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.