Brothers, Sing On!

This week I’ve been memorizing the second tenor part to an arrangement of All Glory, Laud and Honor by Dr. Brent Wells, current director of the BYU Men’s Chorus. For the past year and a half, Dr. Wells has been working to put together a video of the choir singing this song along with alumni of the choir, and the marching band drum line, and today was the day of the shoot.

Being a part of Men’s Chorus, under Mac Wilberg, was one of the highlights of my time at BYU, so when the chance came to be involved in this song, I was thrilled. I also didn’t know quite what to expect. The choir has been around for decades, and has recently been the largest collegiate men’s choral organization in the United States. So how many alumni would be there? Twenty five? A thousand? And how well did I really need to know my part, because hitting that C natural near the end is kind of tricky?

The shoot happened at Lavell Edwards Stadium on campus, and when we got together, it looked like the current choir members and alumni were about evenly matched in numbers– so around 400 men. Dr. Wells took the alumni up to the President’s Loge for a rehearsal, which is the VIP seating area at the stadium. My VIP experiences in life have been sufficiently limited that I didn’t know what a “loge” was (do you mean “lounge” or “lodge”?), but it was fun to be up there singing with some talented former choir members, even if some of us had some rust on the vocal chords. That would turn out to be the highest quality singing for us alumni for the day, since the shoot would have us on the football field, which has horrible acoustics and can’t reasonably be the audio source for a recording people would want to actually hear.

As rehearsal wrapped up, someone asked, “Who is the oldest person here?” Dr. Wells said, “Great question! Is there anyone here older than 90?” We all kind of laughed, but there did turn out to be a man in his 80s, Verl Doman, who had been in the choir in its first year in 1958. We were all impressed, but he said his real claim to fame was his sons playing football in that stadium, including former quarterback Brandon Doman, who had just carried the alumni flag onto the field before the game a couple of weeks ago.

We had a while to hang out while the current chorus members were being filmed for the beginning of the song. The eras of the alumni could be determined by the colors of their ties (assuming they’d managed to hang on to them through the years) — red and blue while Dr. Wilberg conducted followed by blue, white and gold when Rosalind Hall directed prior to Dr. Wells taking over last year and changing the ties to blue and gold. So I was able to identify and chat with some contemporaries, while other huddles of alumni occasionally broke into spontaneous song. We talked about what years we were in the choir and where we were living these days. One man said that he had come from the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu — technically for his son’s wedding rather than expressly for today’s event — and that he had sort of smuggled a missionary with him who had been stranded there long past his release date because of the pandemic. We agreed that he won the award for farthest travel to be there.

Our part in the video had finally come up, and we got to march up between the lines of the current chorus members while singing, “Gloria, gloria”. By a combination of chance and shortness, I ended up at the front of my line with Verl right behind me. Since we had to do our part a half dozen times, we bantered about how fast or slow each of us were walking, but he was pretty spry for an octogenarian. Also by that time it had begun to rain, so I had water streaming down my face while singing the final, “Thou good and gracious King!”

We were getting drenched, but the video crew said they had what they needed so choir members past and present headed back to the shelter of the Cougar Room. There Dr. Wells said, “You all know Redeemer of Israel, right? The, uh, Mac Wilberg arrangement?” and led us through it. No, I didn’t actually know that arrangement, but it was easy enough to sing along, and feel a part of the choir again after thirty years.

Presumably there will be a video released at some point — I’ll add a link to it here when that happens.

Update: April 4, 2022

After keeping an eye out for months, I was beginning to wonder if they didn’t end up with enough usable footage to make the video, but it was finally posted to YouTube a little over a week ago. There was also a promotional video released, which I’ll include as well since I’m actually clearly visible in it.

Here is the main music video, and below that is a handy spotting guide for seeing where I am, because even though I was right in front and one of the few with a red tie, maybe you’re not as sharp at picking out the back of my bald head as Shannon and Afton were.