Crucial Track for February 10, 2026

"Gloria" by Francis Poulenc

#365songs (41 / 365)

So I joined a choir in September of last year, having had approximately 0 experience in choral singing but with a couple fully self-produced solo albums (I know, I know, "here's my soundcloud") under my belt, and this was the centerpiece of the concert we performed 3 months later.

The progression of my thinking across those three months was pretty dramatic: from "I don't know if I'm going to be able to sing this and also I might kind of hate it and did I make a mistake???" to somewhere in the vicinity of "LET'S FUCKING GOOOO" just before the concert. I'm still not going to be searching out a lot more "Gloria in excelsis deo"-type sacred music to listen to, but the saving grace (no pun intended) of this piece is that it's weird as hell (no pun intended, again, given that it was apparently called "sacrilegious" by some when it was first performed). Key signature and time signature changes all over the place, lots of accidentals and weird harmonies, abrupt stylistic transitions. It took a lot of listening and practice but we did it and I feel pretty good about it. I even ended up... kind of liking it?

We're a couple practices into a new "semester" of choir now and some of the pieces have challenging sections I'm a little afraid of, but I can just remind myself "Well, we did the Poulenc" and feel a little bit more confident about them.