Musician's bellyaching

What do musicians bellyache about? Among other things, bad gigs.

I have to sing in a concert a week from tonight with an amateur chorus as a (low-)paid ringer in the tenor section. I’m glad to have a nice, cheerful holiday concert to sing in a pretty church, especially since I have no Christmastime Messiah gig this year or the earnings that go with it. But preparing this concert is proving to be a bigger hassle than I’d feared.

On the program are Amahl and the Night Visitors and Respighi’s Lauda per la Natività del Signore. We'll sing the Respighi in English, printed in the score in awful, teeny-tiny letters beneath the original Italian.

At Tuesday night's rehearsal I learned that Amahl is going to be semi-staged (something the conductor who hired me neglected to tell me) and I have to put together part of my own costume. Plus, we will perform the opera off-book. That means I have one week to learn 14 pages of very random, wordy text. I won’t be able to hide in the background and lip-synch, because the rest of the tenors, including one woman who's "helping out" (a bad sign), sing too inaccurately to carry the part on their own.

I’ve already stayed up past 2:00 a.m. two nights in a row working on this music, which I’m being paid birdseed to perform.

Never mind. I’m sure some good will come of this. Somehow.