Rehearsal Summary - 03/26/24

We had a great rehearsal this week! It started out with just three of us but someone new showed up just as we were about to start warmups! The four of us did some "rolling hills", as Emori calls them, to practice jumping notes and tuning our ears to whole steps. As planned, we started working on our Beltane piece, "We Dance Around the Maypole" from the "Chants" set and were eventually joined by another member who has to come late each week. This is when we discovered that our new person has sight reading and keyboard skills! So she took over on the keyboard so Emori could consider how to make the piece, which is in a minor key, sound less solemn. (It's Beltane! It should be merry! It's a maypole dance, not a funeral march!) We actually learned the piece pretty quickly and were then able to play around with it a bit. We found that increasing the tempo and adding more energy really helps it feel peppier. We think it could be fun to start at a slower tempo and gradually increase the tempo with each repetition, as one might start out walking around the maypole and gradually increase the pace of the dance. We also discussed potentially adding a quick rest that isn't in the music as written because it feels very unnatural not to breathe there.  

I was able to get several rehearsal recordings! If you'd like to review it at home, the sheet music and recordings are available on our Drive. For the naming conventions of the recordings, see the document in our Drive. If you're trying to practice at home and can't quite discern your note, you can use a keyboard app to plunk out whichever ones you're having trouble with.  (This is by no means an official endorsement, but the app I use is "Voice Training - Learn to Sing" by the developer Learn to Master. It labels the notes on the keyboard and gives you real-time feedback on what note you're singing.) If you need a tutorial on how to read music, this one seems sufficient for helping you figure out which note you want to find on the keyboard.

We had $10 in donations this week. Thank you so much to our generous donor! If you would like to track our accounting, you can view our donations and expenses spreadsheet and receipts on our Drive.

We plan to continue working on "We Dance Around the Maypole" and/or our sigil song next week. We can't wait to sing with y'all!

- El Pethybridge, Administrative Director

TrianglePaganChoir@gmail.com