Three of us made it this week. We had a really productive rehearsal and covered a lot of material! The new warm-ups continue to be a welcome bit of novelty after so long using the same one. However, we decided we need to work on our breath work, so we'll be swapping one out for a breathing exercise some weeks. After warming up, we started with the Ostara piece I composed for us last year. Since we got really comfortable with it last week, it was smooth sailing this week. We worked on refining our pronunciation, including doing a test to see if it was better to hit the Ts in "gently" or to soften it to "genly". We found that hitting the Ts was a challenge in several respects. It is difficult to time it so that we all hit it together, it makes it harder to move on to the lyrics that come next, it doesn't lend itself well to singing as quietly as those verses should be sung, and it doesn't sound nearly so gentle as letting the Ts pass by. As you might imagine, we elected to let go of our Ts! After "Ostara", we moved on to "Moon, Sister Moon". We're all very familiar with this piece, so it was a breeze. I suggested we introduce a slide between the two notes in "sky" and the others agreed that it's an improvement! Much like with the Ostara piece, we focused in on the Ts in this piece, doing a test to determine if "what you know" sounds better as "wha Tyou know" or "wha Dyou know". Unsurprisingly, the softer option won in this piece, as well. Next, we did a couple cursory passes through "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. Next, I suggested we might want to have something prepared for the Little Pagan Faire on May 2 in case we end up wanting to do a little demonstration for folks, so we did a very quick review of "Feathers" and "Beltane". However, there are some exceedingly high notes in "Beltane", so we agreed I'd find suitable harmonies with which to amend it before we really dig in on it. We've gotten pretty comfortable with the "We All Come From the Goddess / Hoof and Horn" round, it sounds impressive but is actually pretty easy, and most people will recognize it, so we decided that's our sure-fire piece if we want to do a demo at the Faire. As such, we spent the last portion of rehearsal working on that piece, which I have affectionately -and pragmatically- nicknamed "We All Hoof".
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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