ACCUPLACER Practice Test 11

In this passage, the author reflects on joining a community choir as an adult.

(1) For twenty years I only mouthed the words to "Happy Birthday." (2) A music teacher had once asked me, kindly enough, to "sing a little softer" at a fourth-grade concert, and I had taken the request as a permanent verdict: some people could sing, and I was not one of them. (3) I hummed in the car only when I was alone, and I stopped even that at red lights. (4) When a neighbor invited me to the community choir that met in the library basement, I said yes mostly because I could not think of a polite way to say no.

(5) The director, a retired band teacher named Ms. Delacroix, held no auditions. (6) "Everyone here is a singer," she announced on my first night, "and some of us are still finding out." (7) She placed me in the back row of the altos, between two women who had sung together for a decade, and told me only to listen for the first month. (8) When I finally sang, she did not single out my wavering pitch; she simply asked the whole section to repeat the phrase, more slowly each time, until it settled.

(9) Improvement came so gradually that I could not have named the week it happened. (10) One evening I noticed that I was holding my note while the women beside me took a breath; another evening I caught a wrong entrance before I made it. (11) The sopranos, many of whom read music fluently, learned a new piece in the time it took me to find my starting note. (12) Yet Ms. Delacroix greeted each of my small gains as genuine news, and in time I stopped apologizing before I opened my mouth.

(13) Last spring I sang a short solo at our concert, four measures and no more. (14) What I remember is not the applause but how ordinary it felt to stand there. (15) The voice had been mine all along; I had simply spent years keeping it quiet.