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Old Kenyon, we are more or less like Kokosing
Last night, Lauren and I drove up to Brookline, MA (basically Boston) to hear the Kenyon College Chamber Singers perform. Since I graduated in 1999, only one year--last year--has gone by without hearing at least one of the group's spring concerts, either on its annual tour or it home concert. I was pleased to hear they would be in Boston and promptly dropped my regular Tuesday commitment to make the hour drive through the dark rainy evening and the labyrinthine streets of Boston, with their tortured logic whereby a street going in one direction from the main street has one name and has another going the other way, with neither posted clearly. Fortunately, we left early.
Nine, ten, eleven, and twelve years ago, I was chauffeured to these gigs in a tour bus. It doesn't seem so long ago. We spent hours each day on such a bus, watching the miles roll by, whether they were filled with snow drifts in upstate New York, the lunar landscapes of eastern Colorado, or the warm ocean-front vistas of the Carolinas. We watched movies, we talked, we played games, but whatever we did, we saved voice and tried not to get sick. Many of us took the opportunity to sit with a variety of people, getting to know people we hadn't known so well before or deepening the friendships we already had.
It felt hard not to know everyone pretty well, especially singing with some people year after year. We rehearsed every weekday at noon. Besides the socializing before and after our hour of rehearsal, its position at noon meant that most of us ate either an early or a late lunch. I was a late lunch person, invariably with other Chamber Singers. Who else would I have eaten with at that hour? We had leftovers from the hot bar, items from the salad bar, omelets, and almost always some soft-serv ice cream or fro-yo... and good times. Followed, for us, by the traditional and highly-ritualized trip to the post office (or postal orifice, as it came to be known). Of such things, along with our bond as Chamber Singers, were wonderful friendships forged.
Still, in a choir of 45 (or 55 for my junior and senior year, when the larger tour bus could be had for the same price as the smaller and, goldfish-like, the choir expanded to fill its bowl) there were invariably people you still didn't know by the time March break rolled around, and I was a firm believer in taking the opportunity presented by an interminable bus ride to get to know some of those folks. We would also watch movies (I've long since forgotten the details of the movie, but I will always remember the way that Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest was sold to us by the tour managers). We had the "walk of shame" each day, when items we'd left behind at the previous tour stop were returned and we were shamed for leaving them. Then there were the intentionally left items, such as the year when every single female member of the group left behind a bra in the dressing room. Getting them back to their rightful owners became a sort of game show.
We would arrive sometime in the afternoon at the church where we would sing. The Riser King would go with Doc to scope out the church we would be singing at, and then the riser crew would go to work. We sang in some beautiful venues, some amazing spaces with amazing accoustics, and often places with both. After freshening up, we would have an afternoon rehearsal, some free time, and a dinner provided by our hosts. Each night it was somehow the best meal we'd had on tour, as our presidents assured those who prepared it. Every night.
We got to the church 10 to 15 minutes early. Walking down the aisle, the first familiar face I saw was that of our Doc Locke's wife, Kay, always our choir tour mom. After hugging her and saying hello, we located what appeared to be the alumni section. A couple--now married to each other--a year ahead of me, a pair two years my senior, another a year younger than me, and by intermission even more people I once sang with would gather.
The concert began with a Russian piece we sang my senior year, followed by three songs that were new to me, then a setting of Shakespeare we did my freshman year, a di Lasso piece in French that I hadn't heard before, followed by an Italian madrigal I sang my junior year and a Finnish folk song arrangement we didn't, and finally a Bach motet we sang my senior year. The second half featured seven more pieces I had sung in my four years and only three I hadn't.
We not only sang music music in 5-10 languages, we memorized that music in order to free ourselves from the printed page and connect directly to our conductor and our audience (in that order). Really, though, it was the music we were connecting with. Some years, we even managed this before the tour started. Other years, we mumbled through portions of the first performance or two, but always got everything down before too long and worked to take each work from good to amazing before tour was over.
We were also tested on word-by-word translations of the foreign language texts and dissected with the precision of English majors--which a number of us were--the deeper meaning of the English texts. We learned a lot of this from September through February, but when we lived with the music nine times in the ten days were were performing it on tour--to say nothing of our afternoon rehearsals and time spent on the bus going over things--we got to know the music incredibly well.
