Deep-voiced men 'have more kids', allegedly

What? You don't believe me? I read it in the news! Now, I just need someone to work out whether or not the Hallé men prove or disprove this statement...

Oh, and also, there's a story on Manchester Confidential about defectors from the Manchester Boys' Choir. What I want to know here is which choir they've defected to!

Anyway, currently I have a really sore throat as a result of tonight's choir rehearsal. Yes, yes, I *know* that means I was doing something wrong! It's because we spent most of it singing just vowels - that always causes me pain (for reasons I don't fully understand - must ask Maggie). Whatever the reason, I think I need to try not to speak tomorrow. It's probably a good thing that I'd already decided not to go to choir, because I thinking singing again would probably make it worse, and I want to be able to sing on Friday, particularly as hardly any of the elusive 2nd altos can make it! Tomorrow night, instead, I'm off to see United. I did try to get rid of my ticket, but no-one was interested, so it would have been wasted if I didn't go. (Cup games cost extra to the season ticket, but it's one of the conditions of having a season ticket that you have to buy a ticket for every home cup game.)

You may be thinking that going to a football match is possibly not the best course of action with a sore throat, but I actually don't make that much noise, apart from frequent squeaks and gasps of alarm, which greatly amuse the guys who own the seats on either side of me :-)

Tonight at choir, in case you were wondering, we only did one piece - Oma Maa. It's nice enough, and has some good chords, but it's not wildly exciting. (Not like the Verdi, which was also scheduled for tonight but which we didn't actually do! I was outraged! Just watch him do a bit of it tomorrow....) We still don't know much about the Finnish words, but we had a bit of a go at them anyway. (Note: I'm sure I've read somewhere that Sibelius himself wasn't very good at Finnish, because he was brought up in a Swedish-speaking family. I'll look it up when I'm less tired.) And we discovered that the altos and basses are going to have a very difficult time. You see, the words are printed in Finnish and Swedish. For most of the piece, the Finnish words are under the soprano and tenor lines, and the Swedish words are under the alto and bass lines. Which is a pain, because we're so used to reading words under notes, it's a real strain to have to read them from elsewhere. (This is, of course, at its worst in hymns and Christmas carols, where the words aren't even printed anywhere near the music except for verse 1. Fine for the sops who just have the tune, but not for the rest of us!)

However, it was worse than that. For SOME parts of the piece, both the Finnish and Swedish words were under every line. Great. Except that it switched between mode 1 and mode 2 totally randomly, almost always on line changes and page turns. And, needless to say, there's no space to write the words in the right place (and in any case I can never read them when I do that!), so I was reduced to a system of crossing out all the Swedish bits and putting arrows and rings all over the place. And all of this is before we've even been taught by a Finnish language coach! Things will go downhill from here, I imagine...

I'll end on a quiz question. Which Finnish word is the one most commonly used in English? Answer in my next post :-)