In Connecticut: Blending Voices

By RICHARD CONNIFF

At 8 o'clock on a Thursday evening, the members of the choir are seated in folding chairs in their rehearsal room at Christ and Holy Trinity Church, Westport, Conn. Bruce Barber, choir director, stoops at the piano with one foot on the sustain pedal and his eyes on his singers. He is leading them through a 300-year-old hymn, and he is not happy.

"Remember," he pleads. "It's 'I heard a voice from heaven.' It's not coming over the telephone. It's got to be very intense, very mysterious."

They take it again, more intensely. "No glottal stop on the 'I,' please," Barber says, breaking in. "I know it's hard." They give him a wide-open "I," then try the hymn again.

This time Barber is exultant: "Oh, altos, it was wonderful. You gave me lots of chutzpah." He beams around the room, dark eyebrows dancing up over eyeglass rims. "Now take out Hymn 287."

What Barber has here is a typical church choir, 18 or so voices, some by their own description small, some serviceable, with a few gorgeous ones folded in; four of them belong to paid section leaders, and the rest are volunteers. Most are under 40; they are suburban and modestly affluent. Many of them have come here from other denominations; they like the loftiness of Episcopal ritual -- what one of them terms "smells and bells."

It is easy enough to pick out the ringers, the professionals, in the choir. In the instant before she sings, Carole FitzPatrick, the lead soprano, sits forward and seems to assemble herself into a musical instrument, spine straightening, chest swelling, head lifting and tilting back. When the volunteers mumble through the first reading, she growls, sotto voce, "Come on, girls, sing!" "I was singing," comes the lament. The volunteers regroup to one side of their leader, for strength in numbers. They start to open up and "honk it," as FitzPatrick indelicately urges on the third try.

"Let it waft," Barber encourages, beginning to relish the sound.

The choir needs its professionals. "We'd be all over the lot, surrounding notes as opposed to hitting them," says Carl Igelbrink, a bass. There is also the matter of attendance. Igelbrink will miss three rehearsals this month because of business travel. An alto has a conflict with a Chinese language class, and another has been out speaking to Hispanic groups for the Republican Party. But the professionals always show up; they need the income while they ! struggle to build performing careers.

The trick for Barber is to blend the changing cast and the varied talents into a unified voice. He drills them on breathing and on the peculiarities of sung pronunciation. At verse 9 of Psalm 37, he interjects, "This is my favorite: 'For evildoers shall be cut off. ' With a big t before the 'off.' Crisp as a knife." He is relentlessly attentive to the details that weave together the different parts: "Everybody, on the bottom of page 3, let's make that a dotted quarter note with an eighth rest, so we can hear the soprano entrance."

When a single "Amen" requires the sopranos to sing 22 notes, he has the other sections pause to savor the glorious sound that their voices will support. And always he implores, "Listen to each other. Listen for the blend."

The blend is a question not just of music but of personalities. The singers share a familial sensibility, with a family's history of love, conflict and eccentricity. The chemistry of rehearsals has lately been altered, for instance, by the absence of a popular soprano, who lives someplace called Katydid Lane and who is celebrated for crawling around her living room in her nightgown lest her appearance in the picture window scare off visiting deer. The chemistry is also different because Ethel Brandon, who directed the choir for 38 years, is now back in the congregation after an illness, a 90-year-old soprano belting out The Church Triumphant.

As in any family, different people take different satisfactions from the choir. Igelbrink, a vice president at Sperry & Hutchinson Co., arrives at rehearsal with his office face on, peering over his reading glasses, but begins to loosen up on Give Us the Wings of Faith. Chris Forrest, a computer consultant, delights in the camaraderie with professional singers.

"Part of what these guys do," she says, "is turning down their volume and melding with what we've got -- and lemme tell ya', honey, we ain't got one- tenth what they do. I've gone to see Carole and Mark (the lead tenor) in recital. When they open up, your heart comes into your mouth and tears come into your eyes and you think, My God, I know this person."

Carole FitzPatrick takes an equal and opposite delight in mingling with normal lives; it held her together last year when she was stretched thin earning a master's degree from the Yale School of Music. "Sometimes it's wonderful to be up there with these people who've never had a voice lesson," ( she says, "all of us singing those great words together, all our hearts directed in the same way."

The blend is a delicate thing. Lately, it has been adjusting uneasily to a new professional bass, Winthrop Buswell. His predecessor, a divinity school graduate named Peter Vanderveen, is moving away from singing into the ministry, as the parish intern. He sings with the bass section now merely as a volunteer. "It's been more difficult for him to replace me, because I'm still here, than for me to step aside," says Vanderveen. But his friends in the choir say singing means more to Vanderveen than he realizes. His key ring is an organ stop labeled "choral bass."

Buswell, meanwhile, has not entered the social life of the choir. He hurries in late from an audition and rushes out again after the final "Amen." He has come here from New Hampshire, and he would be more comfortable with the simple liturgy of a New England Congregational church. What has really kept Buswell from fitting in, though, is his rich, resonant voice.

Buswell is unaccustomed to choral singing, and he drowns out everybody else. A few singers simply stop in the middle of a hymn, overwhelmed. Barber glares. Privately, he tells Buswell that he is even louder than the organ -- to no avail. Finally, at a Sunday rehearsal, Barber dresses Buswell down: "Look, your pianissimo is not our pianissimo. Turn it way down." In the hallway afterward, Buswell, abashed, tells the other singers, "I guess I really blew it in there."

The choir has been building all month toward an evensong for All Saints. On the big afternoon, they assemble for a final rehearsal. Nothing goes right. The choir's attempt at a Nunc Dimittis produces dissonance and glances of distress. Some heretic in the alto section sings "Holy Spirit" when everybody else is singing "Holy Ghost." Twice Barber loses his place.

It is a gray autumn dusk outside, with just enough rain to keep the streets and sidewalks damp. As the hour approaches, radiators click on around the church. "This is typical," Chris Forrest says. "Lots of mistakes and people thinking they can't possibly do it."

Then the evensong begins, with the choir in blue robes and white cottas. They sing intensely about a voice from heaven, and as they intone the words "Blessed are the dead, blessed are the dead . . ." bass, tenor, alto and soprano seem to wheel around one another, in an eerie polyphony that rolls across the congregation.

The members of the choir falter momentarily at the start of the Nunc Dimittis. But then, suddenly, everyone is there. You can hear the blend, unmistakably. They sing through the rest of the service as one choir, from the foundation of Buswell's subdued bass on up to the surging descants of the soprano line. The 22-note "Amen" dances down like the leaves in the streets outside. For a few moments, it is possible to feel ordinary people lift themselves up into the communion of saints and the cloud of witnesses.

Then the voices separate again, and the singers disperse, until Thursday, into their everyday lives.