Birds flying high, you know how I feel

Great rehearsal this week. Quite different, in many ways, from any rehearsal we've had before, but I think it was really effective. I was most amused by the giant pencil that the bass section had placed on the conductor's stand, and even more so when he started conducting with it (because they STILL couldn't sing on the beat)... the memory is still making me giggle :-)

We started with a few bits of the St Matthew Passion, which we'll be doing with Mark on Monday. We did one of the more difficult fast choruses - ironically I've forgotten which one, and I can't check because I've lent my score to a friend who missed the rehearsal. (I say "ironically" because I'm pretty sure it was a chorus that consisted of one line repeated over and over again, and after we'd done it several times I was fairly sure that line was ingrained forever. And three days later I've no idea what it was! Must be getting old...) The first time we tried it, it was quite fast, and had lots of mistakes - so we did it again, faster. And then again, still faster. And then again, faster even than that. By the time we tried it for the fourth time, at the proper speed, it was just about perfect. A great technique, which I suspect some people hadn't experienced before, judging by the surprised looks I saw on some faces.

(My oboe teacher (a lovely lady called Sonia Wrangham), when I was at school, introduced me to a general technique of which this is a variation, and it's so effective that I've used it a lot when I've given instrumental lessons myself. The technique is this: if you have a difficult passage, or even one that's not that difficult but you're having trouble with anyway, you make it HARDER.... but you make it harder in a way that doesn't alter the basic issue, which is usually just the notes. So, you make it faster - or if it's a run of straight quavers, you change them all to dotted quaver/semiquaver pairs - or you put accents on every other note - or you play two (or three, or four) identical notes on every note - or you add an octave leap after every note - or... well, you get the idea. After you've tried two or three harder versions of your passage, the original version is usually pretty easy when you go back to it. Now, although all the above variations of the technique work brilliantly on any instrument other than the voice, some of them would be a bit TOO hard for a singer... but making a fast passage faster works very well!)

After that, we sight-read a chorale, but we did so in silence. We were given the starting chord, and then everyone spent several minutes looking through their own part in their head - then we sang it without the chord being sounded again. It was pretty good, and again I think some people were surprised at the fact that they could do this. Self-confidence is a wonderful thing, isn't it? And when a whole choir has it at once - as I think we did on Wednesday - it's almost like a drug.

(Annoyingly, when we were given a few minutes to look through another section in silence, someone decided it'd be OK if they hummed their part. Argh. SO offputting! But it did make me realise that I hadn't mentioned "not humming" in my "how to sight-read" guide, so I've now amended it (and the downloadable version).)

The second section that we looked through in silence wasn't sight-reading - it was the middle section of "Toward the Unknown Region". New technique again, though - we looked through it, then we sang it, then anyone who had a question about it was encouraged to ask it, and all the questions were dealt with, and the relevant sections rehearsed. Then we split ourselves into three groups more or less at random, and after the tea break the three groups each performed the section, with comments from the listeners after each performance. It was REALLY interesting - not just the comments (and the discussion that followed some of them), but also watching and listening the rest of the choir performing. And performing to an audience consisting of other members of the choir - who all know the thing we're singing really well - feels very different to performing to anyone else. All in all, a very enlightening experience.

We finished off by doing the start and the end of the Vaughan Williams, but those bits are easy compared to the middle section. It's a very satisfying ending, though, and it was a perfect end to a really great rehearsal. Can't wait to do it with Mark (on Monday), with the orchestra (on Tuesday), and in a packed Bridgewater Hall (on Wednesday). Plus it's being shown live on the big screen in Exchange Square! So any of you who are reading this but aren't in the choir... you can see the concert free! Of course it's bound to rain :-)

(Oh, and if you're wondering where the title of this post came from, it's the first line of "Feeling Good", which I was rehearsing last night - my group is singing it (amongst other things) at the wedding next week. Can't wait!)