After a week laid up with a pretty nasty cold, I really should be getting some rest before tomorrow’s concert, but I’m not exactly sleepy.

I am instead awash in mixed emotions, bittersweet nostalgia and excitement and who-knows-what’s-next, with a wistful dash of just wishing I could have it all, and all at the same time.

The past two years with Choral Chameleon have been a labor of love (lots of labor. and lots of love) and although this day has been a long time coming and the choice made long ago, still does it have to be just now already? It feels something like moving away from home: you’re full of angst and know you need to make the break, so the plans are set and then it’s time and as you pack everything up you suddenly start to see it all with new eyes, with just love, and now that the days are numbered it’s all more poignant than before, and the attachment and resistance are gone so who really cared about all that annoying stuff anyway? I just love you guys. And without drifting too far to the maudlin, it’s true. I do love this group, and everything it stands for. I am extraordinarily proud of my work as President and the foundation I helped to lay for its future. I’m twenty times the musician I was two years ago. And now it’s time to go.

Tomorrow we will premiere a truly stunning work by Jeff Parola and Tony Asaro, aptly titled Such Beautiful Things. We’ll round it out with another great big contemporary work by Conrad Susa, and two sets of fairytales by Irving Fine and John Rutter. We’ll be musical chameleons. We’ll be twenty voices singing together, not just at the same time. We’ll sing of the hidden value of the downtrodden; we’ll sing of God’s all-seeing Eye; we’ll sing a song of sixpence. We’ll be led by a brilliant conductor with an exceptional gift and vision, without whom none of this would exist.

And then I will say goodbye to all that, and keep walking North to the Open Country, where I may turn Musician as well… (you’ll just have to join us to get the reference.)

There are any number of little clips and quotes I could finish with, many of them lyrics I will thrill to sing tomorrow. But perhaps it’s apt that at the moment I’m finding solace in Sondheim:

White: A blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities.