Pay to sing

Voices of Kentuckiana and other points of light

At yet another absolutely brutal news moment, the worst turn of a calendar page in a while, surrounded by legit anger and understandable despair and despicable gloating and massive confusion, I flew from Waco to Louisville to make music. We took off at five in the morning and the jacked up tech lady next to me talked the whole way to Dallas about her lazy coworkers and her freezing hotel room and how there needs to be less government so that people can be free to innovate and I was so grateful for the short flight, and then she had to run to another terminal and my connecting gate was right next to where we landed. So there.

I met Emily for breakfast and we had our version of the hushed conversation happening in every other First Watch booth. Back at her house, stepping into rehearsal, the world kind of fell away but also didn’t. We reveled in our mutual badassery and knowledge of one another, finding refuge in music but also finding ourselves unable to hide there for long.

Dude. That was, like, the boring part of the weekend.

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That same night, we went to a Pride event put on by Kentucky Opera for the Stonewall anniversary. It was wonderful to hug the necks of many friends I hadn’t seen since moving from Cincinnati. We ate artisan ice cream in KO’s new performance venue and settled in to hear a beautiful program. Louisville has a pretty fabulous music scene, and the singing and playing on offer was gorgeous and moving. That the soloists and pianist are friends just made it better.

But I was absolutely slain by the one group I hadn’t heard before, the Voices of Kentuckiana, which is a name as surprising as they are. “We’re a pay to sing!” said one of the members afterward, slyly using opera slang on me. A “pay to sing” is a training program that takes fees from the participants, and such programs are often derided for this reason.

The Voices of Kentuckiana are an unauditioned LBGTQIA-and-allies choir whose members pay fees to handle the group’s expenses.

They. Are. Fantastic.

I mean it. Listen.

Because everyone’s welcome, they’ve got some untrained voices, and because they were founded thirty years ago and provide an experience that inspires loyalty, they’ve got some old voices. It’s not the kind of group where money and competition have yielded a cohort without technical challenge. But they sing a cappella with impeccable tuning. You can understand every word they say. They can take it down to a whisper and then pull out all the stops.

And the programming! I love hearing Radiohead’s “Creep” as a beautifully arranged choral piece, but to hear a bunch of queer people singing

Whatever you want/Whatever makes you happy/You’re so very special/I wish I was special

is to feel your heart break for real. And when they did a number that featured the singers who were original, early 90’s members of the group? a quartet of dudes my age with slightly shaky but steadfast voices, and two women holding hands?

There is no other reason for music but this.

Voices of Kentuckiana are singing at the GALA Choruses Festival in Minneapolis this month. Minnesota friends, go hear that!!

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I drove my rental car down to Knoxville the next day for the NATS convention. The National Association of Teachers of Singing is as relentlessly dorktastic as the name suggests, which I mean in the most respectful and loving way possible, for I am one of their number. If you’re in an industry whose conventions make you sad and impatient, I am sorry. NATS conventions are very nerdy but those nerds are passionate musicians and teachers, and this convention had a whole lot of musicianly, teacherly joy on tap.

Many good things happened, but I don’t think anyone will correct me for saying that all energy was driven by our attendance Saturday night at a concert by Larry Brownlee and Kevin Miller . If you’re already a song dork, there’s no need to explain who those gents are. If you don’t know about them, start here and then go to YouTube or Spotify and continue. Any program that this phenomenal singer and brilliant pianist took on would be glorious, but what they did at the Tennessee Theater still has my mind and soul buzzing. All the music was by Black composers, the first half from greats who have left us and the second from youngs who are writing today. The performers (can I say it enough? No!) were In. Cre. Di. Ble. But the music! Every piece so beautiful.

Every measure begging the question, how do I not already know this.

There’s no better way to advocate for music than to perform it.

We imagine we love Beethoven because he is Great, but we love him because we know him. This weekend, nine hundred dorks began to know and love Margaret Bonds and Jasmine Barnes and a whole list of others, and we will always be in debt to Larry and Kevin for this.

There was so much new music this weekend, from the recently composed music sung and played by brilliant young musicians on a performance class that I led, to the music Emily and I performed, to other new compositions all over the conference. It felt so vital and immediate, connected to us and our time, and everywhere I heard it and saw colleagues and students leaning into its performance was like a ray of light shining into a dark, dank, hot, oppressive time.

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On Sunday night in Knoxville, it rained, and the humidity broke. I took a walk early Monday morning, and the air was cool, the light soft, and day broke quietly as it often does, as though anything might happen.

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At the end of my long car trip from Knoxville to Dulles, I hopped in the rental shuttle to the terminal, where my fellow passengers were discussing the oppressive east coast heat.

“Where did you come from?”

“Knoxville.”

“Ah, up in the mountains, you missed it. It has been disgusting here. And the delays! Who even knows why but it’s probably global warming. Our poor dog, we’ll have to drug her again. What are you gonna do, right?”

The van’s vents, still set for yesterday’s hundred degrees, poured frigid air over us. The nice driver broke the rules and dropped me at the Marriot. I was surprised by the gentle, dry breeze. The van and its shivering passengers headed down the road. Did they know the weather had changed?

I watched them drive into the fading sunlight.

Thank you Emily Albrink, Chad Sloan, Marquita Richardson, Kimcherie Lloyd, Daniel Martin, Voices of Kentuckiana, Susannah Biller Kness, Taylor Burkhardt, everybody at NATS, gosh so many, all y’all. Keep the faith my loves.