Reprise to a Tribute

Giving a quick “Hush” to choir and cast, I pushed open the double doors and peered into the darkness on what looked to be a full house.  Had it really been four years, since we’d first come together, a group of total strangers all in high school for the first time?  Four years since we’d come together in a tentative alliance to restore the integrity of the school’s foundering music program.  Tonight we were performing, not in memory of the past, but in honor of the might-have-beens.

Carolyn Colbert was dead.

The prelude music ended, and the murmurs in the darkened church died into silence.  Four years.  It had been four years, and I was suprized how little it all had changed.  This was a culmination of four months of relentless practice, and I’d done this show so many times before.  Yet still I was terrified—this time, not because of the flute solos, but because without Madame Colbert we were thrust under new and untrusted direction.  I clutched my flute in trembling hands and waited for the instant when Madam Soles, our new director, would signal the go-ahead. The opening chords of “I Bind My Heart” shattered the silence. 

Before the silent cast, I reclaimed nerve and dignity, counted to ten, and led the choir in slow and solemn procession down the center aisle, just as before: thirty voices now, instead of the quavering handful with which we'd begun that August of our freshman year.  In the dark, I found my place behind the altar and turned on one last mike before the melody ended and the lights came up, same as always. 

I prayed, head bowed, as the narrators read their part, listening for the words that after all this time were still my only cue.  “And after three days, He will rise again.” 

There was the familiar instant’s silence as I raised my head, fiery exultance in my eyes, and brought the flute to my lips; this moment was mine alone…           

Music exploded, glorious, from that sparkling shower of notes.  Kyrie eleison!  Kyrie eleison!  Kyrie elsison!  She had changed the music on us, I suppose so she wouldn’t feel as though she stood in Madame’s shadow.  But nothing had changed.  I still couldn’t name the moment when the choir put words to that melody, broke into parts, split into rounds, voices soaring in that lofty holy of holies.  Caught up in the music, all that mattered to me was the purity, the clarity, the brilliance of that single hymn of praise.           

Eight more times in that hour, I put joy and pain into melody as actors dined, scourged, crucified.  And when at last it was done, I again raised my flute, this time in final, glorious tribute.  Echo and vibrato ripped through the room, not quite drowning out the sobs of cast, choir, and audience, though again a different melody, this time the haunting interrogation of  The Reproaches: Oh my people, what have I done to you?  How have I hurt you?  Answer me…