We had a really fantastic rehearsal this week! I was pleased to meet our new member this week and hope they'll continue joining us! Emori lead the other four of us in breathing exercises and warmups before we launched into "Full Moonlight Dance", since it was the day after the full moon. They had us do some really challenging exercises, repeatedly singing the song aggressively staccato and then repeatedly singing it like we'd been novocained at the dentist. Having sung those two extremes was really helpful for finding the right balance between diction and fluidity; I think it really helped polish our performance! After that, Emori had us do listening exercises, focusing not just on our own singing but really hearing the rest of the group and matching each other. They had us visualize our collected efforts as connecting strands of energy. Then they had one of us at a time walk in circles around the other three, making observations and sharing them afterwards. These exercises were truly effective! You can hear in the recordings (the first recording of us singing as softly as possible, the second of us finding our volume in the moment by listening to each other) that we truly sound like a unified choir, rather than just a collection of people. Honestly, it was a moving experience and the exact feeling that I value so much about singing in a choir. I really look forward to bringing this into to future rehearsals!
We finally figured out how to upload the "Harvest Chant" recording from last week. If you're only listening to learn the song, skip ahead to 1:15 where the first run-through, the piano example, and the second run-through are. Otherwise, enjoy the silliness and chatter they also recorded!
If you'd like to review any of our material, 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.
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