Four of us made it out this week. First, we worked on that old chestnut, "Maypole Dance". The three of us who were there when we started working on it were all singing it in the same octave but the high notes were a stretch for my voice, so we developed a harmony with me dropping down an octave during that part, which sounded quite nice! Our fourth person arrived shortly thereafter, singing in the lower octave the entire song. Consequently, you don't hear the split in that recording but I think it speaks well to our choral cohesion that you can't pick out my voice from the others. When we felt we had that piece pretty solidly under our belts, we moved on to "Moon, Sister Moon". As you know, if you've been following our blog, we've tried a lot of variations of that piece. I tried tapping out various tempos for us to sing with but what ultimately ended up working best was a slow, ethereal, organic approach, without any tempo-tapping, simply listening and cueing from each other as Emori had us practice. I think it makes sense to learn a song to a set tempo, but I think I'll be incorporating this organic approach more in the future!
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. You can also listen to the TPC playlist of recordings of some of the pieces by professional artists on Spotify. 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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