Julia Flynn Siler

Workmen were pulling up the tattered red carpets of our college chapel at Oxford, which meant that our choir was temporarily homeless for our weekly Wednesday rehearsal. After casting around that afternoon for alternative spaces, our music director came up with a solution: we crossed Holywell Street and entered the grounds of nearby New College, making our way to the original bursar’s office in an ancient stone building – directly across from the headmaster of New College’s residence.

 

 

A dozen or so of us singers passed through a heavy wooden door and saw the painted college crest on the wall facing us. A grand piano sat in one corner. There was a single window, and we could see the thickness of the walls – three feet or so. Tour guides over the centuries have joked about New College’s name: it was founded in 1379, over a century later than University, Balliol and Merton colleges, about thirty years after the Black Death and around the time of the ascension of Richard II. It’s not new.

The lighting was dim and outside and darkness cloaked the medieval walled campus. I struggled to see the music our director handed out to us, squinting at the small print. We began by rehearsing Anton Bruckner’s Locus Iste (Latin for “This Place Was Made for God”) which we planned to sing at the college’s upcoming Charter Day service on February 26^th – followed by the \ challenging anthem, O Thou the Central Orb, by Charles Wood (with painfully high notes for the sopranos, which I had to skip since I wasn’t sure I could reach them) and its wonderfully resonant bass part, and then Call to Remembrance by Richard Farrant, an Englishman living in the time of the Tudors.

I can just read sheet music and still sometimes count out notes in a musical phrase. To join the choir, I’d had a one-on-one tryout with the musical director, singing for him for about an hour. Somehow, he let me join. And here I was, a sixty-something amateur, singing alongside a young opera singer from Kiev, Ukraine, who had attended her country’s top music academy before the war, as well as a gifted singer from Ohio who is attending Oxford on a choral scholarship.

 

 

I’ve been lucky enough to have two private singing lessons with the music director (something he offers to all the choristers) and he focused on the basic with me: how to breath. I’ve also gained enough perspective over the years to see the humor in some of his private and group instructions to us. During our group warm-ups, our music director urged us to change the timber of our tones – instructing us that the sounds we were making as we practiced scales should be “a little less primrose and a lot more venison.” That gave me something to chew on!

As the oldest singer there, I may also be the happiest (the choir director, sitting across from me at dinner after rehearsal last night, noted that I seemed to be always smiling, which is probably true.) What I’d discovered I like most is learning by doing — feeling and experiencing the power and beauty of the words in the hymns through singing them. The beauty of the experience is deepened by singing in our college’s chapel, which is famous for its stained glass windows made by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, leaders of Britain’s 19^th century Arts and Crafts movement.

 

 

Towards the end of our dinner after rehearsal, as I was explaining how I’d joined our parish choir to feel what Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani (the subject of my second book, Lost Kingdom) must have felt as director of her choir – the experience of the luminous, the feeling of God’s presence. My music director suggested last night a different interpretation of the Biblical phrase of “the word became flesh” as being the expression of the words through singing, which of course, happens through the body. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. All I know is that I feel closest to the spiritual world when I am singing – and in touch with a force much greater than myself and my own small concerns. Singing brings me joy and is a form of creating something beautiful with other people.

This kind of deep, experiential learning – through singing with a group of skilled singers, of joining the choir community and taking part in the spiritual and musical life of my college alongside students in their twenties and professors and librarians in their forties and fifties – has been as meaningful to me as sitting in Oxford’s lecture halls. It feels profound to  join a choral tradition that began long before the founding of New College.

It’s been a joyful experience to sing in the college choir  – even though I still sometimes struggle to hit the high notes.

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Julia Flynn Siler is a visiting scholar at Oxford University this spring. She is currently singing  with the Harris Manchester College choir, under the direction of music director Stephen Taylor, and has sung with a women’s chorus, The Shady Ladies, as well as the choir of her local parish church, in Northern California.