Not long before the break this evening, we had 27 singers at the regular Berkeley singing. The singing was loud, exuberant, with a very strong tenor section driving the rest of the singing (which is the way it should be). I was sitting next to Alex in the bass section. In between tunes, he turned to me and whispered, “We sound great tonight!” Cynic that I am, I said, “Yes, but how long will it last?” My cynicism proved prophetic: voices sounded fatigued after the break, and with the fatigue not everyone could stay on pitch and we wandered off into unintentional microtonality. Sometimes the Berkeley singing feels like we’re having a competition to see who can sing the loudest, rather than a cooperative venture to raise our voices together in song.
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