Four of us made it out this week. After a five minute warm-up, we started in on our new Midsummer piece. Because all of us present already felt comfortable with it, we started experimenting with alternative rhythms and dynamics. We considered changing the dynamic emphasis on different lines but ultimately preferred simply increasing the volume throughout the piece, so the first stanza is somewhat piano, while the last stanza is more forte. We decided that singing the entire song forte as we've previously done has a very jovial, celebratory mood, while the gradual crescendo lends itself to increasing energy in a ritual. After that, one of our members suggested lengthening the time we spend on the word "longest" in the final line, which we also liked. We put both changes together and got a lovely recording of them! We have noticed, however, that not having formal sheet music to sing from does cause confusion on rhythmic issues, especially how long to hold certain notes. I'd love to collaborate with someone on that to see if we can get it pinned down; I simply don't have the necessary expertise. We spent the last 30 minutes or so experimenting with "Summer Solstice Chant", though we didn't take any recordings. We tried adjusting the tempo, dynamics, and phrasing. What we found is, essentially, that there's a wide array of pleasing ways to sing it! We decided that it's a very adaptable piece, which can be altered to suit a variety of purposes and atmospheres.
In other news, one of our members was kind enough to bring our fliers to a Summer Solstice festival this weekend to share with the community! We extend our thanks to them and encourage other members to also bring our fliers to community events!
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.
P.S. Apologies updates are so late; I've been utterly swamped with various community events!
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