I changed my major to International Affairs in my sophomore year. I hated how the other piano students were annoyingly competitive and it no longer felt like the right path. I continued with music, however, in the form of singing. I sang in chorus in high school and made it into Maine’s All State Choir, which was an honor, but when I entered my freshman year, I auditioned and was accepted into the University Singers, the most prestigious of all the performance groups at the University of Maine, Orono. The chorus was comprised of 64 people, with only eight people on each vocal part (bass, tenor, alto and soprano one & two).
We toured not only down the East coast to Philadelphia, performing numerous shows along the way, but also to Europe in the spring of 1992 under the leadership of a charismatic conductor, Dr. Cox, who closely resembled Albert Einstein. Amazingly, he is STILL the conductor today, 30 years later (he started in 1978), and still taking choruses down the East coast and to Europe. Can you tell who is who?
We sang in numerous cathedrals and churches, from Notre-Dame de Paris to the Strasbourg Cathedral in the Alsace region of France, to smaller venues in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, including shows in Montreux, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Vienna, Rothenburg and Regensburg. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Singing in some of the cathedrals, our vocals hung in the air for what seemed like an eternity after ending a phrase, a natural reverberation that mimicked a digital vocal effect. I’ll never forget those 16 days.
I also fell truly in love for the first time on this trip, making the entire tour even more vivid and surreal. She was also a pianist and a soprano in the choir, and the magic of these shared experiences, from the small village of Villars high in the mountains above Lake Geneva, a cable car beneath the Matterhorn, the twisty medieval streets of Rothenburg, and on Vienna’s famous Giant Ferris Wheel all seemed to enhance the world around us and the connection between us.
The romance was short-lived, coming to an end within a few months after the trip, after we came down from the high of being abroad. This made for an awkward return to the choir as a sophomore in the fall of 1992, when our conductor, who was falling in love with his wife-to-be, ironically chose to have ‘love’ be the theme of the semester. To our surprise, she and I were randomly assigned to sit next to each other for the entire year. Why does fate laugh upon us so?
By the end of the spring semester, I was ready to leave. Not just leave school but leave to work in a remote and wild park for the summer, and soon after to leave Maine and head West, never to return to live on the East coast.
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