The joy of adequacy

It's nice to have some activity where you aren't striving for excellence

I sing in a church choir some Sundays. Singing in a choir is known to be a healthy activity, both from the perspective of maintaining social connections and from the perspective of maintaining cognitive function. Apparently, there is something positive about engaging in a coordinated activity with other people, particularly involving musical performance, and particularly for older adults.

Of course, the health benefits are not the reason why I do it. Instead, I do it because I enjoy it. Something that I like about the arrangement is that it is one of the few areas of my life in which I get to be “good enough.” In so much of life, I find myself needing to be excellent. In any setting where I am supposed to be excellent, I need to be concerned about whether I am doing enough, or being smart enough, or working hard enough, as well as being concerned about figuring out the right things to do next.

I'm not really complaining about the need for excellence. I recognize that I have accepted a bargain where I am relatively well compensated because all those things are hard. Nevertheless, it's nice to have at least one area of my life where the bargain is quite different: I am an amateur, a volunteer, and therefore the expectations are correspondingly lower.

At the same time, I find I don’t enjoy activities that are staffed entirely by volunteers and amateurs. There are too many ways that things go awry, and too many well-intentioned people cheerfully paving their way to Hell. What’s great about this choir is the presence of a “spine” of professionalism. Each of the parts has at least one paid professional musician. That enables the choir to be the kind of place where every week we take on a new Mass setting and a new motet with relatively little rehearsal. It’s like an ongoing tour of the vast body of Mass settings in western Christianity.

We rehearse for 90 minutes, then sing the rehearsed 20-30 minutes of music in a 90-ish minute Mass. The non-professional members of the choir range from people who are good enough to be professionals to grade-school children who are just learning to sing. I suspect that most of the non-professionals are in roughly my situation: parishioners who are good enough to take part, good enough to keep up, but perhaps not good enough to keep things going if the professionals were removed.

In this context, I cheerfully accept that I am not a leader. I am pretty good at sight singing these days, and indeed, I often surprise myself by how easily I deal with a piece I haven’t seen before; but, of course, that’s partly the result of decades of exposure to certain choral-music idioms. It also doesn’t hurt that I have decades of singing along with pop songs on the car radio, often choosing to sing harmony parts. Nevertheless, for any genuinely new piece, I am pretty unreliable if I’m not accompanied by someone who already knows the piece or who is better at sight singing than I am.

Choir is also an opportunity to use some rather obscure skills. In particular, Anglican chant and plainsong are skills that are taken for granted in this church-music context, but are actually not very common among even many working musicians. Every once in a while, we will do a chant that is notated in the medieval square notation, which is great fun to show people who are only familiar with more conventional, newer notation.

My value to the choir is not that I can carry the bass section on my own. Instead, if the bass section basically knows where it's going, I can thicken the sound with one more mostly-competent voice. It's nice to be a follower in some domains. And it's nice to be prepared to take a back seat. I neither expect, nor even want, to ever sing a solo.

(For one thing, I don’t really have a soloist’s voice. Many years ago, I was the lead singer in a handful of rock bands, so I certainly understand a soloist’s role and I’m not burdened with stage fright. However, a voice that works for rock is not necessarily a voice that works as a soloist for church music. My voice today isn’t very much like my lead-singer voice of three or four decades ago, either).

The main hazard to all of this is that the more-challenging parts of my life – the ongoing pursuit of excellence in various forms – can easily crowd it out. When I’m overcommitted, which happens all too often, it’s easy to decide that singing in choir must be cut out. After all, it’s 3-4 hours of activity and there’s no way to do a “little bit of it” in some given week. But it would probably be smart for me to think that some time being “merely adequate” is important for mental balance, and to put a high priority on keeping it on my schedule.