Random association beginning with the Messiah

• Just came from our penultimate rehearsal before we sing The Messiah this Sunday. OMG, we have improved. Thank GOD, because it was getting a little scary there for a while.
  
  Some items of interest:
  
  
  • We're three choirs, maybe... 150 people? I think? Somewhere up there, anyway. And there are at least two female tenors. I've always thought it would be so cool to be a female tenor. We had one at St. Mary's Cathedral Choir in Kingston, about four or five altos that had been pressed into service at the Kingston Choral Society because we had only two real tenors and three straining basses, and I always thought it would be really neat to sing down there. Sadly, I cannot even get myself transferred down to second soprano, so I think it would take some massive hormone treatments to become a tenor and I really don't want it that much.
    
    
  • Continuing the theme of vocal switcheroo, our alto soloist is a guy. Which looks and sounds so completely wrong when you first hear it, until you get used to it. It's kinda funny to come across a male alto in real life when just a few weeks ago I came across male altos on Youtube, singing a different song from The Messiah:
    
    But Who May Abide The Day of His Coming, alto soloist Matt Alber, and same song, alto soloist Micheal Chance.
    
    What's funny is at the time I hadn't even been looking to find The Messiah. I'd just followed a link someone posted for Matt Alber's End of the World (very cool song, lovely video except that he looks better with the beard). Clicked another Alber link, found Monarch, also quite lovely. Saw a link to him singing Messiah, clicked, and went AAUGGH WTFF IS THAT??!!
    
    ...listened a bit longer and realized if I didn't know it was a guy singing, his voice was actually quite lovely. And perhaps finding a guy singing in a high voice weird and wrong and icky was more my problem than it was his? Maybe?
    
    
  • The male voice is totally amazing. Tired of hearing alto/falsetto? Here's the lowest basso profundos in the world, singing We Praise Thee with the St Petersburg Chamber Choir. And Vladimir Pasuik & Viktor Wichniakov (I think the same two guys from the previous link) more solo-like.
    
    Caution: don't play those too loud unless you're sure the closest male elephant in heat is a couple of cities away. Otherwise you may be getting company real soon - big, cranky company, expecting a nubile female somewhat larger than yourself.
    
    
  • Another weirdness: sat next to a soprano from one of the other choirs, quite relieved that she really sounded like she knew what she was doing because I was getting mightily tired of sitting next to one of our own sopranos who, um, still doesn't. At one point she introduced herself, and told me she was the mom of one of my choir's altos.
    
    It's a very small world. Said alto is the sister of a girl I went to high school with. And also the sister of the mother of one of Justin's closest friends when he was in kindergarten. I keep running into the women of this family. Apparently there's a fourth sister I have yet to meet. I'm sure I will run into her some day; probably doing TaeKwon-Do, or soccer, or working at a law firm, or something.
    
    
  • At the end of the rehearsal, somebody started to sing happy birthday to our director, whose birthday it was. You know when a crowd of family or friends starts singing Happy Birthday, how everybody ends up in different keys, with a low drone underneath it all from the tone deaf?
    
    OK, now imagine someone strikes up the song and you get about 150 choir singers to join in. And then an orchestra jumps in too.
    
    Yeah. Best rendition I've ever heard :D :D :D
  
  
  
• And on to something that has nothing to do with choir, other than being slightly ironic in that my choir stuff has had to do with The Messiah and what's next decidedly doesn't:
  
  Joss Whedon accepts his Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism at Harvard University's Memorial Church
  
  I love this man. And I may have to print out and post this quote:
  
  The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man, that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight. Faith? Is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.
  
  
• As long as I'm linking to one Joss Whedon speech, I may as well link to another: Joss Whedon's Equality Now speech, AKA 101 answers to the press junket question, "Why do you always write these strong women characters?" (his speech starts at 2:00 min)