. . . We have done that which is our duty to do” (Luke 17:10).
Note: This post was originally written in April 2016 and has now been updated.
I’m not going to try to give the full Scriptural background for this verse since I’m applying it in a very specific way. I will just say that this is something Jesus said to His disciples in a discussion about faith. You can read the entire chapter at Bible Hub.
This verse originally came to mind as I was congratulating myself on how much work I was doing to prepare for an upcoming Cherry Creek Chorale concert, which included the Mozart Requiem. (I’ve since finished a book on this wonderful work; you may purchase it here or here.) I always struggle with learning new music, especially the difficult stuff (of course).
Here’s what I wrote back in 2016:
We usually had some very helpful practice music files on our member page, and this time is no different. In fact, there’s a plethora of material out there on the Requiem, as there is for most big, well-known pieces. Our web administrator has posted a YouTube series that shows the sheet music page by page as a music file plays. You can choose which vocal part you want to hear emphasized and that will be in the foreground. So, pretty cool, but the source of the music is something called a midi file, which is electronic, not vocal. Or of course there are tons of actual performances out there, either on video or as audio files. But then everyone is singing together, so you can’t hear your part separately. Or there’s always the old sit-at-the-piano-and-plunk-out-your-part method, which I’ve certainly done many times. So you can play your part as slowly as you need, stopping and starting at will, but you’re not hearing the words or accompaniment and you have to be sure you’re playing correctly, both for the notes and for the rhythm, not always true for me. I’ve said in the past that I dearly wish there could be a vocal version of the separate parts, so that someone could actually be singing my part, words and music, in my ear, and all I’d have to do is sing along. But I realized that this type of thing would probably require more work and expense than a freebie video, so I sort of forgot about it.
But those sixteenth-note runs in the fugue sections weren’t coming together very well for me. So one evening I did a little more googling. I don’t even remember what exactly I put in the search terms. (It’s all in the search terms!) And suddenly, there it was, the site of my dreams: SingleParts. (And then of course I discovered that they’re not the only one–I just came upon another one, ChoraLine, and there are probably more.) The catch is that you have to pay for the materials, about $20, but I figure that I got my money’s worth the first day I used it, going through all the tenor choral parts twice and also using the slowed-down versions of the difficult sections. It’s amazingly helpful.
Here’s the October 2021 update:
Our choir has now purchased an all-choir subscription from a wonderful, fabulous, excellent, extraordinary company called Choral Tracks. It’s hard for me to say enough good things about this resource and about how much of a change it has made for my own ability to practice and to feel confident that I have my music nailed. If you have access to this material I can’t urge you enough to use it. CT is doing the same thing as the companies referenced above in the earlier paragraph I wrote, but it has a much larger catalog. The other companies use actual choirs to perform the music, whereas CT just uses a single voice for each part, plus piano accompaniment. But that’s okay, because they’re able to do so much more repertoire this way. They’ve expanded their staff and offer various subscription plans for full choirs and for individuals. For our choir we end up paying less than $10/year per member for our subscription, and we can give CT a list of all our selections for the concert season. If they don’t have it in the catalog already they produce it. For every piece they provide separate tracks for each part, a fully-voiced track, and an accompaniment track. I download the tracks onto my phone and create a playlist with my single-part track (typically tenor I) and the fully-voiced track for each of our selections. I can listen to the playlist while looking at my music but also while doing other stuff. It’s a good test of my memory to see if I can sing along with the tracks without my music.
If you’d like to read the short book I wrote about practicing choral music outside of regular rehearsals, be sure to purchase Intentional Song, available, as with the Mozart book referenced above, here and here.
And the conclusion from the older post, still applicable today:
What on earth does all this have to do with Luke chapter 7? Just this: I was feeling pretty proud of myself. Boy, was I going to nail this music! And how smart was I in the first place to even find this stuff online? I should be singled out for my all-encompassing dedication. And then the thought occurred to me, ‘Debi, you’re just doing your job. You’re supposed to learn your part, whatever it takes and however you do it. Just get to work.’ A bit of a facer, as the British would say. I don’t deserve any particular credit for doing what I’m supposed to do in the first place, do I? All very humbling.
How about you? Are you a gold star junkie, as I tend to be, and as Gretchen Rubin talks about? Well, I guess we’d better all just get over it.
