Possibly my favorite night of the year

Last night I went to the 36th annual Messiah Sing-Along at my church. It was my second time attending the event. It's not really a church function, more like a community function that happens to be put on by my church. If you've ever been to a Messiah sing-along, usually (in my experience) they are like going to a performance of Handel's Messiah, with an orchestra and soloists who are professionals or part of an organized amateur group, and then the audience can stand up and sing along with the choruses.

This sing-along is not like that. In this sing-along, everybody performs the whole Messiah - all three parts, with every recitative, aria, repeat and da capo. There are no soloists. The orchestra, too, is made up of people who show up to play. Of the 500 or so people in the room, only the conductor and the harpsichordist are professionals.

I find this experience to be profoundly, movingly and unabashedly populist. It's more like a musical barn-raising than a performance. There's an indescribable sense of community, of all these people who show up, on the same night at the same time each year, to craft together this beautiful, famous, complicated, 4-hour piece of music. There are many, many wrong notes. Some pieces are quite shaky, while others achieve startling clarity and beauty. But of course the orchestra has never played together, let alone rehearsed. There are over 100 people singing each recitative and aria, rather than just one practiced soloist.

As in a barn-raising, we tackle our project one step at a time, knowing that we are not experts but trusting that we have the basic tools to do the job. In between each of the 53 pieces, the conductor gives any instructions or heads-up - "ok orchestra, we're doing the version in G minor on this next one, and sopranos - the key is to keep those sixteenth notes light!" After each piece, we all applaud an aria particularly well done, or a valiant effort at something difficult - after all, we all have the score in front of us, we can see how hard it was, and we know our section will have its own challenge soon enough. The conductor is enthusiastic as well as gifted - how she keeps us all together is truly a wonder - and she compliments without patronizing. "Bravi, basses, that was magnificent, truly!"

I myself, having sung soprano for years, have shifted to alto, my voice no longer able to hit the high notes. So I'm learning to sing harmony, which is much harder than singing the melody (after all, you can almost always pick out the melody easily enough). I've decided the altos have some of the most beautiful arias in the whole Messiah, including Oh Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion and the haunting He was despis'ed. And that terribly tricky one, Thou art gone up on high, which went off so well this year. Plus we have the only duet in the entire Messiah, a bear of a thing with the tenors, late in the third part when everyone's tired, which didn't go off so well this year. But standing in the midst of 100 women, all singing in unison, "Lift up thy voice with strength; Lift it up, be not afraid!" - the wrong notes seem to disappear with the power of it.