choir thoughts, and excellence

So yesterday was the best day ever, which was amazing, because in the evening, I went to my old high school's choral concert with Carl.

It was so sad, I.... was exceedingly sad.

I was secretly glad that my Flip ran out of batteries after like 1 second, because I would have felt guilty about not recording it otherwise. But I don't think I could have recorded it.

It was really amazing to me that just five years ago (or six?), that choir was so good we were getting invites to the White House and the National Cathedral and the governor's mansion and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. We sang at the coolest places. That was a highlight of my life. It is rare that a day goes by that I don't miss elite choir.

Yah, there's no way that same choir is invited to those places now.

Watching the concert made me realize how much I have missed excellence. I think that's one reason the past few months have been so distressing: I have seen excellence. But not recently.

In a choral setting, you know when you're excellent, because when everyone sings exactly on pitch, it creates an auditory illusion of an unsung note that seems to pervade the room, called an overtone. It's like this glorious hum that penetrates everyone in the zone. It's amazing, and I have felt it. My old choir could create this particular psychoacoustic illusion fairly frequently.

That is what excellence is.

Anyway. When I took the concert and the whole rest of my day together, I realized that the biggest issue in my life recently has been a lack of excellence. I haven't felt an overtone in forever. I pulled out some T.S. Eliot last week, but other than that, it has been probably over a year since I had read anything even remotely excellent. I haven't studied anything by da Vinci in forever (his excellence astounds me).

Mediocrity is a pathetic aim when excellence is out there. I honestly believe that the cruelest thing that can happen to a person who has known excellence is to take that away. Indeed, I'd almost forgotten the significance of excellence, until last night, when I was forced to see what happens to a choir when all the excellence is gone.

I'm so excited to have time to devote to excellence again. This morning I spent a fair amount of time practicing Joplin (PS, Scott Joplin was SO excellent). This afternoon, I've planned to crack open the spine of my O-Chem book and practice drawing some chemical structures. I have some language textbooks I've been meaning to study. I should practice my guitar.

I'm glad we went to that concert last night. In many ways it was downright scary (Carl later described my high school's current student body as "classy, with a side of class"), but in the end, it was worth suffering through just as a reminder.

Seek excellence.