From Our Readers: The Soundtrack of My Life

Elizabeth Leon is an author and musician from Ashburn, Virginia. For more information, please visit www.msva.org or www.elizabethleon.org 
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In August of 1999, I was the mother of an almost two-year-old daughter and was expecting a baby in December. After two years staying home with a toddler, I was desperate to regain some sense of who I was outside of motherhood. Flipping through a free local paper, a small ad in the classified section caught my eye:  Singers wanted for local choir. After talking with my husband, I scheduled an audition.

That decision changed my life.

I recently heard my conductor describe that day with words that brought an extraordinary amount of goodness to my heart.

“A young soprano walked in to audition that day. She had, and I don’t mean to be cliché, the voice of an angel: a pure, clear, soaring voice but also a vibrant personality.  I thought that day, and I am not particularly religious, on this voice I will build my choir. And I did.”

The tears pooled in my eyes listening to him offer me this tribute last week in front of our entire ensemble during the last Sunday night rehearsal he would ever hold.

“Elizabeth, I could not have asked for a better North Star to guide our choir than your voice.”

Moved with awe and gratitude, I let those beautiful words wash over me and soak into my body. It is a risk to share them because I fear being judged as arrogant, but I need to be truthful about what it means to me to have been a part of the Master Singers, and not primarily my impact on the choir, but more significantly, the choir’s impact on me.

The Master Singers of Virginia and the relationships I hold within it have been my home for 24 years. That is longer than I lived with my parents as a child, 7 years longer than my first marriage and currently 14 years longer than my second. All but one of my six children grew in my womb to the sound of my voice singing in the Master Singers and the resonance of more than thirty voices around me. My children grew up attending concert after concert. My family schedule is still anchored by Sunday night rehearsals from August to May.

The music of the Master Singers of Virginia is the soundtrack of my life. 

On Sunday, May 7, 2023, I sang my last concert with Dr. Erik Reid Jones. Estimating 2 1/2 hours of rehearsal per week, an hour of pre-concert singing, and an hour of music per concert, a conservative guess would show that I have sung more than 2,300 hours with the Master Singers of Virginia under Dr. Jones’s brilliant and creative direction. I feel inept to convey the effect that being a part of this magnificent ensemble has had on my body, mind, and spirit, but it is enormous. I have no doubt that I would not be the woman I am today without the privilege of making extraordinary music with dear friends and colleagues week after week, year after year.

The Master Singers have been a constant in my life when many other things were not. Through the death of a marriage and a child, the music and community of the Master Singers were a lifeline that transcended these upheavals and provided a refuge where I could flourish in the midst of chaos and sorrow.

Dr. Jones frequently says that a choir is, first and foremost, a community – a community of people who sing together. The community of the Master Singers has been a sanctuary of goodness and beauty for me, and an outlet for the goodness and beauty I hold within, despite the circumstances in the rest of my life.  As a stay-at-home mother of a big family I spent most of my day juggling the needs of 5 children. I cherished the hours in rehearsal when I could focus intensely on only one thing. When my life began to fall apart, the ensemble provided an outlet for the intense emotion I struggled to contain in my body. When I got remarried, the Master Singers provided the music at our wedding. When our son died, their voices soared through his funeral mass. Week after week, I metabolized stress and grief amidst artistry and excellence in the safety of our community. 

Not just the music, not just the community, but the two together are the heart of the Master Singers under Dr. Jones’s exceptional leadership. He is exceptional not just because he is a brilliant musician and outstanding conductor — there are many of those. What makes him extraordinary is his capacity for vulnerability and his unwavering belief in his instrument: the choir. He demands excellence from himself and from us not because he desires accolades but because he is fiercely committed to bringing the true beauty and artistry of music to life. He enters into the music with abandon and invites the singers and the audience to do the same – to open their hearts, to be energized, to dance, to savor, to play, to weep, to be still, to grieve. To sing with Dr. Jones is to be moved by not just his musicianship or by the music, but by his soul.

One of his favorite maxim’s is: Music is a temporal art.  In order to fully experience music, one must be fully present and fully engaged. We are held by the music, wrapped in the sound. The song begins and we ride a wave that has movement, rhythm, pitch, and intensity. We crest, rise, and fall together, deeply focused and attuned to each other and our conductor through our bodies, our breath, our eyes, our mind, and our spirit.

