Friday night I went with my girlfriend and her family to see a choral group called Chanticleer. It’s about a dozen men, most young, one with a lengthy handlebar moustache, who sing everything from medieval church music to Miles Davis. Also a song by a Korean composer that sounded like a sped up recording of some kind of large bird’s mating ritual.

That song was by far the best part.

Some of the men sing terribly low. The handlebar guy drops his voice so deep it feels like he’s sitting right beneath you. I bet he doesn’t even need subwoofers in his ride; when he listens to some rap music, he probably just sings the bass parts himself.

Another singer, this one with a trimmed goatee and a ponytail, is at the opposite end of the scale. His notes rarely come down beneath the stratospheric level. When someone who has been locked out of their house needs to break a window to get in, I’m sure he is the second person they call, after a hammer.

The really cool thing about Chanticleer is the versatility of their voices. The range of sounds they could produce reminded me that the human voice is really an amazing instrument. That was the other best part of the night; realizing that the beauty I’d seen on stage was created with nothing more than voice boxes like mine. It was a touching and universal message; music is in the soul of every person, and all you need to do is lift your voice.

I was pretty psyched about that. For a while. Then I tried to make that Korean ostrich shrieking sound and I got a little frustrated. Music may be the universal language or whatever but I think you need to be able to sing to speak it. Apparently I don’t sing Korean.

Plus, I think I sprained something.

Seriously, though, you can’t have a moustache like that and not have subwoofers. Or at least regular woofers.

Most everyone in the audience was pretty clearly a choir geek (and I say that in a loving, non-judgmental way). At intermission every conversation I overheard was about how “We should do Gaude virgo at the winter concert,” or “It’s amazing how full those third overtones were!”

At the end of the show when they announced that the last song would be “Keep You Hand on the Plow,” someone in the balcony actually said “Yesss!” I didn’t see who it was, so I don’t know, but I can only imagine he or she was pumping his or her fist.

Now, lest I give you the wrong idea, let me say that the song was a tremendous, soaring gospel chant and I was sorry when it ended. But if the words “Hand on the Plow” make you pump your fist, you are definitely a choral aficionado. Good for you, I say, as long as you’re aware of it.

Then again, I can see why someone would recognize the song; it’s one of those that takes over a whole room in your hippocampus and refuses to leave. I’ve been singing, humming, and thinking about it all weekend. Can’t get to heaven by drinkin’ gin, I reminded a passer-by on the walk to the coffee shop this morning. She wasn’t drinking anything, but she looked relieved anyway. It’s just nice to know.

Later at Marshalls I was in the dressing room trying on a pair of snow pants when I remembered that I needed to keep my hand on the gospel plow. Not having one around, I put my hand on my cell-phone, which, I thought, could at least be used to find a gospel plow, or call someone who could tell me about it.

Even now, as we speak, I hear the distinctive notes of that song coming from the bathroom, where my girlfriend is showering. That’s the power of gospel songs, I guess. They’re hard to stop singing. So the next time a glass of gin is placed before me, the first thing that’ll come to mind is an image of that pony-tailed man with his eyes closed and his face toward the sky, warning me, in an octave six times higher than normal, not to take it.

And you know what? I won’t. I will leave that glass were it lays. I will begin singing a mighty chorus of “Hand on the Plow,” in whatever octave I can muster. And if the mood is right, my friends at the table will start singing right along with me. Then maybe the whole bar will join in.

And a lone voice will come from the back of the room, drunk with joy and soda-water: “Yesssss!”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2004 at 6:19 am and is filed under Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.