A Last European Musical Hurrah

“Sorry, haven’t had time to write…” Boy, if I had a penny for every time…

I giggle that I think I don’t have time now, and five months from now I’ll be in Nicaragua. The JVs (Jesuit Volunteers) down there now are lucky to blog every month. So I’d better make this good.

To be fair, I have been busy, in a way I’m not used to. I work full time for Catholic Relief Services now, and spent three and a half weeks training for them in San Diego (see last post). Then I sorta went to Italy.

Hehe.

Yeah so…Loyola Marymount’s three choruses, plus friends and family, toured Rome, Venice, Florence and a couple cute villages for nine days, performing concerts and singing masses. Highlight (of the trip, and of my life): singing in the Sistine Chapel.

“But Heather, you can’t even talk in there.”

Oh, if you’ve got money, you can scream your lungs off. With some generous donations from the Dean of the music dept and the Pres of LMU, the choruses paid for a private night tour of the Vatican, complete with a solo visit into the Chapel, where we sang for 15 minutes.

You enter the room and you leave reality and enter a dream. Michelangelo’s dream, where the colors and figures overwhelm you, and the air smells like the weight

of the ages. I glanced away from the walls and ceiling for a minute and saw all my peers gawking. Dr. Breden, our director, told us to line up to sing. We thought she was nuts. We get a half hour in here and you want us to spend it singing?

What I didn’t know was, the Sistine Chapel has perfect acoustics.

It’s relatively short and narrow with an arched ceiling, and the room is entirely empty. I.e. the sound doesn’t bounce or get trapped; it floats up and out. We sang Tu Es Petrus, O Tebe Raduyetsia, and my choir, the Women’s Chorus, got a solo with the most beautiful rendition of Tota Pulchra Es that I’ve ever heard (as soon as videos of our own performances are available, I'll post them...this is just to give an idea of what each piece sounds like).

When we fell silent, our sound hung in the room for a full minute. It was as if invisible angels were singing the echo back to us.

I was overwhelmed with life and emotion and bawled as we left the Vatican. Think I’m silly? Everyone else was bawling too.

Not to downplay the rest of the trip. I loved hanging out with choir friends, meeting new people, seeing the masterpieces of the art world, and singing a mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. It was a phenomenal curtain call for my classical music career. What I’ve got left, I venture, are prayer services and masses in Nicaragua J.

Stay tuned for a report from the coolest summer city in the US…Portland, OR.

Oh, and if you love me, I’m still fundraising. Please donate a buck or two that you’d otherwise toss out a window (?). Follow the directions at the following link: Send Me to Serve!!