I first learned the Requiem my senior year of college. Indeed, it was exactly 10 years ago that we started rehearsing it. I devoted a lot of time to learning the often chromatic fugues, listening to the recording, etc. When you get to know a piece of music that well, you begin to truly appreciate certain moments. Powerful moments. Moments when the orchestra hushes and the chorus comes in, or in the second movement when the strings crescendo and the chorus sings in unison, full-throated, “Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras.” (Behold, all flesh is as grass). We’ve been talking about good ideas lately. How did Brahms get that one?

Anyway, now I am singing the Requiem as a grown-up, appreciating these moments again, as when you see an old friend after an absence. The rehearsal schedule this week has been brutal. Any soprano who has sung the Requiem knows what I am talking about. But as I wrote in 168 Hours, I believe that the best way to ensure that you don’t lose your time to work (past the point of diminishing returns), to chores that fill all available space, or to meaningless hours of TV, is to give your leisure hours purpose. If anything, I need my singing more now that I have a busier life than I did in those college days.

Of course, making it to rehearsals is a bit more complicated than it was back then. Here are a few ways to make a regular volunteer or hobby commitment work:

• Play fair. Especially if you have kids, remember that both partners are entitled to a personal life. One option is to give both parties one weeknight “off.” She does bridge on Tuesday, he goes bowling with his buddies on Thursday, with the other party making this a special time with the kids. However, if this isn’t workable for you (and it isn’t for me)…
• Secure reliable coverage. We have a regular Tuesday night babysitter who can stay until my husband gets home, or until I do. Yes, this is a cost, but there are other options, too — if you have family nearby, the kids can go to Grandma’s on, say, Tuesdays, or you can trade off with friends.
• Slip in time for practice. In college, my choir met three times a week, and many people’s a cappella groups practiced 4-5 times. This is not going to happen when people have full-time jobs. But with 168 hours in a week, there’s plenty of time outside your official “night” for practicing. I read through notes on the subway. I listen to recordings of works we’re singing while working.
• Focus. Since my kids are often with a sitter while I’m at rehearsal, I have a bad habit of checking my iPhone frequently. What if there’s an emergency? There hasn’t been in 3.5 years, but you never know. Then about two weeks ago, I dropped my phone and it shattered. It is still usable, but checking my email or text messages means I risk slicing my thumbs. This makes me think twice. So now I just check it once at break, and I’ve found that I enjoy being fully present for the music, listening to other parts when it’s not my turn.

How have you made time for a personal pursuit?

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But she didn’t, and as she told me in a Facebook message later, it was “awesome.” I’m not surprised. When it comes to putting extra, joyous things in our lives, we often run into this issue. We’re tired. We’re busy. We have perfectly good reasons for not doing whatever it is. But it helps to ask, will I look back and think this was fun? Will I enjoy having this memory? Will I feel more energized afterwards? Then it’s probably worth doing it anyway. You’ll always be tired. So you can be tired and have this great memory or tired and not have this memory, but the tired is a constant, so you can learn to deal with it.

To finally get to the second part of this blog post headline, that’s how I wound up singing back-up last night for the heavy metal band Gods of Fire. They were playing a set for the Major League Dreidel competition over at The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. My choir, the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, had been invited to sing a few Hanukkah carols and to join them.

I had missed the rehearsal because I was in St. Louis. I’d just flown back that afternoon, and had work to do and wanted to hang out more with my kids. It was cold outside. Brooklyn seems a long ways away. But I finally decided that being cold is temporary, I always have more work to do, and I will be spending every single minute from 1pm today to 8am Monday morning with my children.

On the other hand, this 30-something mommy of two is unlikely to get many more chances to sing back-up for a metal band at the Knitting Factory.

So, off I went. And it was pretty fun, both singing (with earplugs on stage!) and watching some of the other acts, like Category Sixx, an “air band.” That is, they pretended to play instruments the whole time, which was a lot more entertaining than you’d think. I made it home by 10pm (and hey, my children still weren’t asleep, so I wound up spending time with them anyway).

