Gang, some of you may know that I sing in my church's choir. I'm a tenor, and there's usually two or three other tenors when we sing at the Masses we sing at. (Of the four voices, the tenors have the fewest members in the choir I'm in. We usually have more sopranos show up than we have all the other voices combined.) Tomorrow is our last Mass that we'll sing at until the next school year starts in September.
Our prelude, to commemorate Memorial Day, is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is a very tenor-heavy song. Last year, we had maybe 40 of us there, with six tenors. In the Battle Hymn, there's two soprano parts, one alto part, two tenor parts, and two bass parts. Last year, we had three of us singing Tenor 1 and three singing Tenor 2. We had a new choir director, who used to be a tenor in the same choir about 25 years ago. Now, he teaches music at one of the local high schools, and his students regularly win competitions. This guy is goooood. He knows just how to wring the last bit of sound out of a part to get it sounding just right. Last year, when we finished the Battle Hymn, the estimated 1100 people in the church gave us a standing ovation for a minute and a half. We kicked some serious ass on that song.
That was then. This year, if we're lucky, we'll have four tenors. I'm the only one singing the Tenor 2 part. I am rather nervous about it. Soloing is something I have no real problem with, if I'm the only one up there. but, this part is pretty important to the blend on the verse where I'll be singing it.
And I'm the only one doing it. If I suck singing it, it'll make all of us sound bad.
I've done some work on it this afternoon, so I'm fairly confident that I'll do well. I just have this nagging doubt about it. We have to be there for some last-minute run-throughs at 10:15 AM.
I want to hit this one. Smoothly. Tom Petty was right--"The waiting is the hardest part."
