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From Song to Site: My Path to Digital Product Development
When I was a girl, I loved to sing. I sat in the living room and sang along to the albums my mother brought home, like Judy Collins’ “Judith.” I’d slip the record out of the sleeve, put it on the turntable and settle on the couch with the liner lyrics, and sing and sing and sing. Eventually, I committed the words to memory, and still know them to this day:
The moon’s a harsh mistress
It’s hard to love her well.
In fifth grade, I joined the chorus at my elementary school. We were invited to sing the children’s part of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with the high school glee club. Our little band of elementary school students stood on the corner of the stage, chirping “Tempus es iocundum” (“This is the joyful time”) to the huge, dark auditorium filled with parents and big kids:
Oh, oh, oh Oh! Oh! Oh!
totus floreo, I am bursting out all over
iam amore virginali I am burning all over with first love!
totus ardeo, novus, novus amor est New, new love is what I am dying of!
quo pereo.
I didn’t understand the piece – at 11, my experience with desire was limited -- but I absolutely grasped the passion of sacred and profane medieval songs set to music by Orff in the twentieth century. I loved the crash of the opening bars and discordant twist of notes. I loved the mingling of voices and orchestra. I had discovered ensemble singing and was hooked.
Later, I joined that same high school glee club in ninth grade. At rehearsals, our conductor gesticulated wildly to coax the notes out of our untrained voices while his wife patiently plucked out the music on the upright piano, over and over and over, until we got it right. We sang mostly sacred music – Mozart’s Requiem, Haydn’s Creation, and Carmina Burana. We performed in auditoriums, senior centers, and churches, where daylight filtered through intricate stained-glass rose windows high above us and formed luminous jeweled mosaics on stony floors. I could feel the transcendent power of my body as an instrument, my voice one of many in the chorus filling splendid spaces with song and moving audiences.
Soon I made friends with other singers who, like me, loved to make music. We became inseparable. We met daily for lunch at “our” table in the cafeteria, or, during the warm months, sprawled on the grass of the school field. Over weekends, we gathered at each other’s houses to eat Chinese food and go to the movies. And we sang. We wandered through the streets of New York with a pitch pipe, stopping to sing madrigals and spirituals before pop-up audiences, and performed Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine every year at our school graduation. We toured in England and Israel and sang in National Cathedral. I had found the satisfaction of collaboration.
Senior year, three of us became officers. We met with the conductor and decided on programs. We made posters for our concerts and posted them around the city. We instructed singers on what attire to wear at performances and the travel and rooming logistics of touring. At the end of the year, we performed Fauré’s Cantique at our own commencement on the school field where we’d lingered over so many lunches. In the fall, we dispersed to college, beginning a new score.
In that meandering way that careers have, mine led me to become a digital product developer. I listened to that call to creativity and was drawn to the ensemble performance of multiple talents coming together to make web sites. Just as the conductor stood at the front of the auditorium foyer, gesturing for more sound from the tenors, correcting the notes of the alti, and ushering singers and instrumentalists in the same direction, at the same tempo, I lead teams of software engineers, graphic designers, editors, and marketers to create web sites and apps. Together, we make something out of nothing. We create sophisticated maps, write thoughtful analyses, and craft intuitive digital solutions.
I now sing in a group whose repertoire includes ballads, gospel, American folk and show tunes. After a grinding day at work, I take a deep breath, head to rehearsal and emerge in buoyant spirits. The meditative focus on the notes, the voices, the piano all pull me away from my daily cares and, for two hours each week, I weave my alto voice with those of the soprani, tenors and basses, forming a different luminous mosaic.
I have hung onto to my glee club friendships. Though we are now scattered across the U.S. and Europe, we met at one of our homes last fall before continuing to our high school reunion. We sprawled on the sofa, ate admittedly more refined fare, and fell back into the familiar banter and shared confidences that had filled countless hours in high school. Several of us gather each summer for choral sings; in July, we will sing the Fauré Requiem and Cantique. In work and out, I replicate the joy of making something out of nothing, call on diverse talents through collaboration, and create results of arresting beauty.
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