A love letter to Toronto indie rock from overseas

I am full of salad and walking 5 K a day, and on the clear days you can see the Alps over the Bodensee. But you are sorely missed, in your sweaty gatherings (and, I reckon, prom dresses of the fake variety). I long for your daring fashions, your nerdy enthusiasms, your band love, your interesting conversational topics, and your earnest attempts to talk over music you dislike. Most of all, in a few weeks I will miss the dancing audiences of hott youthsters, as I will be submitting myself to the cold judgement of a discerning German concert-going audience. They don't even stand up to clap at the end of a show, unless it makes them feel like their highly organized innards are about to explode.

I do not lack for loudness over here, but it's the kind that only a hundred trained singers and a full Romantic orchestra can make at full tilt, not the kind of screaming amplified glory that has happily filled my last few months with all of you.

The first rehearsal of Bruckner's Te Deum was deafening. But things really started to come together (in a mildly terrifying way), two days ago when we did the first tutti rehearsal of Mendelssohn's Elias. Our conductor, a charming, white-haired, elfin man named Helmuth Rilling, has a deceptively simple style. This is a man who conducts Bach's 200-page B-minor Mass from memory, and punctuates rehearsals with thoughtful reflections '” like about Mendelssohn being inspired to write this oratorio after reading about the flaming wagon: just think! FLAMING! WAGON! This rehearsal was wild. And unfortunate, for the singers: for the life of us we couldn't follow that baton. 'œLook at bar 138. It is very interesting. You may find marked in your score a ritardando: I would very much like to conduct one, but when I look at you, it seems you have found a better idea.'?

Things very much heated up when he said with irritation, 'œYou are supposed to be professional musicians. You have to stay with me, or you will not be with the poor orchestra. Now take your faces out of your scores, or we will be forced to think of you as just singers and not musicians.'? A groan arises from the chorus. 'œI am sorry! But you are going to have to work a little harder!'? But it is so true. Most of these folks in the choir are soloists, used to living in their own blissful little lands of musical stretching, and leading accompanists around as if they're rodents on strings. Okay, maybe monkeys on strings.

Completely humbled, we spend the rest of the time with our faces fixed on his beatific little one over the sea of thrashing bows. Barely glancing at a score you're reading for the third time in your life is something like floating. Looking down, memorizing the shape of the next four bars, and letting the music make its own sense as it leaves your mouth.

Singers, I am learning for the hundredth time, are a rare and barely endurable breed. Something about occupying a body that is also an instrument transforms normal people (and by our standards, dears, excessively normal people) into hilarious caricatures of self-fascination. One thing I cannot stand, however, is Tenor Talk. Tenors are the sort of people who make others constantly conscious of their rarity in the natural world, and never cease to delight in filling the hours with discussions of Famous Tenors Throughout History and Those Who Ruined Their Voices by Singing Through the Passagio. (The Passagio is the area where the quality of the voice changes, like from my bright and shimmery higher range to a breathier low range: my voice teacher here calls the former 'œthe chocolate range.'?) But look. If I wanted to listen to the frat-boy enthusiasm that accompanies the tenor vocal fascination for more than five minutes ('œYou know, he only had one role, and it was Don Giovanni,'? 'œThat poor guy made the mistake of singing the heavy repertoire too young, and his voice was in shreds'?), I WOULD GET MY HEAD CHECKED OR HURL MYSELF OFF A CLIFF.

Mercifully, I have a little international lifeline in 20hz, and sometimes I get through the days picturing our own Marcel Gonsalves bellowing away in the baritone section. I would recommend this pastime to anyone who will listen.

KATE MCGEE PLAYS BASS IN REPUBLIC OF SAFETY AND IS CURRENTLY REHEARSING TO PERFORM WITH THE FESTIVAL ENSEMBLE AND CHOIR IN STUTTGART, GERMANY. THE WAY I SEE IT IS A ROTATING OPINION SPACE. TO CONTRIBUTE, EMAIL JONNY@WAVELENGTHTORONTO.COM.