"Gosh, this is fun!"

... said Jamie, while we were trying to get the Ritual Dances into our heads. It's really not that hard (although also not in the LEAST tuneful), and after spending the first half of the rehearsal on it, I think most people are quite a bit more comfortable with the thought of performing it next week.

(Jamie's comments progressed from "It goes up, you know THAT much!" - while trying to get the tenors and 2nd sops to actually have a go at the bar they couldn't do - to "You know what? That sounds remarkably close to what I've got printed on my page! Aren't you clever?")

Much hilarity after the break, when we switched to the spirituals. We started with the middle bit of "Nobody Knows"... for a while, no-one (even the altos!) could sing the "O" of "O brothers" to Jamie's satisfaction; he claimed we were all starting from above or below the correct pitch. Then he got the idea that this might be because of the way he'd brought us in, so he experimented with various hand gestures that might improve matters, but this led to "Maybe you need to stand at an angle..."

The bar everyone's getting wrong in "Nobody Knows"... well, not everyone is, but an awful lot still are. I think people have started to realise; at one point when Jamie was waiting to start "Go Down Moses", several altos behind me could be heard humming said bar (some more accurately than others!) As for GDM, I'm again disappointed that lots of people who couldn't do it last week seem not to have looked at it since. Mind you, I'm not much better myself - I can sing the notes and rhythm with perfect accuracy, but I keep meaning to see if I can do anything about my breathing problems in those very long phrases, and I haven't had time yet.

The change to "By and By" wasn't much better than last week, until it had been practised a few times. (I'm not entirely sure why it's so hard for the sops to get an E from an F, particularly when they've sung an E the previous note (admittedly in a different octave, but still).) And yes, *that* bar is still mostly wrong, although there are a few people singing it right now.

We finished with the wonderful "Deep River", during which Gill and I realised how hard we were finding it to sing the "Oh Chillun" arpeggio - Jamie was getting everyone to do the revving motorbike effect on it, but one of the revs is just on the break in our voices and hence harder. Must give that some thought.