Four of us made it out this week. Two of our folks were delayed considerably, so the other two of us spent the first hour catching up and talking about composition and the logistics of getting sheet music put together for our new pieces. Once one of the other two showed up, we tried out some new warm-ups. Right as we finished warming up, our fourth person showed up. He'd warmed up in the car, so we started working on "Lammas Gift". Last year, we had to spend a considerable amount of time figuring out how the later verses lined up with the music because they're in plain text on a separate page from the music. We also added a harmony on the final note to give the piece a greater sense of resolution. Since we'd already figured out those details last year, we were able to spend more time this year on the finer points of the piece. We started by increasing the tempo ever so slightly. More importantly, we clarified some aspects of pronunciation: The word "a", which occurs repeatedly throughout the piece is best pronounced with a soft "ah" sound and the word "altar", which we'd been singing with a hard "er" sound at the end sounds better if it's softened to an "ah" with a barely-there non-rhotic "r". We also realized that we'd been instinctively pausing for breath in places without rests. That was really difficult to overcome; even though we'd already talked about it, through our second recording you can hear that we start out doing the pause and that we slowly start to correct throughout the piece. We also hit a sour note at the end, so we need more practice hitting that final harmony. I've really enjoyed being able to dig into the details more on each piece in our second year and look forward to getting pieces performance-worthy to open that up that possibility in 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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