THE BIG STORY
Musical Magic
KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER
Season is fast upon us, and we lucky citizens of fantasy paradise are too flush with marvelously fun activities of all stripes to be able to do more than a fraction of them. I was at four musical events in the past week that were too good to truly be real. It’s as though I fantasized them.
And that is just music. I’m sure others have been having their arts, literature, dancing, dining, partying, fishing, athletic and every other kind of fun in this, our bubbly winter wonderland. In a small burg of 20,000, we must have the highest per-capita joy ratio in the world.
In order of increasing size, I’ll start with Will Johnson playing the grand piano at the Gardens Hotel. Owner Kate Miano uses her landmark property for every socially enriching community contribution she can—fundraisers, parties, public celebrations—and that includes music four days a week in the early evening. Will is one of those New York successes who decides he will grace our island for a while, captivated as we all are by its charms. He plays Saturdays from 5-7. He is the best pianist in town, and you can even sing along if you want—the acoustics are such you won’t infringe on his music. And with the Divine Wine tastings readily available in the adjoining room, how can you keep from singing?
Next larger was the amazing performance of the Dartmouth Glee Club and the Key West High School choir at the high school auditorium. It was something of an accidental happening, with no publicity, and attended only by a lucky few insiders. You pretty much had to know Sid Goldman to find out about this gem. Sid is one of our amazing “characters.” He’s a successfully retired orthopedic surgeon I first met playing tennis with the big boys at Bayview Park, where people told me, “He’s a doctor who’s driving a cab!”
Which was true at the time. Kind of as a hobby. Makes as much sense as my doing money work when I could be drinking all day. Sid is a Dartmouth alum with strong ties to their Glee Club. They had been headed to Cuba when our idiot state department smacked ’em with some paperwork that said, “No Go!” All dressed up with nowhere to sing, they called Sid from Miami, and he set them up with our high school choir.
Which is amazing in its own right. Under the remarkably talented direction of the overqualified James Carter, his choir was planning a more or less open practice before beginning their travels around the state to ring up their usual awards for excellence. So they followed the Dartmouth Glee Club to the stage with a few a Capella numbers of their own. If you love vocal music, you should cry to have missed this.
Next up in the same auditorium was our impossible South Florida Symphony. How a town our size can host regular seasons of a 90-plus full size symphony is another unlikely fantasy. They make their money in Broward and Miami Dade and then repeat their programs in their founding conductor Sabrina Alfonso’s home city. They usually play at the TWFAC, but the Nutcracker seems to own the place for December. So they were stuck in the immense KWHS auditorium, which, in another fantasy, has improbably fine acoustics.
The final magic was a huge, maybe 400-person turnout for the revived Keys Chorale. You had to show up over half an hour early for the good seats and a program. It was a dream come true, not only for the singers, who feared losing the group, but for the community, which got to picnic under a full moon on one of our perfect Keys nights while listening to a perfect program of holiday songs.
The college did it for FREE, as a gift to the community in celebration of the Chorale’s 25th anniversary. Legions made it happen, but new director/Professor Jim Cutty for the Chorale and FKCC honcho Dr. Frank Wood were the guys who led the way. I think it will end up having been the wish-I-was-there event of the season. If you missed it, don’t make that mistake again.
I hope you have your own miracle weeks coming up. Trash your TV and get out there!
[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]
I did not have space for this personal aside for our print edition, but everything fits online. My solo went as well as I could have hoped. I did indeed enjoy practicing it a thousand times, and never more than on the last day.
As I wrote last month, I did three versions of In Dulci Jubilo in three languages. I got all the Latin and German right, but I began my song with forgetting some of the English! I sang, “Good Christian men rejoice, in heart and heart and voice, (mumble) heed to what we say….” and fine from there. But I was laughing at myself for stumbling over words I new as well as my name!
Dulci was a perfect warm-up for the main even, an easy-to-sing and emotionally simple song, made interesting by the languages used. The main event was a verse of O Holy Night, emotionally complex and musically challenging. I was stuck with a key where the full octave jump at the end was just out of my range.
What got me so excited on the last day was the wonderful coincidence that I woke up with a once/year perfectly clear airways for singing–head, Eustacian tubes, throat, nasal cavities all in primo shape. The one day/year I can sing the E natural. So for three hours, i kept playing with finishing the big C# with a quick jump up to the E, visioning the Michaelanglo mural with the hand of God reaching down with one pointing finger. I envisioned soaring to touch that finger.
But thank goodness for my Korg pitch meter. About half the time I hit the E it was a bit flat. Not good odds, even for a risk-taker. The song was so rich without that maybe-too-flashy fillip, so I stayed with underplaying the big note, and taking the energy of that “divine” on an arpeggio down to a caesura before the new focus, a final, soft, lingering “diviiiiiiiine.”
And the key was finally following my vocal coaches advice about emotion. All that analysis above was after-the-fact. While I was singing, I lost all concern with technique. When I missed the words, I was amused. I was glad for the dear Savior’s birth, desolate for our sin and error, yearning for our soul’s worth, thrilled with hope, weariness evaporating, a relieved joy, and most importantly, at the end feeling touched by the divine. I was the song, not a singer.
I blush to recount the lavish praise I received, except for the most important one: “That was the most emotional singing of that song I’ve ever heard.”
Hallelujah!