February 15 2008, 11:14 PM Sacro

The week has been long, the night crisp. I took a long look at the car this evening, sitting quiescent under snow. It was with a sigh that I knocked all of that off and shoveled the driveway, chattering in the fresh wind.

Tonight I went to see The Suspicious Cheese Lords.

A dozen men in dark slacks and simple wine-hued shirts, entirely unassuming. And then they began to sing. They were singing in a local Cathedral, a vast space of stone and arch. I was a little bit late (I am good at that), and so spent the first few songs far in the back, out among the scattered, few or none to a pew. I am happy for this: it was good to hear their singing shaped by the far end of that space, less detail, more melding, distant in a way the songs they sung felt as their voices brought them back to us over centuries. Back there I also got to hear a breathless, bewondered "Oh, Wow" pulled from the lips of one of my neighbors as their recital of Miserere mei Deus by Senfl turned its corner into beauty.

During intermission, I got to move up. I found Mr. Bridged: we chatted of things relating to the place, told stories. I was hoping to see Mr. Woodwind, but I did not find him there. The Suspicious Cheese Lords returned for a second set.

Up close, the sound was brighter, lighter, less mixed by the heights of the hard walls. Tones blended, lifted and fell. With eyes closed, the air could be imagined to shimmer with it, the granite arches filled again with Latin sung in ways that the place was built for, even if perhaps the builders themselves did not know it at the time. The music rang smoothly, seeped gently, fell to cadence and shone like light. It was tremendous. It was difficult to clap; we were in a church, after all. It was difficult to clap, too: it seemed a poor offering to give after the last of the notes dies away, lost in the rafters, each and every time. We did it anyway.

They were not done. "Congratulations," they said, "on surviving the Latin portion of the program." They then spun hymns in English, rich with close and careful harmony. What came to mind to describe it, sitting there, was the Shenandoah Valley. Not the actual one, but the one of memory and dreams, the one the way it was half a century before now (for any value of now). There, on that rumpled land on a summer's day, in some field or farm, with clouds lazy in the sky, the chirps and hum of bird and bug, and the sun slinging down light, the warm sweet light, shining in that moment when all hangs still...

It was like that.

That was the gift of a dozen men in wine-hued shirts this evening, in a bright stone church on a flinty winter night. If you get a chance to see them, I would recommend it.