--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nick Vaccaro, Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Last September I returned to choral singing after about a
break of about 20 years. I feel fortunate to have found (thanks to member
Dorothy Ramsey) the Lincoln Choral
Artists as a vehicle for doing that.
One of the main reasons that I’ve felt an immediate
connection to LCA is the very broad and
eclectic repertoire that we’ve explored. Over the past year, we’ve sung music
ranging from Thomas Tallis and Heinrich Isaac to James Taylor and Pat Benatar. I
haven’t loved everything that we’ve sung -
but I’ve liked most of it, loved a lot of it, and learned from all of
it.
So, why do I think that performing such a wide range of
music is a good thing?
It isn’t always a
good thing. Juxtaposing or combining different styles of musical expression can
sometimes produce strange results,
and musicians sometimes struggle to do justice to music that falls outside
their comfort zone.
All the same, I’ve found that an openness to stretching or
crossing musical boundaries has made my musical life a lot richer - both as a performer and a listener.
Here’s one example. In 2007, I finished graduate school and
came to Nebraska. Before I’d made much in the way of social connections here, I found myself with a lot of alone time when
not working. I also had a melodica (an
instrument I’d started playing the previous year), and had recently come across
a number of interesting musical performances on a new website called YouTube.
So, I decided to pass some time by recording MIDI-accompanied renditions of whatever
music that I thought I could make sound decent on the melodica. And that eventually
turned out to be… a lot of different things, drawn from a range of musical genres
even broader than the programming for LCA’s last season.
The videos are still up on YouTube – all
in vintage 240 pixels, but with sound quality good enough that I can go back
and watch them fondly from time to time.
Teaching myself to play every one of those (very different)
songs was a challenge and a thrill in its own way. The feeling of playing an
Aretha Franklin favorite is different from the feeling of playing a Robert
Schumann favorite; not better or worse, but different in a way that’s worth
experiencing.
LCA seems like a great place to pursue more of that sort of
exploration. I look forward to seeing where we’ll go next.
