Word: basse
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...choir needs its professionals. "We'd be all over the lot, surrounding notes as opposed to hitting them," says Carl Igelbrink, a bass. There is also the matter of attendance. Igelbrink will miss three rehearsals this month because of business travel. An alto has a conflict with a Chinese language class, and another has been out speaking to Hispanic groups for the Republican Party. But the professionals always show up; they need the income while they ! struggle to build performing careers...
...blend is a delicate thing. Lately, it has been adjusting uneasily to a new professional bass, Winthrop Buswell. His predecessor, a divinity school graduate named Peter Vanderveen, is moving away from singing into the ministry, as the parish intern. He sings with the bass section now merely as a volunteer. "It's been more difficult for him to replace me, because I'm still here, than for me to step aside," says Vanderveen. But his friends in the choir say singing means more to Vanderveen than he realizes. His key ring is an organ stop labeled "choral bass...
Then the evensong begins, with the choir in blue robes and white cottas. They sing intensely about a voice from heaven, and as they intone the words "Blessed are the dead, blessed are the dead . . ." bass, tenor, alto and soprano seem to wheel around one another, in an eerie polyphony that rolls across the congregation...
...members of the choir falter momentarily at the start of the Nunc Dimittis. But then, suddenly, everyone is there. You can hear the blend, unmistakably. They sing through the rest of the service as one choir, from the foundation of Buswell's subdued bass on up to the surging descants of the soprano line. The 22-note "Amen" dances down like the leaves in the streets outside. For a few moments, it is possible to feel ordinary people lift themselves up into the communion of saints and the cloud of witnesses...
...example, Fort Worth's Sid Bass and his brothers bought and sold 9.9% of Texaco's shares for a swift profit of $300 million. Manhattan Financier Saul Steinberg earned $60 million that year by buying 11.1% of Walt Disney Productions and then reselling it to the company at a premium, a practice known as greenmail. Boesky made much of his fortune by guessing -- and sometimes knowing -- where the corporate raiders would strike next. Says an eminent Washington securities lawyer: "The millions and millions that are made out of nonproductive deal making represent the collapse of real morality in our markets...