Before the sermons,
there were the songs.

My formation was in music. I studied voice under Dr. Nathan Wight — repertoire in German, Italian, French, English. Handel oratorios. Schubert song cycles. Mozart bass-baritone arias. The Pirate King. Sweeney Todd.

Music training teaches you to hear what’s wrong before you can name it. You develop pitch — not just tonal pitch but structural pitch, the sense that something is slightly off, that the phrase wants to go somewhere different, that the breath is misplaced. I’ve been using that skill in various forms ever since: in pastoral work, in writing, in every website I’ve built.

I played the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance. I played the title role in Sweeney Todd. I sang Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail — the villain who gets the best aria in the opera, the one where he catalogues exactly how he intends to execute everyone. Mozart gave the bass-baritone the laugh.

The junior recital was November 8, 2007. Forty-eight minutes. Schubert to Barber, with a Ravel cycle in the middle that I probably underestimated and somehow got through anyway.

I don’t perform publicly anymore. But I still hear everything in phrases.