Feeling' Small

by Don Harkey

Sometimes we find ourselves in unique situations that offer powerful, yet unexpected, memories.

I was 16 years old and I had been sitting in rehearsal for several hours in a practice room at Hastings College in Nebraska. We only had a couple of days to learn the music and come together as a choir. Most of us had never even met. Even the director, Dr. Fritz Mountford, was unknown to us. We were a group of strangers pulled together to quickly learn several pieces of music in only a couple of days for a performance in front of hundreds of people.

This is how honor choirs frequently operate. Hastings College had held auditions throughout the state of Nebraska looking for high school singers. They had selected around 60 singers from the state to come together to immerse in music for a few days. I really didn't expect a lot. I was looking forward to seeing how the choir would sound, but I really didn't think that we would be able to pull something together that was truly significant.

I was very wrong.

Dr. Fritz was not your average conductor (evidenced that I don't usually remember names well, but I remembered his name after 19 years). Dr. Fritz was one of the most passionate conductors I had ever seen. He spent his first hours with the choir teaching us how to sing together under his direction. He would stop suddenly in the middle of a song and we were expected to stop. He would speed up and slow down and we were expected to follow. We eventually caught on, although we didn't really understand why this was important.

The music we were doing had not made an impression on me, at least before we started rehearsal. We had a version of "Ave Maria", a contemporary piece called "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners", an Italian piece that was playful, a church hymn straight out of the hymnal called "Beneath the Cross of Jesus", a choir version of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge over Troubled Waters", a men's piece based on a Robert Frost poem, and an extremely challenging event rodeo-like piece called "Cindy".

As we rehearsed, the choir began to fall in love with music. Dr. Fritz took us through the music and explained the meaning of each song giving us powerful imagery to use while we were singing. For Ave Maria we pictured Mary holding a baby Jesus in her arms while angels watched from on high. For "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners", we pictured the evil in the world that would be unable to hide at the Day of Judgment and, at the end of the piece, we imagined the horror they will feel realizing that it is too late to repent. For the Italian piece, I can still see Dr. Fritz dancing in the front of the choir. For "Bridge over Troubled Water", we were asked to imagine the smallest, most precious thing we could think of as we sang the words, "When your weary... feelin' small." For Cindy, we were told to just have fun and sing the song like we were telling the story (which included singing parts of the song in a western accent).

When we got to the performance, we were all excited. We had some amazing moments in rehearsal and we wanted to really capture those feelings again. It was all very unspoken. We were just together. We wanted to bring that audience into the new world we had entered only a couple of days before.

Our first song was "Ave Maria". It is nearly impossible to write about the first moments of that performance. The gymnasium was quiet as the choir paused before beginning. The opening chords coming from the choir were unbelievable. When a choir sings a beautiful chord and the harmonics come into play, the sound is so full and amazing that most choirs tend to sing louder. The opening of the song, a slow "Ave", used that harmony, but did it in such as soft way that the audience was immediately hooked and left wanting more.

We moved on through the performance with the audience's complete attention. We opened "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" with a unison and powerful phrase, "At the round Earth's imagined corners, throw your trumpets angels and arise, arise from death you numberless infinities of souls... and to your ransomed bodies go." We paused for effect (under Dr. Fritz's close direction), then the men continued forcefully to describe all of the different ways that we mortals shed our coils. "All whom the floods did, and fire shall overthrow! All who war, death, age, tyranny..." Then when we were finished, the women sang the part of a soul who stepped forward before God asking for forgiveness. The plea was soft and passionate in contrast to the harsh opening. The answer came dramatically from the choir who sang with increasing power to the climax and end of the song with the basic message that it was simply too late, "WITH THY BLOOD!!!". We ended the "D" on blood as loud as we could and at the same time so that it echoed in the gym. The audience was dead silent for several seconds. The director had dropped his arms, but still silence. They were stunned. They only began to applaud when the director turned with a sly look to the audience as if to say, "take that!".

We went on with our performance singing "Bridge over Troubled Water", which brought some of the audience to tears. We sang "Beneath the Cross of Jesus", which was dedicated at the performance to a deceased professor at the college. The hymn was no longer a hymn, but a musical testimony of the grace of our Savior "my sinful self, my only shame, my glory on the cross.".

Finally we ended with Cindy, which was an event. We struggled to keep up with the piece and made numerous mistakes, but we didn't care. We were having so much fun that the mistakes didn't matter. "The first time I saw Cindy, she was standing at the door, her shoes and stockings in hand, her feet all o'er the floor!". Parts of the music built up to 32 part harmony complete with clapping and stamping and we ended the performance with a loud "Yee-Hah".

The audience was on their feet instantly. It was the single most powerful reaction from a crowd I have ever experienced. We stood listening as if in a haze. Within a couple of days, we were back in school singing with our own high school choirs with more focus on finding the right notes than putting imagery and passion into the songs. I got a chance to talk with a few others from the choir and we all had the same feeling. We almost felt that for a few moments on stage and in rehearsal, we had touched the Face of God.

There are so many lessons from this experience. Take each moment and strive to make it mean something. When you have the opportunity to reach out to others, as Dr. Fritz did, don't just use the moment, but wear it out. There are things that are bigger than any of us and they are all around. These are the twists and turns that God places before us to help us gain wisdom so that we choose to know that He is the way.

The next time you are "feelin' small", look to the miracles all around you and make a moment that you will remember for your entire life!