kumir_k9 | Weekend in review

At Randy's last bardic, Kara asked me if I'd be willing to direct her and a bunch of our friends in doing SATB Christmas songs for her Christmas party and maybe at a nursing home. I agreed and have been working on putting several pieces together (9 of them total) to work on. I was warned that some of the people had no musical experience. So I put the pieces up in Finale (music transcription software) and output pdf files for the singers to read from, Word documents of the lyrics for the blind member of the group to memorize (his PC will read to him), an mp3 file of the ensemble sound, and individual mp3 files of each of the 4 parts for people to learn from, and then putting them up on my web site for everybody to download their appropriate files. This has been taking about an hour per piece. I did a couple more on Friday night and stayed up pretty late working on that.

Saturday, Monique and I drove up to Bolton MA to Kara's for the first rehearsal. Ok, Monique came to sit in the car and study for her class while I did the first rehearsal. I had two sopranos (that's it?), 3 really strong alto, 3 tenors (a low alto that had a great tenor sound and 2 men who'd never sung in parts before but had nice tenor voices) and 2 basses.

We spent the better part of the first hour working on Silent NIght. This may sound scary that it took that long and let me tell you, I was pretty nervous myself. The thing is that that hour was spent teaching the initiates what choral singing is all about and developing a group synergy. By the end of the hour, Silent Night was sounding really good.

The next hour we got through the rest of the music. All the ground work of the first hour really paid off and we were getting pieces to a reasonable level with much less work. We pulled Joy to the World together in about 20 minutes, a real feat considering that the parts aren't in straight rhythmic parallel all the way through.

It was a thoroughly deflightful rehearsal. We have one more in December and then the party. I should have the remaining pieces put together and uploaded in the next couple days.

Then Monique and I drove up to Nashua to do shopping. We were less than a half hour away, so we figured we'd make a day of it and save some money. Groceries are literally half the price up there as they are here in SW CT and there's no sales tax and we're feeding 10 people for a couple days over Thanksgiving. Besides that, it's $50 worth of gas to go up there, so if we saved at least $50 on groceries it was a win. $550 worth of groceries later (which probably would have cost $800 down here) we headed back home. I was so tired I was in bed and asleep by 9:00.

Sunday I slept in until almost 9:00. That's right, for those of you doing the math, I slept almost 12 hours. It felt so good, but decadent. I spent most of the day working on the database project for Monique for United Health.

Flute choir rehearsal was good but challenging. We were missing two members which meant at least one, often two, parts missing on everything we rehearsed. It was a good exercise in independence. While it's tough to get a feel for cohesiveness in that situation, it forces everyone to count and think and listen.

And last but not least, the Patriots. We utterly destroyed the poor Bills. I was feeling bad for them because we could just do no wrong. So on we go undefeated. Go Pats!

Now, back to my vacation and another day of database development.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

*perks up*

Do you need more sopranos? I happen to be a soprano who loves to sing Christmas carols and learns stuff very easily on the fly. My schedule is rapidly filling up this season but if you could give me a list of the rehearsal and performance dates and Kara says it's ok then I'd do my best to make it work out. :-)

Hmmm, I will have to check with Kara. I'm not sure it's kosher for me to invite someone to her Christmas party, but it doesn't hurt for me to ask. *I* certainly have no issue with more people.

We have a second rehearsal on Saturday, December 8th at 3:00. Her party is Saturday, December 15 at 6:00. The nursing home (if it happens) would be on Sunday, December 16. Let me know if these dates are good for you ASAP before I ask Kara.

If you want to see the stuff we're doing, you can find it here:
http://www.dillia.net/music.html
We're replacing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" with "The Twelve Pains of Christmas".

I'm already invited to her Christmas party. :-) The caroling is often my favorite part. Though what time will you guys be performing? I'm going to the Christmas Revels at Harvard at 3 PM, so I might not get to the party until 7 or 8 by the time all is said and done. I don't know when during the evening you guys were planning to perform.

Amazingly, I'm available at all those dates. Yay!

Wheeee! How convenient is that?

You're going to the Revels and you didn't invite me? I'm crushed, devastated, house broken even... er, um, heart broken that is. Though you may rest assured I am house broken as well.

Performance time has not yet been determined, but I'm sure the later we perform, the less anyone drinking will care how well we perform. ;-) Seriously, I don't know what time, but I will check and get you added to the distribution list for rehearsal related stuff.

I'm going to the Revels as a part of a Lesley alum event. It's all been very last minute and they only had so many spots. Perhaps next year? :-)

Do keep me posted. You have my e-mail address? If not, Kara certainly does.

I'm almost positive that I think that I might be pretty sure that maybe I have your email. I can check my contact book if there's any doubt.

I was just pulling your leg on the Revels. Monique and I went one year and had a blast. The timing in general stinks because of the time of year and the distance. If I'd been thinking and realized I was going to be up there anyway, I probably would have tried to get tickets for one of the shows.

Weekend in review

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject