Too much cake…?

Tonight I have the first full, official concert with the gay men’s chorus. And I’m not really in the mood for it. 

Since last Wednesday, in just over one week, I’ve sung & hung out with people from the choir already four times, and will have to do so for four more days in a row from tonight through this Sunday. 

Tech rehearsal on Tuesday night was extremely long (4 hours) and simply exhausting.  

I guess I’m feeling a bit how one feels when one’s had too much cake: it tastes good in the moment, and we may even binge on it, but then it feels like too much, and sometimes we might wish we hadn’t had so much of it. 

The small, reduced performances in which I took part last week on Wednesday & Saturday felt wonderful to me and I’m really happy I sang then. The additional events of special socializing and bonding with some individuals on those two days were also meaningful to me and I’m glad I had those experiences. But now it almost feels like that was the apex for me, the culmination of this holiday concert cycle for me and now I would rather just take a break from it all and move on, going back to my other activities and dedicating more time & energy to “my other identities”. 

I’ve started climbing again now that my wrist has healed enough and yesterday evening I had a great session with my best buddy and also a very meaningful time at the social climbing event I organized for expansive/inclusive masculinity. Both of those events put me in touch again with parts of my identity and of my (social) world that mean a lot to me and that I had missed in the past few weeks/months. Both events were important to me also because my presence there really mattered, they couldn’t have taken place without me. 

Tomorrow I have a job interview that is quite important to me. And in less than two weeks I’m scheduled to have a surgery that means the world to me. 

These are the things that are on my mind and in my heart now, the things I want to focus on now. 

At the small volunteer singing events last week, I felt my presence and my voice really mattered. And I know they did. But for the whole big show I feel they don’t. At those small volunteer singing events, there were about thirty of us singers in total; at the show there are about thirty of us per section. It makes no difference whether I sing at the full show or not. And anyway so much of the show depends on small groups of people (the a cappella ensemble; the dance troupe; the singers who are also acting characters) doing their visible parts well, while we in the chorus just feel, to me, like an almost unnecessary “backdrop”. 

Additionally, the artistic director said something during tech rehearsal on Tuesday night that upset me and is still nagging at me… He commented on the fact that he could hear some individual voices from the chorus sticking out and that we needed to fix that, i.e. (quoting him) that we need to “sound like one voice, we need to match the other voices around us in pitch, timbre, and volume”. While I understand and agree with that, and I also noticed some individual voices sticking out too loudly from the chorus (like one of my neighbors), the requirement that we match timbre hurt me. I might be confused about the technical terms here, but I’m pretty sure that the timbre of my voice is different and there’s no way around that. I can match pitch and I’m definitely keeping the volume of my voice low (also because I wear an N-95 face-mask while singing) but my trans voice is in some way different from the cis-male voices (& even different from some of the other trans voices, probably of trans folks who are on higher doses of testosterone). Even if I sing the same note — as I do — and avoid singing too loudly — which I wouldn’t do anyway — my voice sounds different, it cannot match the others fully… 

So why should I go and make the effort of singing in these concerts at all?