Two of us made it this week; our newest member remains consistent! After warm-ups, we started with "Feathers". The rhythm, as written, is a bit counterintuitive to us, so we've decided to sing it a bit jauntier. We've been working from music without an attribution on it and I think it may have been incidental to Bizzy (my co-founder, our original Musical Director) getting us a copy of "We All Come from the Goddess", which is also on that page. But I actually found a different version of this piece in one of the Pagan songbooks books our newest member loaned me. It was attributed as "Native American", which means it's commonly referred to as a Native piece but the author was unable to verify that with the seven tribes she was in contact with, meaning the attribution could be the musical equivalent of a false or folk etymology. I'm not an expert in Native American music but, as someone well steeped in Pagan music, it feels more similar, both musically and lyrically, to popular Pagan chants than to the Native songs I've heard. We also spent some time working on "Samhain's Door" and found some opportunities for harmonies that add depth to the piece, while remaining consistent with its atmosphere. It's been really lovely to have someone willing to experiment with the music, not just learning pieces but exploring them! Getting us comfortable with improvisation has been one of my long-term goals, so I've really enjoyed learning from her extensive experience with it. She told me how, when she was young, everyone was singing doo-wop in the hallways at school and music was more of a casual and communal activity than it is now. I'd love to see that relationship to music make a resurgence in our society. And that's not all I've been learning from her! She has a far better grasp of music theory than I have and she was generous enough to spend some time teaching me about chords. We also spent a significant amount of time simply commiserating about current events and the cost of living.
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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