Ultimate Cross-Training

Last night I did some grueling training for the triathlon in the basement of a Lutheran church, after training earlier in the stairwell at work. I am sure you are thinking, "OK, Famous Hat, I can buy that you are training in the stairwell by running (or at least walking at a brisk pace) up a bunch of stairs, but training in a Lutheran church? Come on! Maybe if it were a Shaker one..." (After all, they do spinning! just not on exercycles.) But I have it on good authority (my choir director) that what we were doing was "just like training for a triathlon." In his words.

This coming Sunday is something the Lutherans call "Cantate Sunday," and we are working on a Bach cantata, something in German about praising God. (Sorry, I studied Romance languages.) It is a beautiful piece, but we sopranos get quite a workout with a lot of high notes and hardly any time to breathe. Between you and me, what's up with old JS's fondness for having melismas on umlauted vowels? Seriously, it's like he purposely picks the most difficult vowel sound to put all those notes into. Even in Latin, a much easier language to sing in than German, he still finds some whacked-out vowel to put his melismas on; I remember singing something by him where we had to sing "Vi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-irgo Maria" because he couldn't possibly have put the melisma on the "O." In the cantata we are currently working on, he also has some goofy syllabification that is counterintuitive. I think the word is "reichlich," and we all want to sing "re-e-eichlic" but of course Bach wrote "reich-li-i-ich." Since many of his choir members were his own children, we wondered if he wrote some of these cantatas to punish them for something.

I think my choir director was trying to encourage us sopranos as we worked on this gorgeous yet grueling piece, so he said it was just like training for a triathlon. Afterwards I asked him if, in fact, it could count as training, and he said yes. So there you go. Some people work out to salsa or techno, but I work out by singing Bach!

Famous Hat