Being all Multicultural and stuff

Last night I watched video clips of my host mother’s chorus singing in Italy. Her youngest daughter, who is my age, sings in the choir, as well as having some sort of pedagogical role (I think), and the middle daughter directs the younger children and is a soloist. So the mother, the two daughters, our neighbor and I huddled around the computer to watch these clips, the mother and the soloist daughter very nervous, and we skipped through the parts where they were singing beautiful music in a beautiful Italian church as quickly as possible so that we could see the clip where they were in some big plaza singing “Oh Happy Day.” We watched this clip many, many times. Nastya has her big solo in this song, and it seems to be everyone’s favorite, from sort of flighty, but sweet Katya, to tall, intimidating Nastya with her serious face and died-platinum hair, to their cheerfully-impudent eight-year-old niece, with her round Buryat face making her seem all to more like a little rubber ball of irrepressible energy. When my host mother was telling me about the choir the first day I was here, one of the first pieces of information I received was that they sang “Oh Happy Day.”

The thing is, they are fairly bad at singing “Oh Happy Day,” or as they say, “Oh Hippy Dei,” and, just as when I saw them sing this song in concert before they left for Italy, I was rather embarrassed for them when I watched the film. Nastya sings, every time, “When Jesus watched to wash my sins away,” they are wearing some sort of ridiculous costume involving what looks like those nets oranges come in on their heads (when singing traditional Russian music they have very cool outfits), and, most painfully, they completely fail to convey the mood and the power of the song. I remember thinking the first time I saw them sing the song, when, admittedly, I was not feeling very charitable toward the country in general after spending an hour and a half wandering around looking for the building where they were performing and dealing with very unhelpful people and then being treated with great suspicion by the building’s secretary, that a Russian would not know a happy day if it hit him on the head. The singers all looked about as miserable as Russians always look in public. It was sadder, I thought to myself, than Martin Luther King Day last year when the Middlebury Congregational Church attempted to sing spirituals, and imported a black person to read a sermon. In short, I was unimpressed, and wished that they would stick to Russian music, which they sing most beautifully, and I thought, in rather snobby overgeneralization, that Russians tend to be somewhat aesthetically tone-deaf in general with respect to their attempts to copy the Western world.

But then, later, I thought about how Katya had turned to the neighbor and asked if she had ever heard the song (“no, of course not”), and how excited she had looked when she said “Takaya klassnaya, da?” (something like “such a classy one, isn’t it?” but without sounding dumb). And about how sincerely the little niece (my host-mother’s granddaughter), who sings in the chorus, had told me that it was her favorite of the songs they sing. And how Nastya swayed back and forth in her seat when we were watching the film. And I realized that, in answer to Katya’s question, yes, it really was an awesome song, and if I didn’t associate it with the 8 million times we watched the movie “Sister Act 2” in middle school chorus, and if I had never heard gospel music, I would be pretty excited to sing it too. And even if they didn’t quite achieve the sound of an actual gospel choir, and even if the still-Soviet-created atheism of their education and culture, and the almost total lack of connection of their lives from the lives of the song’s usual singers prevents them from really knowing what they’re singing about, their enthusiasm surely shows that they got some idea of it, of a culture far away and far different from their own, and they were truly, deeply impressed by it, and they truly enjoy singing the song. My objection to their interpretation – that had never really heard gospel music - was what made their singing it so cool, really; these kids were much more impressed with their encounter with the culture whose song they were singing than we ever were in elementary school when they made us sing Follow the Drinking Gourd every year, despite our supposed greater understanding of it.