Bel Canto

I considered doing this for my co-cultures assignment, but it's a specific enough co-culture that I wasn't able to find resources on the topic. So I'm in this church youth choir called Bel Canto. It's pretty well known in circles of church youth choirs in the area because most churches can't afford to put together such a strong choral program for such a specific group of people. This is the choir I went to Costa Rica and San Francisco with and a group that I have grown to know about as well as I know the prism cohort or the cross country team, which is to say very very well. I should make this multimedia but all of our videos are on facebook so I have to include links instead of actual videos. But this is our most recent performance.

And this next one is my favorite. Because there are candles and the song is beautiful even if it's not that difficult.

I remember when I was deciding on my co-cultures assignment (which I eventually wrote about being a caucasian american) how I didn't think Bel Canto worked because it doesn't have that much of a culture--that it's open to new people and people could never feel uncomfortable in such a close community. Well I had my last performance ever yesterday and our banquet was tonight, and we definitely have our own culture.

Take this, for example. It's a skit that the guys did on our last night in Costa Rica. To us, it was hilarious. There were six guys in a choir of almost fifty, and they distinguished themselves very well. They'd spent the whole week making jokes about their voices cracking, or eating oreos to improve their falsetto. We saw Jeffrey and Mike drop the keyboard multiple times while our director wasn't looking, and we'd spent two weeks on tour together so we were all plenty comfortable making fun of the touring process, but sometimes I get really excited about that video and show it to people outside of Bel Canto and they... don't get it at all. "What was that clapping about? Someone passed out on stage?" I guess that goes into ethnocentrism--I'm so used to being a part of the choir, a part of the church and of the community that we've built that I fail to realized what a priveledge it is to have this opportunity, or how unique the whole situation is.

This is a choir that demands attendance to the same extent that school demands attendance and accepts few excuses, but it is also a choir that will go into the memorial gardens of our church or a random cathedral in Costa Rica and start singing just because our director thought it would be a cool idea on a whim. It is a choir that leads worship but also performs at retirement parties, weddings, choir competitions, and across the country and the world at cathedrals, universities, or other inredible venues. It is one that sings large multi-part works such as Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols or Mendolssohn's Elijah, but also gospel pieces, foreign language pieces, modern acapella choral music, or elaborate version of Christmas carols accompanied by harp. Sometimes we have clapping, sometimes we have organ, sometimes we are acapella in a small village in Costa Rica with no plugs for our keyboard. We spend weeks preparing songs in six part harmony, or we hear the morning's hymn set five minutes before we walk on stage. It's this versatility that led me to think that we didn't really have a culture as a choir, but that's clearly inaccurate.

Nobody who spends that much time together can go without creating its own unique culture and we are no exception. We are a group of people who incorporates each freshman class easily and bids farewell to each senior class... with much less ease. We all deal with cheesy talks from our director and attempts at metaphors to make religion or the music make more sense, and we all secretly enjoy them. We all laugh as the director stops and says "second sopranos" or Katie runs in fifteen minutes late for the third week in a row. We get it when someone says "this song isn't exciting enough--let's add motions like we did for Adiemus!" or "this is too short, we could always insert a two minute clapping section on page six." We get used to the scavenger hunts that seniors always put on for retreat or the pretzel dance and the bedtime stories we read to incoming freshmen to make them feel welcome... or very confused. To us, it's all normal, and it's all tradition that feels comfortable. So now as I leave for college and I leave all of my Bel Canto traditions behind, I worry just a little bit. I worry about being the new kid in crew or in an acapella group, about no knowing the traditions, about the culture shock of going into a womens college and not knowing their traditions and culture. And then I realize that four years from now, that culture and those traditions will be my ethnocentric world view and I'll be just as unprepared to leave them behind as I was tonight, saying good bye to Bel Canto for the last time.