As I’ve been learning from reading psychological studies on happiness, human beings are pretty bad at predicting in the moment how they’ll feel in the future, because we’re very influenced by current emotions. If you’re currently tired and cranky, it’s hard to imagine not feeling tired and cranky. So it helps to ask how another person might feel if they did that volunteer project, or sang back-up for the Gods of Fire. They’d probably find it fun. Chances are, you will too.

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The Little Choir That Could: The Young New Yorkers’ Chorus celebrates its first 10 years

by Laura Vanderkam

In the spring of 2001, Westminster Choir College graduate Nathan Davis spotted a need in the New York music world. College students devoted copious hours to their choirs or a cappella groups. Then they moved to the city after graduation, and had no opportunity to continue singing with their peers. So he founded what became the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, a group for singers in their 20s and 30s. Our choir is now celebrating its 10th anniversary this season, culminating with an appearance at the American Choral Director’s Association conference in Chicago in March.

Like any start-up, YNYC faced challenges at the beginning. “We were small, we had no guys, no money, we rehearsed in the dark, cold basement of Notre Dame Church on West 114th,” says Raoul Bhavnani, our first president. “Think clanging pipes, hats and scarves.”

The group also had trouble keeping members. “After each of the first two concerts,” notes Chris Mueller, who has accompanied YNYC since the beginning, “we lost every member of our alto section. It wasn’t until January 2002 that we had our first returning alto.”

But slowly the group grew more cohesive through post-rehearsal trips to bars, and as we became clear on both our mission of fostering the art of choral singing among young people, and commissioning new music from young composers. One of our first major commissions was a work by Mueller called Wondrous Hope, an 8-part piece based on a text in Lamentations, which YNYC premiered in Merkin Hall in May 2004. Mueller missed the dress rehearsal, however, since his first child was born that day! (Offspring of YNYC members could now form a reasonable children’s chorus — and we are hoping for more YNYC babies in the future as many of our members have started to date and marry each other!)

To further this mission of commissioning new music, we decided to launch an annual Competition for Young Composers that fall. Every year, composers under age 35 submit work samples to YNYC, and our judges choose three finalists, who are then commissioned to write new works for the choir to premiere in its May/June concert. Previous finalists have included Joshua Shank, Peter Hilliard, Abbie Betinis, Jenni Brandon, Dominick DiOrio and other rising young stars of the choral composition world. YNYC has now commissioned 18 new works through this program. Though awarding prizes isn’t cheap — and since YNYC’s members are just starting out in their careers, fundraising hasn’t been easy — we have decided that this is one of the most effective things we can do with our limited funds.

In addition to fundraising challenges, in the spring of 2006, YNYC survived what could have been a major organizational obstacle. Nathan Davis, the founding director, stepped down to pursue new opportunities. We interviewed many candidates, and hired Michael Kerschner, the Director of Choral Activities at North Shore High School in Long Island, as our second artistic director. He was actually the first person to send in his resume! He was very excited about the gig. “I was thinking about starting a similar ensemble myself,” he says, when he read a previous Vocal Area Network article about us. “While slightly disappointed to learn that I did not invent the concept of a post-collegiate choir, I was happy to know that such a thing existed.” He “had a good feeling that this would be a great coupling, and was thrilled and honored to be offered the opportunity to direct the ensemble.”

Under Kerschner’s leadership, YNYC has taken on new stretch goals. We returned to Merkin in March of 2008, and made our Lincoln Center debut in a joint concert with his high school students. We hired an orchestra to perform Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych (with the composer in the audience) and packed 650 young audience members into Old St. Pat’s for our December 2009 concert. We started performing world premieres outside the Competition for Young Composers. “I am also continually overwhelmed by our audience and their enthusiastic willingness to go on what ever musical journey we have to offer them,” Kerschner says.

