TURBINE | KAPOHAU

The sopranos sit in the front, the basses behind them. The altos sit across the room, in front of the tenors. In front of everyone sits a single person, coaxing the music out of us with her hands. Each part secretly believes they are the key, without which the music would not be worth listening to, and nobody is quite wrong.

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Eight weeks ago, the conductor worried aloud that we did not have long enough to prepare One of the Great Masterpieces of Western Music. She was probably right. But it has been long enough that we have all had the In Paradisum stuck in our heads at least once. For whole stretches while we sing of paradise, we do not have to refer to our scores, and our voices are carried out of us effortlessly as if they are not ours. Then comes one voice, the conductor’s, and it is shouting QUIETER! like the fall out of Eden itself.

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We are supposed to be singing with emotion, but nobody remembers exactly what the Mass means. Instead, we are all trying to make beauty without meaning, as if we were vocally assembling a genre sunset painting. Qui tollis peccata mundi, we sing with rich enjoyment. How delicious it is to shape these deep vowels; the crunchy knock of the double ‘c’; the double ‘l’ to be rolled in the mouth like a sweet. Unfortunately, this line is about sin.

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Imagine you have a cathedral in your mouth says the conductor. That much space, that much lightness. Imagine your breath as a wave, from top to bottom; always another coming. Imagine bowing this phrase on a violin. Imagine tossing a hat lightly in the air when you sing the word cœli. Imagine you are three inches taller when you come in on the high note. Imagine vampires, blood moons, Dante’s circles. Imagine you’re an oboe. Imagine for a second that you might believe in God.

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The French composer Maurice Duruflé was commissioned to write the piece we’re singing for 10,000 francs by the collaborationist Vichy regime in 1941. He was supposed to compose a symphonic poem, but instead he started work on a requiem mass of nine movements. When he finally finished in 1947, three years after the Vichy regime collapsed, he demanded payment nonetheless and got 30,000 francs.

I am not sure whether to interpret this story as one of entitlement and collaboration, or one of artistic freedom and reassurance that meaning comes even out of terror. It is difficult to hold both options in my head, but impossible to ignore either. Mostly, I feel that my love for the piece has a little shard of bone in it; and that my resistance to it flickers in the face of its beauty.

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The orchestra has come for the dress rehearsal. We look them over carefully, this crowd of musicians clutching rosin and reeds. Like dog owners, the players resemble their instruments, which is alternately comical (the organist angular with long fingers; the tubaist a little rotund) and strangely moving (the cellist’s exposed shoulders echoing her cello’s). We sing with our soft bodies, but their instruments are hard and gleaming and separate from them, immensely beautiful and highly inconvenient. When we sing, we sound ourselves. But there is something special about the silence of the players themselves as they play — their expressive world conjured solely from wood and animal gut and delicate curvatures of brass.

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There is a moment in the Libera me when everyone is singing in unison, and the distance between the highest voices and the lowest is very obvious. The sound makes me think of the sort of understanding that exists when I know what something means in a foreign language before I have translated it. The dark voices and the bright ones both two things and one thing, and everything in harmony.

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About two years ago, my pet rabbit, the last remaining token of my childhood, died. It was my birthday and she was two weeks off ten years old and making strange sounds, so we took her to the vet. They said: we would advise. I said: today? They said: really. She was not really frightened, because she was too ill. But I held her soft body, white with grey splotches, until they had finished the vial and it was just a body. Her eyes were closed. We each laid one more hand on her head, good girl, then paid for her cremation and a stupid little ashes bag that would be ready in ten days. Then we drove home in silence. So that was death without music.

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The venue is taller than we’d imagined, the air holding up masses of cold stone. We are dressed in formal, slightly theatrical black — cummerbunds, silks, cube-heeled court shoes — like Victorian funeralgoers. There are so many types of dead here, I know my heart in my chest: music by a dead composer; in a dead language; to honour the dead; in a church by a graveyard. Perhaps strangely, we are not dead. We spread our folders, clear our throats. Imagine cathedrals. The stained glass light falls on our faces like an augury.