Now, His Yoke... *choir mutters* ... is EASY!

Piano rehearsal for Messiah tonight. (Explanation of what a piano rehearsal is is in this post for those who don't know.) Anyway, we met Paul Daniel (who I'm quite impressed to find has a Wikipedia entry). I'm still not totally convinced by his dynamic alterations (especially the last one, which we only found out about tonight: starting the Hallelujah Chorus quietly! My favourite thing in the whole piece, ruined! That's even worse than the year the conductor decided to ask the basses to start He Trusted In God quietly. Oh, the muttering that ensued!) but I'm not quite as totally against them as I was. This is partly because he knew exactly what he wanted, and explained why he wanrted these things, and was extremely clear throughout... and partly because he seems like a really great guy. I liked him a lot. (The title of this post is from him - more Paul Daniel quotes in a minute!)

I'd had a really bad day at work which culminated in me totally losing my temper for the first time in years, and screaming - literally, and at length - at a hall full of kids. I don't recommend it. By the time I got to choir my voice was still raw and I couldn't speak above a whisper without coughing, so I wasn't expecting to sing very much, if at all. But Jamie's warmup somehow managed to cure it. Still couldn't sing as loudly as I usually can, but I could sing without coughing. Clever, that!

Not much scope for Jamieisms, as he only did the warmup, but we did get "Can you do a polar bear coming out for a swim in the morning?" (which was a face-stretching exercise), and also at one point when he was being a bit of a human beatbox, I was reminded of that amazing guy Shlomo, who was on Later with Jools a couple of weeks ago. Did you see him? I was very impressed. No idea how he does what he does.

Anyway, Paul Daniel stuff. My favourite:

PD: Are you called mezzos or altos?
Altos: [in unintentionally butch yet horrified voices] Altos!
PD: Not contraltos?
Altos: [even more horrified] No!

(I must say he went up even more in my estimation for asking. I don't think I can recall any other conductor ever asking, and non-altos may not realise how much most of us hate being called those other words... I can even forgive him for calling it The Messiah!)

A similar one which may not amuse non-altos as much as it did us:

PD: You copy them, don't you? [referring to a soprano phrase that we echo]
Altos: Yes.
PD: Can you do it better?
Altos: [amused that this is even being questioned] Yes!

A bit of a visual one, but still:

"Everyone's eyebrows go up in semiquavers, don't they? Mine do. *demonstrates* It's a Handelian reflex."

Oh, and I personally very much enjoyed his Lucius Malfoy impression in "He trusted in God" (when he was demonstrating the utter withering scorn required). And then there was the "HEH-HEH heh" exercise (practising accenting semiquavers) which made him grin hugely for several minutes :-)

And the last one: "Men use their 6-packs!" This was his suggestion for articulating semiquavers. I mention it not because the phrase itself is particularly amusing but because of the hurt looks many of the basses gave us when we laughed at the very thought :p

Looking through my score, I noticed a couple of old scribblings that I can't resist including. (Well, as Sylvia pointed out, there are so many scribblings on my Messiah score that it's hard to work out which ones to follow. For example, there's a bar I've dubbed "The Bar Of Many Dynamics", on page 71. It has, crossed out: p, pp, mf, p, f, ff, mf. This year's marking is p, so there's another p with a ring round it. Many, many bars of my Messiah score are like that, and that's not including the ones that have extra non-dynamic instructions!) But the two I treasure are these:

From Nicholas Cleobury, who conducted it one year: "Aren't the altos intelligent?"

From Jamie, the first year he rehearsed it with us, on page 13 at the words "And all...": "You know, the bloke what wrote it!"

Think about it :-)

*giggle*

And finally, I've not mentioned searches for a while, but there have been some good ones lately. I'm quite impressed that someone found this blog by searching for "jocelyn sings" (and I'd love to know who it was!) I also like that someone searched for "a Dominant pedal is a" (presumably looking for a definition) and this blog was the only result... However, I think my favourite is the person who searched for "jack sparrow byronic" and discovered that all three of those words appeared on a choir blog :-)