Three of us made it this week. We had a really productive rehearsal and covered a lot of material! The new warm-ups on rotation continue to be a welcome bit of novelty after so long using the same one. Having warm-ups specifically for vocal agility and tone is much more helpful (and fun!) than the very basic warm-ups we were using before. After warming up, we started with the Ostara piece I composed for us last year. It's a fairly simple piece to learn, so we picked it up pretty easily. We got the lyrics and rhythm down quickly enough that we were able to move on to dynamics. The lyrics revolve around the word "gently", so it is mainly sung piano. But there is also the swelling of rivers and new life, so the volume rises with the lyrics, before ending back with a gentle piano. Hopefully it translate in the recording! The song rises up to B4, so I thought I was going to need to implement a harmony for folks who couldn't pop up that high, as I have in the past; instead, we discovered that one of our members has increased her range over the last year! Higher notes that were uncomfortable for her to sing last Spring are now perfectly attainable for her! We love to see people expanding what's possible for them and finding new ways to access their voice! After "Ostara", we moved on to "Equinox Chant". We didn't spend much time with this piece because it feels more like an Autumn Equinox chant than a Spring Equinox chant and, honestly, it's a little dreary and boring. The recording linked above was maybe our third run-through. I asked if the others wanted to do three repetitions for the recording and the consensus was "No, oh my goodness, it' too boring," so we moved on. In our last 30 minutes, we worked on singing the round combining "We All Come From the Goddess" and "Hoof and Horn". While most people are introduced to "We All Come From the Goddess" pretty soon after getting involved in the Pagan community, "Hoof and Horn" is less well known. One of our members hadn't encountered it before, so we spent some time introducing her to it. She picked it up very quickly! Luckily, even singing it in the round is fairly straightforward. Our other member even switched up which part he was singing toward the end but she rolled with it like a champ! We were going to spend the last 15 minutes learning a piece we've had the music for these last two years and never used but we ended up chatting instead! I'm not even sure what the title of the piece is; it's something Bizzy (my co-founder and our original Musical Director) had on the same sheet as "We All Come From the Goddess". We'll get around to it eventually! I learned it in order to record an example and found it easy to pick up and fun to sing!
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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