It’s summer vacation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Cato College of Education! Like many teachers (and students), I feel like bursting into joyful anthem. The Hallelujah Chorus comes to mind. It’s followed me across the years.
In 1978, I was in the 4th grade at Olde Creek Elementary School in Fairfax, VA. Miss Compton, a 30-or- so-year old White woman who wore her dark blonde hair in a bun, was the music teacher at the time. Once a week, our class would line up in a single file and make our way downstairs to Compton’s first-floor cinderblock classroom where, among other things, we learned to play Ode to Joy on a plastic recorder; to know that on a sheet of music the spaces spelled “F-A-C-E” and the lines stood for (E)very (G)ood (B)oy (D)eserves (F)udge; and, to recognize bits and pieces of music from Camille Saint-Saëns, Mozart, Stephen Foster, and so forth.
One afternoon, she pulled out a vinyl disc of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. Compton told us that when King George II heard the final Hallelujah Chorus at the 1743 London premiere, he was so moved that he rose up from his seat to stand at attention. Following his lead, so did the rest of the audience. Audiences still stand whenever it’s played. So, we practiced jumping up out of our folding metal seats as the string section began its first vibrations.
In 1984, at W.T. Woodson High School, I signed up for Mr. Grant’s chorale elective. Grant was in the twilight of his teaching career as music and other arts-based programming were beginning to be pushed out of the curriculum in favor of more “rigorous” subjects. He taught us from behind a baby grand piano with his cup of coffee perched on its top and a smoke between classes in the teachers’ lounge. As early as September, we began learning the Hallelujah Chorus for a December concert. I still remembered that the spaces spelled “F-A-C-E” and the lines, (E)very (G)ood (B)oy (D)eserves (F)udge, but not much more. That is, I couldn’t read music at all.
So, Grant placed me and a few others strategically next to Michael Whalen, a tall wrestler with a red mohawk, who knew the music and sang it in a magnificent baritone. I just listened to him and went wherever his voice went until I learned it by heart. In December, we rode a yellow cheese bus to the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue dressed in black tuxedos and cumberbunds that Grant had stashed away in a closet off the music room for such occasions. I borrowed one for the Junior Prom later that spring. We sang the Hallelujah Chorus in the building’s rotunda flanked by Christmas trees. Michael died tragically the summer after we graduated while he was jogging on the train tracks with his Walkman playing the punk rock that he loved so much.
In 1995, I heard the Hallelujah Chorus once more wafting from my music-teacher-neighbor’s room on the third floor of Cardozo Senior High School in Northwest Washington, DC. I was commuting from Fairfax on a bus to the Pentagon, then a metro ride across the Potomac River to U. Street, and then a walk up the hill to the school. The way the bus schedule worked, I always seemed to be an hour early — just in time for Blanche Hammond’s early morning chorale that began even before the school day officially started. I joined the choir again, still not being able to read music. Hammond squeezed me in between two young men who could, and I followed along.
Hammond had studied music at Howard University. In her salad days, she had even sung a recital of art songs with the then up-and-coming Jessye Norman in the Phillips Collection’s oak paneled music room off Dupont Circle. She was a lyric mezzo-soprano with a voice like melted butter. Besides teaching at Cardozo SHS, she also led the choir just around the corner at the Greater First Baptist Church on 13th and Fairmont with its limestone facade.
Many years later, after I had long left Washington DC, I dropped by the church on a Sunday afternoon. She was still singing, and it was as glorious as ever — just like summer vacation.
|: Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!:|
Image by Michael Maasen on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
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