Contrasts...
Sep. 21st, 2006 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meanfreepathI'm quarteting for the University Choir this weekend. This Sunday's selections include "The Heavens are Telling" from Haydn's The Creation, and the motet "Exsultate justi" by Lodovico Viadana, a Renaissance composer. The service, which begins at 11 on Sunday, may be heard live on Harvard radio, 95.3 WHRB, or online at www.whrb.org. The University Choir does most of its singing relatively early in the service, before Rev. Prof. Gomes's sermon.
If I don't make it in to UChoir, or decide not to have to spend most of Sunday in some kind of church, I may sing in the Dudley Chorus, the chorus of the graduate student house here. They held their first rehearsal this evening. What a contrast between two sessions just a few hours apart. With the UChoir, we read through at the first go and then polished both the Haydn and the Viadana in an hour. Every singer, auditionee or veteran, was experienced, I was pushed to be on my sharpest musically, and the UChoir sang with a natural technical precision far exceeding that of the Swarthmore College Chorus, or frankly any large ensemble I've ever sung in before.
The Dudley Chorus also rehearsed for an hour. More than a few of the singers had never sung in a chorus before. We actually had to spend time, during the warmup, tuning 5-4-3-2-1. In that hour we managed to sort of get through a short canon at the fifth and two lines of a simple 4-part motet. I think SWIL roundsingers could have done that canon, by Mendelssohn Bartholdy, significantly better and in less time.
The director is trying to put together a Dudley Consort, a more experienced subset of the Dudley Chorus to sing a few selections from Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes (alas, not the whole thing). If I end up singing in Dudley, I will definitely do this for the opportunity to sing some more challenging music.
We will simply see how this Sunday's quartet auditions for UChoir go, and just how swamped with work my classes will leave me. Clearly I would love to sing with UChoir, but if that cannot be, I think I can say, at the risk of sounding immodest, that I would definitely bring a lot to Dudley's bass section.
If I don't make it in to UChoir, or decide not to have to spend most of Sunday in some kind of church, I may sing in the Dudley Chorus, the chorus of the graduate student house here. They held their first rehearsal this evening. What a contrast between two sessions just a few hours apart. With the UChoir, we read through at the first go and then polished both the Haydn and the Viadana in an hour. Every singer, auditionee or veteran, was experienced, I was pushed to be on my sharpest musically, and the UChoir sang with a natural technical precision far exceeding that of the Swarthmore College Chorus, or frankly any large ensemble I've ever sung in before.
The Dudley Chorus also rehearsed for an hour. More than a few of the singers had never sung in a chorus before. We actually had to spend time, during the warmup, tuning 5-4-3-2-1. In that hour we managed to sort of get through a short canon at the fifth and two lines of a simple 4-part motet. I think SWIL roundsingers could have done that canon, by Mendelssohn Bartholdy, significantly better and in less time.
The director is trying to put together a Dudley Consort, a more experienced subset of the Dudley Chorus to sing a few selections from Brahms's Liebeslieder Waltzes (alas, not the whole thing). If I end up singing in Dudley, I will definitely do this for the opportunity to sing some more challenging music.
We will simply see how this Sunday's quartet auditions for UChoir go, and just how swamped with work my classes will leave me. Clearly I would love to sing with UChoir, but if that cannot be, I think I can say, at the risk of sounding immodest, that I would definitely bring a lot to Dudley's bass section.
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Date: 2006-09-22 03:16 am (UTC)Even better, are you coming to Reunion so I can give it to you then? *is lazy*