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It’s official! I am a member of the Virtual Choir 4. I submitted my video last night. Quick backstory for the uninitiated: the Virtual Choir 4 was created by composer Eric Whitacre. Singers from all around the world submit videos of themselves singing their part of a piece of Whitacre’s choral music, and those are later edited together into the final piece/video.

It took seven versions before I made a video that was acceptable. Two were never saved due to issues on the VC4 server end, I went flat at one point in three of them (only a tiny bit) my cat meowed in another (thought I put him in the bedroom) and the vase that was holding up my “background” (a blanket) crashed and smashed to pieces in another. I’m not telling which one I went with. Okay, it’s the one with the surprise guest star.

As you can see from the picture of my recording set-up below, I have my priorities straight. It’s not how I sound but how I look. Actually, because I was so self-conscious about how I looked my singing is kinda tense. I sound better when I’m more relaxed.

If you want participate now is the time. The deadline is June 10th. The great thing about VC4 is we don’t have to wait long for the result. The Virtual Choir 4 is going to part of the Coronation Festival at Buckingham Palace in July, so JULY. Next month! The Queen! If you have special equipment like external mics and cameras, fantastic, but you can just use your laptop as I did. Do it!! I’m telling you, it feels great. You’re going to be ecstatic when you’re done.

I swear I’m like a murder-story magnet. No matter what I research I uncover a murder. I was granted access to the Grace Church archives and on my first day there I came across two small articles about an ex-actor named Harry Chauncey Smith who was found strangled in his bed in a rooming house in 1949. Someone had handwritten across the article that Harry was from the first class of Grace Church choir boys.

A vested choir of men and boys had replaced the professional choir at Grace Church at the end of the 19th century, and Harry was one of the very first boys in the new choir.

Later, I found an 1897 newspaper article describing Harry’s solo performance of a hymn that Christmas. “… had he never done anything else the rendition of that piece would have made him famous.” The writer also described Harry as a “sweet-faced, delicate-looking lad, with large gray-blue eyes and short blonde hair,” who was small for his age. Harry loved dogs and flowers, and his parents had to forbid music and books during the summer in an order to get him out of the house and riding bikes and playing with the other children.

By 1949, the year of his murder, Harry was 66 years old, an actor, and going by the name Harry Redding. He wasn’t doing so well. He was living alone in rooming house on the upper west side, and the walls of his room were covered with pictures of him from his youth, wearing theatrical costumes—his former glory days, apparently. His landlady said she’d seen him drunk on the street hours before his murder.

Harry had been murdered by a 23 year old homeless man named James Robert McCormack (the article said McCormack was 26, but this was wrong).  McCormack killed Harry, he said, because Harry had called him a bum. McCormack strangled Harry with a belt, put a jacket over his face, then he stole $8 from Harry’s wallet and fled. McCormack was convicted of 2nd degree murder and sentenced to 240 months to life. I did an inmate lookup and learned that he’d been released on November 19, 1980. I couldn’t find any death records for him, so if he’s still alive he’s 91.

Harry in his “sweet-faced, delicate-looking” days. So sad. He was beautiful boy.

Bunheads: Apparently this show is still in limbo, and there is no news about whether or not it’s coming back. Way to torture me, ABC Family. Well, two can play this game. Until you renew this show, I’m not speaking to you. See how long you last.

Warehouse 13: I may have already posted about this, but Warehouse 13 has been cancelled, although it will have a final season, so at least we’ll have closure. My thoughts on this: I’m going to stop falling in love with tv characters.

So You Think You Can Dance: This show has gotten even better. I love that they’ve eliminated the remaining negative bits almost entirely. I certainly don’t mind conflict, but I’m not interested in seeing bad or insane dancers and I especially don’t want to see them made fun of even if they kinda deserve it. So I love the focus on the positive in this show, and the great dancing and GOOD GOD the dancing in the auditions has been mind-blowing.

Mad Men: The other morning, out of the blue, I watched a couple of episodes of Mad Men. I haven’t been watching this show because the 1st episode gave me a PTSD attack. It was too good, essentially. It so well captured the worst of a period of time I caught the tail end of, and I guess I’m still traumatized by it. But those few episodes I watched? Oh dear. How many years has this been on?

I tweeted this picture the other day, it’s of my new kitten Bleeck who is a complete and total SLUT, as you can see.

While researching the history of music at Grace Church I came across the story of the wedding of Charles Stratton (better known as Tom Thumb) and Lavinia Warren. It was such a nice story I included a brief write-up in my book even though, technically speaking, it didn’t have anything to do with music. However, it does says something about the spirit of the place where I sing.

Some of the members of Grace Church didn’t want the wedding to take place there, and the letters to Rev. Thomas House Taylor were quite ugly. It’s like they thought the couple were somehow less than human (Stratton and Warren were little people). Barnum desperately wanted the wedding to take place in a concert hall so he could sell tickets, but the Stratton’s love was real and not for show or entertainment, and they wanted to get married in a church. Stratton’s letter to Taylor is touching, “we are as God made us … we are simply man and woman of like passions and infirmities, with you and other mortals …”.

Taylor basically told everyone to go to the devil, and Stratton and Warren were married in Grace Church on February 10, 1863. He was criticized for it afterwards. From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“We are surprised that the clergy, or representatives of so respectable a body as the Episcopal Church should, for a moment, allow themselves to be used by this Yankee showman to advertise his business; or that a Bishop should allow himself to be exhibited like the Albino, or the What is it. Should he do so, the fittest place for the exhibition would be the American Museum; and not in a house dedicated to the services of a holy religion. It is bad enough to turn the solemn rites of marriage into a public entertainment for the gaping crowd of morbid curiosity hunters, without profaning the house of God with such an exhibition.”

Taylor wrote, “if the marriage of Charles S. Stratton and Lavinia Warren is to be regarded as a pageant, then it was the most beautiful pageant it has ever been my privilege to witness.”

Don’t you just love this guy??

More bigoted letters were written by the congregation after the ceremony, but good for you Rev. Taylor and Grace Church. Stratton died 20 years later, and Lavinia remarried two years after that. But when she died she was buried next to her first husband, Charles.

I’m thinking of starting a series called: Things I Meant to Say in My Interview. I was on the radio yesterday talking about my new book about singing, and I blanked on so many things I meant to talk about. Like …

“To sing in a choir is the quickest, surest, and best way to become intimate with music, to get close to the seat of its emotional life, where its heart-throbs can be felt and heard; to ‘experience’ it … to hold communion with its gentle saints and glorious heroes …” – Henry Krehbiel, a 19th century music critic.

Singing in a choir really is the ultimate communion. You don’t just look at a work of art, or listen to it, you become it. “You get to ride on the genius of a Beethoven of a Palestrina,” Dimitra Kessenides, an alto in the Choral Society of Grace Church, once raved to me.

I came upon opera singers in the subway stop at 42nd Street while on my way to my interview on the radio show Talk of the Nation. They are from an organization called The Opera Collective. I took it as a sign.