The pleasure of singing, for me, has been greatly magnified over the years by my involvement with choral groups. I sang with the chorus at the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue after college, but when I married and moved to East Hampton back in the 1960s, I never imagined I would find a similarly excellent group here.
I was a young parent living in Amagansett when, lo and behold, another young mom of my acquaintance, Natalie Hahn, suggested I join her group, the Choral Society of the Hamptons. It turned out that a chorister I knew from New York named Dinwiddie Smith was a member of the local group, too; indeed, Dinwiddie’s wife, Charlotte Rogers Smith, had founded the society in 1946. If the group was good enough for him, it would be good enough for me. And so it was. Natalie Hahn and I are both still members.
Singing with the Choral Society, in rehearsal as well as performance, is a communal experience. Perhaps that’s why I love it so much: the community.
When I started singing as a little girl growing up in Bayonne, N.J., it was a more individual pursuit. My mother was a rather indifferent pianist, but taught piano anyway. She thought I could be the next Shirley Temple. Despite that error in judgment, and happily for me, she had the good sense to send me to a classically trained teacher, although it meant a bus ride to Journal Square in Jersey City.
As a student at Bayonne’s Woodrow Wilson Elementary School, I was sometimes asked to step to the front of the auditorium and sing something when an assembly ended before the bell rang for the next period. The song usually was “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Oklahoma,” which stormed Broadway in 1943.
“Oklahoma” is set in an idealized rural America — an America of perfection that, as we all now know, was an imaginary place. World War II was raging, and we were all singing of sunshine and moonbeams and farmers’ daughters bursting with promise.
As a senior at Bayonne High School, I successfully auditioned for the New Jersey All State Chorus. Later, as a soprano at Douglass College, I was thrilled to sing “Beethoven’s Ninth” on tour.
Do yourself a favor and mark Sunday, Dec. 8, down to attend one of the Choral Society and South Fork Chamber Orchestra’s two holiday performances. If you haven’t been, these concerts are an annual tradition that brings together the audience in a wonderful feeling of community.
This year’s program includes Christmas pieces by Camille Saint-Saens, Gustave Holst, and Cecilia McDowell, but also premieres an original work called “Dancing: Variations,” by David M. Brandenburg of East Hampton, set to a secular poem by Sag Harbor’s Kathryn Levy. The Brandenburg/Levy piece tests our mettle to the extent that our music director, Mark Mangini, has divided it into seven “episodes” for practice. We are determined to do right by it. Find out if we succeed, by buying tickets online.