"It's not a bass moment, it's a man moment!"

Sorry for the delay in posting, folks, I seem to have spent every spare minute this week (and there haven't been many) filling in job application forms. Number of jobs applied for so far: 9 (with 10 more applications ready to be filled in in the next few days). Number of schools that want to meet me: 0. Days until I have to hand my notice in if I want to be elsewhere in September: 18. Argh! But I will persevere.

The title of this post is a Jamieism from Wednesday night's rehearsal. It was during the Dies Irae of Mozart's Requiem (oddly enough, so are all the other things I wrote down, although we also did the Lacrimosa, Mahler 3 and Zadok the Priest. And the men did Schoenberg. Sam showed me his copy - it's only a couple of pages long! And they appear to be in unison throughout. It doesn't look quite as hard as I'd expected (although it certainly doesn't look easy), but a lot depends on the harmony underneath, and since I was looking at it while Mozart was going on, I couldn't really hear Schoenberg in my head!)

This was Jamie's justification for getting the tenors to join the basses on what I think of as the "cars on the motorway" bit. (If you can't see why, I should probably point out that it's the S/A/T backing vocals that inspired this analogy - which I do not claim to have invented, by the way, it was Stuart Beer, a previous choirmaster of mine - and not the bass part.) There was also much amusement at "It might have been the last note he wrote!" [this was the last quaver of page 15] "He might have lifted his head from his deathbed and said 'The altos need a quaver!' ... They need a lot more than that..."

Oh, and also "Can you vibrate more? ... I don't know why my eyes were drawn to the altos..." and "We've got to stick knives into this audience. Gently!"

What else was I going to say? Oh yes, the People's Chorus has sent out emails to those who've applied. I imagine everyone got accepted, because the website is now saying they have room for more. So if you haven't done anything about it yet, do go and sign up. I'll be joining the tenors on the day, because I thought I'd be helpful and put on the form that I could sing tenor if necessary, and they've said "yes please". (I just had a tiny inkling that they might be short of tenors - and guess what, they are!)

Talking of tenors, apparently it was the lovely Paul Brennan who did the dramatic nose-blowing at last week's rehearsal - he came to confess!

Oh, and I forgot to mention that we have two new 2nd altos. Well, not new to the choir, but new to the part - they were promoted from the 1sts. Some would claim this to be a demotion, but what do they know? :p I don't remember anyone ever moving to 2nd alto before, although loads of people have been moved from 2nd alto. Maybe Jamie finally noticed how depleted our numbers had become... but for whatever reason, it's great to have Kathy and Catharina joining the best part in the choir :-)

Dr Liz is keen for me to write about Take That (mmmmm) and I did plan to, but I'm falling asleep again so they'll have to wait a bit longer. So I will leave you with this blog post I discovered, which may interest the Beatles fans among you. It's a guy listing not his favourite Beatles songs, but his favourite *moments* in Beatles songs :-)