Bring Down the House

Te, te Deum laudamus;
Te, te Dominum confitemur:
Te aeternum Patrem
omnis terra vene ratur.

For the last two weeks, I have been humming this opening phrase and other segments of Haydn’s Te Deum. They just form a loop, playing over and over in my head, whether I am reading, commuting, showering, sitting on the toilet, or even watching surgeries. Whenever I am not concentrating one hundred percent on what I am doing, this soundtrack wedges its way through to the front of my brain and starts the automatic loop. I must look like a lunatic on the bus sometimes, staring out the window with my head bobbing and feet tapping, but without the ubiquitous headphones sticking out of my ears.

I sing in the bass section of The Queensland Choir and, like what happens three or four times a year, it’s around concert time again. This time, we are doing Haydn’s Te Deum and Puccini’s Messa di Gloria. With rehearsals twice a week for a month before concerts and increasing familiarity with the music, it is inevitable that the music becomes a temporary fixture in the jumble of information swirling around my head. The music is beautiful and I really enjoy singing it, but having it played in a continuous loop can become a drag. Mercifully, I tend to be able to file it deep into the recesses of my mind after each concert so it does not become a nuisance.

Last Sunday we went down to Bangalow, New South Wales, just inland from Byron Bay, to do the Puccini piece to a full house. It was good to see in the audience a good number of dark spots in the sea of silvery white hair. I know, performances of classical music, with its formal, stiff-upper-lip settings, traditionally high-brow and inaccessible attitude, and strictly no interaction between the audience and performers and no improvisation, can hardly pose any threat to rock concerts. For our concert, we performed at a small Catholic cathedral with the audience filling every pew. With the warm afternoon glow streaming through the windows, we rocked the house. Well, as much as one can rock with classical music.

Our concert tomorrow will be in the Cathedral of St. Stephen in the middle of Brisbane. I am sure we will follow last weekend’s performance and bring down the house once again. What’s the music equivalent of “break a leg”? Strain a vocal cord?

Qui tollis peccata,
peccata mundi
suscipe deprecationem
deprecationem nostram…