I've always felt that performers get more out of the music than listeners, or at the very least, we're in the best position to get more out of the music, because we live so closely within it. Even a decade later, I remember a remarkable amount of the music I performed in college with the Chamber Singers, and have a better understanding of it that it's possible to get from a first hearing. While it's a joy to hear music for the first time, the pieces that I didn't already know were giving me a handshake last night, albeit a very friendly one; the others gave me the deep hug of a friend not seen for years, or even a lover's kiss.
As the concert drew to a close and we applauded the final piece, Doc came out toward the crowd as he always did and started to give his speech about the encore. We always close with the unofficial alma mater of the school, "Kokosing Farewell," and Doc usually gives some variation on a speech about how this river flows past Kenyon College, how "Kokosing" is a native word meaning "owl creek" or something about the meaning of the text (though "asphodel" is usually left unexplained). This time, though, he announced a first: for the first time, he would like to invite alumni who know his arrangement of the song to join the Chamber Singers on stage.
It was magical.
After seeing his coattails all night, it was wonderful to be conducted by Doc Locke again. Even on this song that we all knew so well, that--with alumni drawn in--runs so many risks of sentimentality or being run on auto-pilot, he made it a wonderful musical experience. Doc Locke is, without question, the most expressive conductor I've ever had the privilege to work with.
"Kokosing Farewell" is not only the encore to every performance on the Spring Break tour, it's also sung, seemingly, at every single college event that employs the choir. We not only know it, it resonates with us. The song, set to the old Anglican hymn, has two verses employing an extended metaphor of how we members of the Kenyon community are--and are not--like this river that flows past our Hill. The third verse speaks to the time "when we are far from Kokosing," and how the place will continue to call to us, even "when 'round us evening shades are closing" and our lives are coming to an end. The final verse takes us to an after-life of Greek proportions, complete with asphodel, the perennial herb rumored to grace the underworld, with our river now compared to the river Lethe, "where memory dwells, dear past supposing." Most seniors, by the end of tour, are tearing up as they sing this song. It becomes emblematic of the Kenyon experience for us. We find ourselves buying into it so fully that I will not be the least surprised if the afterlife leads me to a river of forgetfulness that will look oddly familiar to me from my undergraduate days.
The concert is followed by a reception, during which punch and desserts may be served, and we alumni had the chance to talk briefly to Doc and Kay, to one another, and to the current crop of singers before they're shuttled off. Soon on each tour, they are parceled out to host families from the church.
To keep costs down, the hosting church also ropes some of its members into taking singers--typically two to four (or more) of us--home with them and feed us breakfast in the morning. Sometimes we'd sleep two to a bed, sometimes we'd have our own rooms. Some nights we would be up late talking to our host families or each other, some nights we would turn in early. Seeing the country "through the back door," as Rick Steves would say, was one of the joys of Chamber Singers tour. We went to New England my freshman year, as far west as Colorado my sophomore year, down to Atlanta and back up the eastern seaboard my junior year, and to what I'll call, for lack of better terminology, the Garrison Keillor region my senior year. I can't remember all the places I stayed, though a few stand out in memory. Four of us staying in a mansion in Watch Hill, RI, just a block off the ocean. Before being left to our own devices in a basement the size of many homes (and with all the conveniences), we got a tour which included "the grandchildren's wing." A nearby home had just sold for $3 million; it was that kind of neighborhood. Or in Nashville, four of us stayed with a Kenyon alum who was also the brother of my revered freshman English professor, and he regaled us with stories of the school--and his brother--from days gone by. Or in Kansas City, when I and one other lonely Chamber Singer were stuck in a family feud between the parents and a rebellious teenaged son, who fought just as if we were part of the family. We turned in early that night. Aside from any particular memories, I just remember the pleasure of meeting people all over the country and seeing the world from their perspective for just a little while as they opened their homes and their lives to us.
And then we'd get up in the morning, get back to the church, and pile on the tour bus to do it all over again.
We had a long drive back to Providence, to get up and return to our regularly scheduled lives all over again, though sent on our way with the echoes of music and memory in our ears and hearts.