Mennonite Choral Singing - personalized!

A most recent treasure my mom showed us is her choir notebook from when she was a teenager. Although I had seen it once a long time ago, Monika had not and she was amazed at how mom's memories of younger days are so clear. We leafed through it, not wanting to disturb these beautiful fragile pages of hand written music.

The first pages of music were copied by her father, who was the choir conductor in her village in Paraguay and also taught music.

The music was written in Ziphern (numbers), which were musical notations that the Mennonites started in Russia in the mid 1800's, when four part singing was introduced in the church. More about these numbered musical notations can be found here.

What I found interesting was that each song was dated, so you could follow through and see when they were practicing for Easter, Thanksgiving or Christmas. The date on my grandfather's last piece is 1948. It was the year he died of complications from a well digging accident.

Mom was 13 years old and she continued using his book that year, after he died. She explained how everyone would get their music to practice for the following Sunday. The conductor wrote out the music and then sent it to the choir member closest to his house. That person copied it into his/her notebook and then ran it over to the next person and so on until everyone had their handwritten copies of music to practice. Talk about commitment! 

Mom told of how she first started singing in the choir while her dad was still alive. She was the youngest in the choir, but they had asked her to sing because she had a good singing voice. When she began, she sang soprano and she remembers the conductor telling the choir that when the high soprano notes come up, they were not meant just for Erika. This made me smile. She later became an alto because she had a good ear and could easily adapt, while others were more timid.

One thing that caught my attention was her "youth" that came out in the pages. Although her writing was incredibly neat, she loved to doodle. I had to smile about her writing Schluss (The End)  at the end of many a song. She was, after all, a teenager! And writing out music like that was work! I cried myself to sleep the night after I saw all of this! There was something very emotional about seeing a part of her life from when I did not know her. Four or five years of music in this book alone . . . and she could sing all of it still.

Mom has sung in choirs pretty well all of her life, and even to this day she sings in small groups and trios. I remember, as a child, we would stay home with our grandmother, while mom and dad went to choir practice. It was their night out. We came to Canada and one of the conductors she sang under was the man she is married to now. These days they often get asked to sing at Senior get-togerthers or retirement homes. He brings his accordion and she, her voice.