The role of a choir conductor demands a bit of bravado. Dr. Jones stands vulnerably and bravely in front of the group but also in front of 35 unique and individual voices, 35 hearts, 35 sets of lungs, 35 sets of eyes. He invites and receives our sound, and all of our breath and our energy –spiritually, emotionally, somatically — comes flying at him: a sacred exchange of motion for voice, energy for energy to create music together.

The desire for communion and connection is written in our bodies, and yet we exist in a highly individualistic society. We have largely lost the collective, but not in a choir. In a choral ensemble, the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. A choir shares communion through collective breath and voice through song. It is deeply fulfilling and fills a desire many of us don’t even know we have to share our humanity, our breath, and our bodies by working together towards a common goal.

One of the reasons I believe that people are drawn to choral music is this phenomenon. For the choral singer, sharing breath, energy, voice, and spirit while intensely attuning to a collective is deeply satisfying.  It meets a core longing to belong and to be known.

Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes this kind of experience as exceptionally self-regulating and soothing to our arousal systems, for singer and audience member alike. I firmly believe that my participation in the Master Singers has allowed me to survive and thrive over the last 24 years through intense and heart-breaking circumstances. Two key moments exemplify this from my years in the ensemble.

One Sunday during the unraveling of my first marriage, my husband and I drove to a performance of the Master Singers in the acoustic wine cellar of a local winery.  Our relationship was in shreds and I was desperate to save our marriage, but he was detached and cold. We pulled into the gravel lot late and I could barely contain my sadness as I hurried to the wine cellar. Walking into the winery, I could hear the strains of the choir already rehearsing. A fellow singer walked ahead of me and as she opened the door to the cellar, a wall of lush ethereal harmonies filled the hallway, the glorious O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen. My knees buckled and I sank to the ground as the exquisite beauty of the music pierced my heart. In falling into the music, I could finally fall apart and accept that my marriage was dead. The memory of that moment remains as one of the most comforting and agonizing of my life.

One season, our repertoire included Even When He is Silent by Andre Arnesen, a stunning work about clinging to hope in the darkest times of life. My second husband and I were expecting a baby, a son who we knew had a life-limiting diagnosis and was expected to die. Once again, the exquisite beauty of the music enveloped me and provided comfort and support during a terrifying season. I declared with my body and voice as I sang: I believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining, I believe in love even when I feel it not, I believe in God even when he is silent. The text, found scratched on the wall of a concentration camp, is defiant against despair. Paired with the gorgeous harmonies sung with my friends, it sustained me through an unthinkable season. The ensemble sang it again at our baby’s funeral mass.  The music covered me with comfort and hope, allowing me to weep while reassuring me that there would be goodness and beauty again.

As I prepared to say goodbye to Dr. Jones as the artistic director of the Master Singers, I contemplated the relationship between conductor and singer.  It is an intimate relationship, requiring each to be a student of the other. Each is dependent on the other yet balance and equality are not guaranteed. Dr. Jones provided both. The conductor is required to communicate with the choir through his body, but he had the courage to be authentic and vulnerable in the music, inviting each of us to give ourselves entirely as well. In an ego-driven profession, Dr. Jones was not.  Don’t get me wrong – he was confident, outspoken, and talented, so some measure of ego was unavoidable, but he was driven not by a desire for personal success or attention but by a desire for the choir’s excellence: modern choral music, masterfully. 

I am so grateful I answered that ad in the paper. The music of the Master Singers has been the soundtrack of my life. Dr. Jones’s leadership at its helm was my North Star – a constant safe harbor amid the shifting sands of my family life. He invited us to explore hundreds and hundreds of masterful choral works and sculpted each to reveal the heart of the piece, then colored it with his personal creative interpretation. He let us see his heart and created a community that allowed us to grow and mature as musicians and friends. His legacy is not just a rich tapestry of composers, styles, and melodies but the imprint of his spirit on each of ours. After 24 years of professional partnership, friendship, music, and community, I am left with awe and gratitude, two perfectly inadequate words. The music we shared has said it all.

There is no such beauty as where you belong.
Stephen Paulus, The Road Home