some of that second verse into that WONDROUS little white search box and BAM !!!
AHHHHHH - relief at last !!!!!