The choir has grown to more than 70 members, including so many new tenors this fall that we hardly knew what to do with them (a “problem” choirs love to have). And, at the ripe age of 10, YNYC is starting to have its own traditions. For instance, the “Snaku.” We always need volunteers to bring food for snack during rehearsal breaks, and in 2004, our first membership chair began doing the request in haiku form. Our second membership chair, Noah Opitz, shifted to writing limericks when he began running low on haiku material. Once, the “snaku” was even a sonnet in iambic pentameter in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday. “I think I’ve been doing it since 2005,” he says. At one a week, “A little math puts me at somewhere between 175-200.” Not a bad literary accomplishment for our first decade.

Laura Vanderkam sings with The Young New Yorkers’ Chorus and is the author of 168 Hours

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It was an occasion that was both exciting and a little sad. The choir is very important to me, and I’ve learned a lot about effective leadership from serving in this role. I’ve learned that getting the right people to do the right jobs matters. I’ve learned that sometimes you have to take risks artistically and financially and trust that the money and ability to execute will come. In the past few years, we’ve commissioned 18 new works through our Competition for Young Composers, we’ve sung one of the most thrilling renditions of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers I’ve ever heard, and we’ve hired an orchestra and performed Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych with the composer in the audience.

I’m excited because our new president is incredibly hard-working and thoughtful and will pour herself into taking the choir to the next level. I’m sad because I’m going to have to figure out how to replicate the fulfillment I’ve gotten through YNYC in a different volunteer capacity – which is what brings us to this blog post.

People who volunteer are happier and healthier than other people. And, of course, they make the world a better place. Yet only about a quarter of Americans volunteer. Only about a third of these folks logs more than 100 hours annually. Thus volunteering for a mere 2 hours out of every 168 will launch you into the top tenth of community-minded individuals in this country. This is very doable, even if you lead a busy life, if you follow a few guidelines:

1. Focus. Pick a cause that matters the most to you. This is harder than it sounds because there are a lot of really good causes out there! Put some thought into this. Ask what gets you most hot and bothered – perhaps there’s a way you could work toward solving this problem. Or there’s something you love, like the performing arts, which your professional work doesn’t really tap. You may have to try a number of different activities before settling on one; the Hands On Network offers low-commitment volunteer opportunities in different cities that allow you to experiment.

2. Make a serious commitment. One of the reasons YNYC has been so meaningful for me is that I’ve been there every week for 7 years. By taking on a leadership role, I could also see my ideas come to fruition. The more time I invested, the better things worked.

3. Understand what volunteering can and cannot do. Especially during this recession, a number of career coaches and authors have suggested volunteering as a way to build your professional resume. It can work. Just keep in mind that if this is about your career, then you need to keep a business mindset. Your volunteer work should show results: for instance, you raised a certain amount of money and then implemented a program that reached 600 kids and resulted in fewer behavioral problems at their school. It’s a good idea to show results anyway! It keeps us honest. But also keep in mind that some volunteering looks better on a resume than others. A recent study found that, if you’re a woman, listing PTA volunteering on your resume lowers your chance of being called for an interview. Fair? No. But a fact.

4. Use volunteering to practice “alignment.” When you’re trying to build a career while raising a family, it’s often hard to find time for friends. But if you volunteer with friends, then you’ll have a built in reason to get together and a social group that cares about the same things you do. I tried three different choirs in NYC before finally settling on YNYC. Besides the choir’s high artistic standards, its major selling point was that it was so social, and as the president, I could make sure we stayed social. I love going out for drinks once a month after rehearsal with the crew. There’s nothing like partying on a Tuesday night to take a little mental break from job stress and my workaday identity as a mommy of two.

5. Learn how to say “no.” Focusing your time means deciding not to take on other volunteer opportunities after you’ve chosen the one that means the most to you. Again, this is hard, because there are a lot of worthy opportunities out there, and sometimes people will expect you to donate time because of proximity (school, church, etc.) You have to learn to keep in mind that when you say yes to something new, you are in fact saying “no” to going all-in on a commitment you’ve already made. You cannot make more time. But I’ve found that giving a donation is often just as welcome. If you’re making big donations, you should concentrate those on your main cause. But small ones are OK. Yes, time is money, but among the busiest people, money is often less scarce than minutes.

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