By Dave Babbitt – Special to the Sydenham Current
I’ve got too much ‘stuff’!
It seems that I’ve spent much of my 27 years of married life collecting ‘stuff’.
After my mom passed away a couple of years ago, we had the unpleasant task of emptying our family home.
In doing so, I stumbled on lots more stuff.
Many, many people have been so kind in sending me cast-off musical stuff including records, CD’s, instruments, sheet music, electronic gadgets, and so on.
Trust me, I’ve got a LOT of stuff!
I always accept stuff (except pianos!) then eventually sort through it, as one can only store so much stuff.
Some stuff gets disposed of while I try to find a new home for what I think might be of value to someone else.
I’m a ‘stuff’ recycler when possible.
Recently, I became the recipient of some stuff that makes me very sad.
My sister-in-law Julie has attended an Anglican church in Lambeth that like so many churches today, had to close its doors due to declining membership.
Julie took part in sorting through decades and decades of church property and memorabilia, trying to identify things that would still be of value to someone.
I became the recipient of several boxes of choral music that they didn’t have the heart to discard and hoped that I might be able to find it a new home.
Should I not be able to find a new home for it, I am welcome to discard it, but this way, they didn’t have to endure the agony of watching it get tossed in a recycling bin.
Alas, my own church which has also had a long tradition of choral music, recently experienced the demise of our own choir, suddenly rendering decades and decades of wonderful sheet music… useless.
I know how much time I put into perusing music for our bands to tackle for each concert, which drives home to me how much effort must have been put in by the choir directors of the past in selecting these hundreds and hundreds of choral works, that are now homeless.
It’s a difficult, time-consuming task choosing good arrangements that will fit the musicians at a Music Directors disposal.
Sometimes a Music Director might wish to feature a particular soloist, compliment the content of a sermon, present something special such as a Cantata, feature a smaller vocal ensemble such as a trio or quartet, incorporate other instruments, or challenge the musical chops of the choir.
Done well, that process consumes many, many hours.
As I investigate one of these boxes of now un-needed music, I see 30 copies of a Christmas Cantata, but it’s not paper that I see.
I see weeks and weeks of effort put into the accompaniment, the choir learning the music, the soloists struggling to sound their best week after week, in some cases, instruments struggling to learn and incorporate their parts without drowning out the voices, advertising, and inviting friends and family to the culminating performance.
Then I visualize a cold, snowy Sunday evening in December with a large crowd that has gathered to hear the fruits of several months of musical labour.
As the snow swirls and the wind howls outside, the coffee, cookies, and other Christmas baking by the ladies of the church served after the Cantata, are the icing on the cake.
Was it as good as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?
Not likely.
It’s a small-town church choir.
But it sure brought a lot of people together who worked hard toward a common goal and who felt good about themselves when they were finished.
Preparing music like this is a long process that in the end, binds a lot of people together.
Now I’m preparing to drive these boxes of homeless choral music to the transfer station and dump them in, soon to be mulched and made into recycled paper products, no-doubt the same fate awaits the choral music languishing in the cupboards of most of the churches in our community.
Your next cardboard McDonalds French fry container may have been part of a wonderful cantata many years ago.
That saddens me deeply.
The choral tradition of most churches has gone the way of the Dodo bird and I’ve recently written about the demise of choral music in many schools.
I mourn.
But on a much more positive note, our Wallaceburg Concert Band has just received approval for our use of the WDSS Webber Auditorium for our annual Christmas concert, this year on Dec 3 at 7 p.m.
Historically, we have performed to a packed house we and are hoping you will join us once again as we present the fruits of three months of hard work.
While all the new arrangements are great, some are nothing less than stunning in their beauty, and I urge you not to miss this special evening.
I get goosebumps as we rehearse.
Collectively however, we have a favour to ask of our supporters.
Please invite a friend, neighbour or family member who has never been to one of our concerts.
I’m positive that we can change your perception of what a concert band is.
This year, we are also playing a concert at the Capitol Theatre in Chatham, and I can barely contain my excitement!
Why?
Because this is our first opportunity to play in a real theatre, with great acoustics, on a stage large enough to accommodate our band, where the audience gets to sit in comfortable chairs and see us much more readily, the audience won’t have to deal with the noise of the heating system in the WDSS gym, and we don’t have to set-up and tear-down 600 chairs.
Being out of our home element, we’re hoping that we can convince our regular supporters to travel to Chatham to see us a second time on Sunday afternoon, Dec 11 at 3 p.m.
While there will be a small overlap in the material presented, the two concerts will be very different and don’t suggest you miss either one.
For starters, the Chatham concert will open with the Brass Factory Big Band and some swingin’ Christmas charts.
A ‘Greatest Christmas Hits’ of our material might be the best way to describe this outing, but don’t miss us in Wallaceburg or you’ll miss some very special music!
For more information check us out on Facebook, or at wallaceburgconcertband.ca
Best news of all… it’s all free!
