I miss singing every day. Between choir rehearsal, voice lessons, and individual rehearsal, I spent quite a bit of my collegiate experience in the OMH.

And it's not that I'm all that talented or even, you know, able to stay in key sometimes, but I love it so much. I love how, when you're totally in the groove, when you know your piece cold, it's almost effortless and you make music with just your voice. I love the way notes resonate through my whole head, buzzing and ringing around my palate and teeth and tongue. I love standing in a choir and breathing in rhythm with sixty other people; feeling the rumble of the basses in my stomach and chest, the prickle of tenors over my shoulders and up my neck, the brush of the sopranos against the top of my head and always, always swimming in an ocean of alto voices.

Right now I'm listening to Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem and I remember learning it. How much we altos loved the second movement because, for a few measures at least, we were finally able to blast away in our lower registers. I remember sitting down with my score and really looking at the text as a work of verse as opposed to random German vowel sounds I had to make sure were on the right beats. I remember the first time we nailed a movement in rehearsal and I remember the disaster that was our first rehearsal with the orchestra. I remember watching the people who would wander into our rehearsals towards the end of the term just to listen to us sing – student, professors, staff, random townies – and thinking how great it was to be able to give people something they could enjoy without any guilt when all it took was time and a little effort.