Choral Ethics: Exceptions to the Rule

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love to look out my kitchen window, sipping my morning coffee and watching the birds, rabbits and squirrels caper around my yard. Especially in the spring and summer, it helps me focus on things other than my own current concerns and I enjoy the beauty. I feel most at peace before the day truly begins.

This is also the time of year I start thinking “deep thoughts.” These are the thoughts that come as we’ve finished the school year, the concert year, and the church year and we’re in the transition time (for us) of summer. Some planning for Fall has begun or is already finished. I often remember my choirs and choruses from years past.

The last few days, I have been thinking about one of my children’s chorus singers, Cassidy, how she changed my life and ideas of what is important.

I directed a children’s chorus connected with a park district for about ten years. My singers were between five and ten years old, but it seemed every time I got the kids to a certain level, my most experienced singers had rehearsal conflicts with swimming lessons or soccer practice or CCD classes. I asked my supervisor if we could change our rehearsal day and was told no, absolutely not. The last two years I was there were very frustrating for me, and I often contemplated resigning.

One August, a few weeks before our Fall session was to begin, I got a call from my supervisor, asking me to speak with the mother of a child who wanted to sing with us. But there was a problem; the child was four years old. He explained that her daughter was too young for our program, but she wanted to talk to me anyway.

I called the mother back, and Mom told me her daughter had a rare form of pediatric liver cancer but loved to sing. She wanted to give her child every experience she could that could be considered “normal” for as long as she could. I agreed to try, as long as Mom attended the first rehearsal, then we would see.

Cassidy burst into our rehearsal space that first rehearsal, bouncing and giggling, a beautiful little girl with big eyes and no hair. Really, no hair, absolutely bald, with a yellow tinge to her skin. She had a cute little hat which she took right off because she said it was too hot. Her Mom smiled and shook my hand, and we got down to the business of rehearsal.

If I had worried about how the rest of my singers would react to Cassidy, I needn’t have. All of my singers, especially the older girls, fell in love with her. I actually had to make a rotating schedule for who would sit next to Cassidy in rehearsal. She was so bright, had a BEAUTIFUL little voice, could hold her own part quite well, and she was four years old!

This chorus was a mixture of ages and abilities, part of my frustration, and I used unison as well as two-part pieces. I always included one or two songs from collections edited by Ruth Crawford Seeger, unison but with very interesting accompaniments. That Fall, the piece from her Animal collection was a silly song, “The Turkey Song,” and it was Cassidy’s favorite. The last line was, “and his feet were awful dirty,” and she laughed and laughed every time we sang it.

Two weeks before our concert, Cassidy’s Mom called to tell me Cassidy wouldn’t be able to sing for the concert because she needed to be in the hospital for treatment. When I told the chorus at our next rehearsal, they were sad and suggested we dedicate “The Turkey Song” to her and we did. I thought about Cassidy after our concert but didn’t want to intrude when I knew it would be difficult to take time to speak with me.

Life went on, and that spring session was my most frustrating ever. I decided then that it would be my last. My supervisor was sad but understood. He called me in June, soon after my last concert and after I had removed all of my belongings from the rehearsal space. He told me a large envelope had arrived, addressed to me, in the mail, some sort of greeting card he guessed. And wanted to know if he should send it on to me or if I wanted to come and get it myself. I asked him to open it, and he could read it aloud to me.

It was from Cassidy’s Mom; Cassidy had lost her battle in early May that year, but she wanted to thank me. She wrote that the time Cassidy spent singing with me the last few months of her life she was really herself, not a sick child. She told me Cassidy taught all her nurses and physicians that silly Turkey Song. She sang that silly song all day long, until she couldn’t. That silly song about a silly turkey and his dirty feet were the last things she ever spoke aloud before she left this world. My supervisor was crying and I was crying, as he read on. Then he told me I had made a difference in her short life because I had made an exception.

I made an exception because it seemed the right thing to do. Make exceptions, my Dear ChoralNetters, and you will understand what is important in life.