A Voice in the Chorus

The Voice in the Chorus

While the musical had played to sold-out performances throughout its first week, the focus of critics, and members of the audience alike, was less and less on the lead singers than on the beautiful, bell-like tone coming from the thirteen-member, allfemale chorus. The chorus, typically a place where ingénues got their first taste of the Broadway stage, had become the principal draw in a musical with no-less-thancompelling star turns from the frontline performers.

But the near perfect, bell-like timbre emanating from within a chorus that seemed to enwrap this uniquely angelic sound in its communal strains, while at the same time allowing it to sing out in its ring-line tones, began to create a demand to understand its origin. The music director, while saying he would love to take credit for the beauty of the sound, insisted the voicing that was created by the chorus was not necessarily what he was going for when he auditioned potential members. He said he was simply following the guidance of the composers who wrote the choral parts to support the solos of the principal performers.

Nonetheless, to the growing annoyance of the play’s producers, the unique voicing of the chorus had become the musical’s trademark and a growing internet sensation. Numerous unauthorized recordings of it surfaced on the social networking sites and YouTube, quickly going viral on a worldwide basis. Those postings, in turn, engendered a call for discovering the source of the voicing. Typical of cyber sensations the movement soon grew into a contest of near frenetic proportions as to who would unravel the mystery of the musical phenomenon. Suggestions ranged from complex mathematical interpretations to videos of drunken frat boys croaking through choral ranges from bass to falsetto, in lame, sometimes downright ludicrous, attempts to recreate the sound in their YouTube postings.

The ongoing attention was a tremendous boon to ticket sales, delighting the producers but viewed as a pyrrhic victory by the composers, who felt creatively slighted by people attending performances for the wrong reason. They determined to strip away the layers of mystery surrounding the unique sound and explain it once and for all.

First, they listened to the chorus, without any of the soloists, a good start because there it was, the bell-like tone. But when they tried to zero in on which performer, or combination of performers, was most likely the source of the sound, the search became problematic. Sometimes it sounded as if some melding of all the voices somehow managed to produce the beautiful timbre that at the same time appeared to be separate and apart from the choir-like sound of the full chorus. Other times it sounded as if it must be coming from an individual singer. In either case, the sound was always there.

Next they tried stripping away individual performers to see if that would expose a single singer responsible for the sound. But various combinations of singers managed

to produce the sound. Others could not. But when the original combination that had produced the sound was reconstituted, the sound was gone, while reconstituting the grouping, which had failed initially, reproduced the sound when tried again. Combinations were tried and retried, sometimes working, other times not. The production of the sound seemed to be a matter of random combinations of singers.

Word of this confounding situation went viral on the internet, until one theoretical physicist suggested that the sound was coming from some black hole in the cosmos or some quirk of quantum mechanics resulting from the chorus somehow, inexplicably, managing to “tap into the music of negative space.” Or, metaphysically, “the music of the spheres.”

But no matter how hard they looked, no matter how closely they listened, they could not see or hear her. The she, who sang the beautiful bell-like tones, was beyond their ability to capture her sight or sound. But Icould see her, could hear her influence upon every note of every song in the Broadway musical, knew that while she would stand invisibly in the chorus, it would be her voice I would always hear. At the end of each night’s performance or afternoon matinee, I would watch her drop her light blue tunic to the floor and walk naked from the stage. The rhythm of her movement inspiring the next piece of art that would flow from my soul, which would invest itself in every note I would ever write. The breath I had caught would breathe life into my soul. That I would know what she knew: that I loved her.