Six of us made it out this week, including a new person! While some of us have recently worked on "Lammas Gift", some hadn't since last year, and our new person never had, of course, so we spent most of our time working on that. Once everyone felt fairly confident with the piece, we went over choral pronunciation, such as softening the end of "altar". I realized that, in the absence of dynamics direction, we were all singing at different volumes, so I resurrected Emori's listening exercise with a small variation. I asked that everyone sing as quietly as possible and listen to each other to maintain choral cohesion, a blending of voices. It worked! We sounded more unified and I observed that, in the last verse, we all slightly elevated the volume together by listening to each other. We also found that singing the piece piano felt more appropriate than belting it. The narrative of the song is a private ritual, introspectively lending your heart to the gods; a softer performance lends itself better to the tone of the narrative. One of our members pointed out that we were extending the rests beyond what was written and I noted we were also still resting where there were no rests, as that member had pointed out the last time we worked on this piece. We discussed it and collectively decided that breathing when it felt natural to breath enhanced our ability to perform the piece well without detracting from the piece at all, so we would simply alter the piece to suite ourselves, as is our wont. After that, one of our members requested we work on "Harvest Chant". It was getting towards the end of rehearsal at this point, so we simply put on the Reclaiming recording and sang along. One of our members pointed out that the Reclaiming version differs significantly from how the piece is written in our sheet music. We decided the Reclaiming version is more fun and joyful, so we'd continue singing their version instead. We also, inspired by the singers riffing in the Reclaiming recording, had a lovely discussion about the place of improvisation in modern Pagan music and its relationship to improvisation in folk & culture music around the world. We noted that the rigidity of Western classical music is an exception to the rule and that, when playing for joy, musicians tend to approach music as a conversation or an experiment, rather than as a recitation. This organic and communal approach to music-making feels appropriate for a Pagan choir, so I expect we'll introduce more of that as we all continue becoming more comfortable with our voices and each other. The delight of the progress we made on our songs was matched by the delight of hearing our members' thoughts on how history, linguistics, and culture influence music generally and our experiences with it specifically.
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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