Edie is Rachel's brand-new daughter, born on 5th July. I met her for the first time yesterday, when Claire and Alison and I popped round during the lunch break of the choir course. Isn't she lovely?
I'm sure I'm not the only one who still feels totally exhausted after the weekend, and I haven't even had to go to work today! It was good, though. Those who couldn't be there missed a lot of stuff, including: Maggie repeating her "Surfing USA" warmup; Maggie leading us in a great version of Abba's "Thank you for the music"; Paul's guinea pig impression; David's face when he arrived on Saturday morning to find Maggie demonstrating the Funky Gibbon exercise with Paul's help; the meaning of the word overdight (no, I didn't know either, I looked it up on my phone because I was curious. So, those who were impressed when the question was asked and I knew the answer - don't be!); Dimitri helping us to perfect our Russian pronunciation (my favourite was when he said "I hear a mixture of sh and sh"...); various group games designed to help people improve their rhythmic skills; lots of brain-twisting activities with chords and Kodaly method hand signals; and of course lots of singing!
All the pieces we did were great, and I hope we do them again. Well, I know we're doing Komm Jesu Komm again at the memorial concert in September, and one of the Vespers (no. 8, the one with the Aida bit) in the carol concerts. (The altos and basses have the tune in Vespers 8, and it was only when the sops and tenors sat down - so that we could be seen - that I noticed exactly how many more 1st altos there were than 2nd! There were almost three times as many!) We did perform everything at the end of the course, and we got an impressive audience of friends and family - about 30-40 people turned up, and they seemed to enjoy it. We warmed up in front of them, which we hadn't been warned about, but we lost all shame years ago :-) We also did the thing where we all sing any note, and then move until we make a chord as if by magic. (I'm always amazed when that works!) That was followed by a demonstration of the "choral chord progression" thing, which I love doing - except that on this occasion it took a while to get going. I think that that's because we were told that our starting chord was Db major, yet I'm fairly sure it was nothing of the sort.
(I was very pleased that such a lot of time this weekend was spent on the choral chords and the Kodaly method stuff, because both of these techniques are invaluable for my method of sight reading. In fact, I thought of a couple more things to add to what I wrote, so I plan to edit it slightly and then turn it into a downloadable or emailable (or printable) document, because I've had quite a few requests for that - although they've all been people from different choirs!)
Two things to finish. Firstly, my online choir schedule now has all the new season stuff on it (and football clashes). It's not Googleable (try and see, if you don't believe me), so you won't be able to find it unless you know the address. Choir members, email me if you want it. I promise it will be kept up to date (as it always has been).
And finally, for those who were curious about Marvin Suggs - here's his Muppaphone!
6 comments:
Thanks for the photo - she's gorgeous! Rachel looks well too...
I enjoyed the weekend - but I was knackered to the point of making more mistakes than usual in the 'concert'!
I miss Maggie!
In Budapest a few months ago, I wandered into a Greek Orthodox church where a chorister was leading the singing of some beautiful chanting, simply by using Kodaly. How lucky Hungarian children are to learn this at school!
I worked out (to about 99% accuracy) that we were in A-flat for that excercise! My big clue was given when I tried to sing bottom "D-flat"!!
Barbara - Rachel is indeed very well.
Despina - *I* learned the Kodaly system at school, in the UK. Mind you, it was a specialist music school, but still :-)
Sam - I'm glad it wasn't just me going mad. See, although everyone thinks I have perfect pitch, I don't, I just have a good memory for pitch. So when we ended up on the home-made chord and he said it was D flat, I knew that if that was the case, the note I was singing must be A flat (because it felt closer to that than D flat or F). So when he said to move to A flat major, of course I stayed on the same note, but that turned out not to work, and I had to move notes to get to the chord everyone else was on. And after that EVERYTHING felt wrong.
Growing old and with failing memory I find that I can't for the life of me remember the exercises Maggie suggested for warm ups during the summer - can anyone help me out, please?
I *think* the warmups were as follows:
Stretch
Funky gibbon - breathing then deep "ahhhh"
Pigeons & cascading hums
Tractors
Lots of water (no colder than room temp)
However, I may well have forgotten bits, or got bits in the wrong order - please someone correct me if so!
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