Cori Connors: 3-26-19 PITCH

We sing in church. We sing in the congregation, and then after our church meetings we shuffle back into the chapel for an extra hour of choir practice. I figure it’s the least I can do; for the Lord, for our congregation, for myself.

The thing is, I’m pretty confident when I'm singing my own little folk songs with my guitar, and I can do it quite comfortably in front of rather large audiences, but I am a decidedly inferior choir member. I have terrible breath control, and my vibrato is out of control, and most disconcerting of all, I am not good at reading music. I am remedial at best. This is where sticking with piano lessons more than three months when I was twelve years old would have helped me. Reading choir music is like attempting to do math and read an essay at the same time. I say “attempting” because I don’t think I ever really did math. Reading music is one eye trying to figure out the pitch, one foot tapping out the beat, the other foot interpreting the length of notes and rests and such, and the second eye is bouncing up and down finding which musical staff the altos are singing and following that lyric. To the unskilled it is a virtual circus act, with spinning plates in one hand and hula hoops in the other while treading on the apex of a small red ball. The only consolation I have in singing in church choir is that we are, supposedly, all hacks. At least half the members of our church choir are better than I am at reading music, so it helps to plant myself next to one of them.

This is not the church choir I am talking about.
But it is the same church.

Now and then someone will pull me aside in the hall and ask if I teach voice lessons. I chuckle, feeling a little bit like a con-man must feel when he thinks he's gotten away with something; like I tricked another one into thinking I can actually sing. I refer them to Sarah, or Susan, or Natalie, my friends who actually understand music and know how to teach the voice to interpret it . It only takes one short choir rehearsal for me to realize I can’t actually “sing” very well. What I do is tell stories with pitch.

I have said, and still say, that I can embrace just about any musical performance in any style from any singer as long as they are believable and they are on pitch.

Sometimes, even for those of us who sing a lot, the dang pitch can win at the game of hide and seek, like that time in high school when our Young Women's group was singing for opening exercises of Mutual. I was accompanying on guitar, and I plucked away at a sweet little intro to Edelweiss. As usual, the rest of the girls waited a millisecond for me to sing the first note and they all joined in. But this time the note eluded me.

I sang the first syllable on one wrong note, and then another, and then another as the rest of the girls stood there dumbfounded. Finally, I took off my capo and announced “We are going to sing One Tin Soldier” and I started plucking away. Michelle poked her knuckle in my back and whispered under her breath, “I don’t know that one.” But off I went, my fingers hopping over the strings in an upbeat Travis pick while the rest of the clan dragged half a syllable behind me with the melody and the lyric.

I heard somewhere that no-one if truly tone deaf, unless they are biologically deaf, as in unable to hear. The task is matching the note in our ears to the one in our mouths. One of my earliest memories is of my mom and me folding laundry in the basement on Old Clairton Road. Singing was part of most mundane activities of my youth. It still is. My mom was really good at making up little ditties. We sang all sorts of random songs that I still keep tucked in my heart-file. My mom made me feel emotionally safe singing. She sang to me, I sang to her. It was talking, with pitch.

I always came home from school on the days our music teacher taught us new songs and shared the new tunes with my mom. She sang them along with me. I remember specifically this one moment when Mom, interrupted me in the middle of rolling a pair of socks and asked me to find the note. “Try it again, Cori. Can you hear it? It’s up here….” And she sang it for me. My little thin voice slurred up and met hers. Something happened inside me when out pitches met. Something powerful enough to make me remember it all these years later. With the wisdom of age, I believe it to have been the Holy Ghost manifesting truth to me. This is absolutely the kind of thing the Holy Ghost would be in charge of. I felt it then, and I re-feel it now just thinking about it.

Mom and the Holy Ghost were both teaching me that certain things need to be matched absolutely to be eternal. In that regard music meets covenants and love in the path of truth. And that’s the path where I want to plant my feet.

Lord, make me an instrument.