"Singing is just a feeling set to music"
--- Carrie Underwood (American singer & songwriter; 1983 - Present)
I don't need to tell you what an amazing instrument the voice is. There's no wonder why there are a million and one television shows and competitions involving the voice. We all have a voice. If you're breathing, you're capable of vibrating those vocal cords. Most of us don't make a living off of singing, but that doesn't mean that many of us don't sing in the shower just the same. For some people, it's at karaoke. For others, it's in the car. Wherever you go, it just feels good to express yourself through music.
Click to Navigate (Table of Contents):
A DUET
If you haven't read it already, my last post explains where I am at this point as far as companions go (See "On the Third Day"). Elder Scott was a blast to work with; he was my 9th companion in my 11 months of being a missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It was awesome to be paired up with an old friend from the MTC (See "Welcome to the MTC!" and "Adventures of District D -- Part 1")! We had about thirty lessons our first week just because we were so excited to be starting from square one and were able to see things with fresh eyes. This was an outstanding statistic as far as an average week went in our mission! There were no prejudiced first impressions of, “Oh, don’t knock here. They don’t like us” or “We already knocked here before, no one ever opens”. Because of this, we found reasons to talk to everybody and that worked for us. It took some time to get to know the streets and the members but the Lord provided. When you don’t know where to start, sometimes it’s good to look around and just start wherever you are.
Elder Scott liked to sing and he was very good at it. He was one of the handful of us in District D who actually sang at choir practice in the MTC. He could hit those highest falsetto notes or the deepest baritone. He was also pretty excited to work with me considering that I also like to sing even though I’m far from professional. I'm one of those people who sings in the shower and in the car. We’d enjoy walking down the streets singing every now and then or starting lessons with a hymn. If you have talents, use them or lose them.
WARD CHOIR
Music can invite the spirit. It set the mood for everything we taught and kept our spirits up in spite of the summer heat and dust. When Stake Conference came around, our Ward got assigned to form a choir and sing a few hymns including “The Day Dawn is Breaking” (El alba ya rompe) and “Dia de Reposar” (which I wasn’t familiar with; the English hymn is “We Meet Again in Sabbath School”). As missionaries, we weren’t required to sing in the choir because we were supposed to focus our energy and time on teaching but our help was appreciated. Practices were about an hour per week. They were desperate for more men’s voices and they knew that Elder Scott and I sang. That and they didn't know how to read music; sure, I don’t either but I grew up singing the hymns with music so I knew most of them by heart and they were new to them.
I grew up with many more hymns because we always had a piano or organ player to accompany us; in Mexico, piano players were scarce so they had to rely on each other for pitch and rhythm. If one person sang off-key, no one could prove they were wrong, so they went along with it and learned bad habits. We were blessed that there was a piano player in the Ward, Hermano Carrillo, who was also the Ward mission leader so we got to spend a good amount of time with him.
The choir struggled to stay on tempo despite piano accompaniment, and they didn’t always hit the right notes but they voluntarily came to the call for the formation of a choir (See "Hear the Music, Try the Dance"). They didn’t need to be there either; they had families and jobs that took precedence but they made the effort to come and sing as best they could and that is all that could have been asked of them. For that, I was very proud of them.
Elder Scott and I helped teach this Ward choir. Elder Scott taught the men’s section the low parts and I helped the women with the higher parts (since I was more familiar with the melody than harmonies). We must have been good because the young woman conducting the choir went so far as to tell me I sang well as a girl, which got some friendly chuckles. I took it as a compliment.
Missionaries sing a hymn every day as part of morning studies and whenever they wish to call upon the spirit of music like in lessons, etc. I had a decent voice before the mission but I believe that, to at least some degree, the Lord blessed me with a somewhat better voice when I was a missionary because I was constantly practicing and learning from guys like Elder Scott. I'm still not the best singer but we're not designed to all sound the same by divine design. But even with our differences, we can find harmonies.
Comments