Subbing @ St. Augustine's Church, Oakland

I accompanied the Feast of the Immaculate Conception service this evening. I always forget how much worse traffic is going out to Oakland on a weeknight, so I arrived a few minutes later than planned. Carol, one of the stalwart sopranos of the church choir, was waiting for me in the church cafeteria. We rehearsed an arrangement of "Ave Maria" that she was to sing, deciding on the lower key from our two printed options. Then a rush over to the church.

Seated at the piano bench, I skimmed through the music binder. Tonight I performed the program of music with no prior rehearsal. I was familiar with some of the selections, but several I had never played before. 

At the end of our rendition of the responsorial Psalm "All the Ends of the Earth" I found myself hung out to dry. It is traditional when performing these Psalms to sing twice through the refrain at the beginning and then twice through the refrain again at the end after singing all the verses. Expecting this tradition to be upheld today, I laid down a decisive V7 chord (A7 in this instance) to lead the cantors back around for one final refrain. They didn't go with me. I found myself stranded. As I played an instrumental version of the refrain I started having doubts about what was supposed to come next. So I determined to myself, "Oh, I forgot that they wanted to sing an additional verse... I'll go to the verse section once again after I finish with this refrain." That was the wrong move. The cantors response to my veering back for another verse was to walk back to their seats. I was humbled. No icy stares afterward, or anything like that; we just didn't connect. 

These things happen. I've learned to not dwell on the blunders. I constantly try to teach my students this vital lesson about performance: if you make a mistake, just move on. People will forget about it almost instantly. Few people in this world have a heightened musical perspective. If the performer just moves on, the majority of listeners never even realize a mistake happened.

Jesse