Cirocco Jones

All I can say is I'm already looking forward to next year's Mosaik. And hoping the recording matches what I heard last night. And marvelling at anyone being able to coordinate six choirs, 200 singers aged 5-70+, one guest conductor, and choreography rather more complex than regular European-style "walk on to the stage and stand there." And being able to keep everyone high-energy during and after a long day of rehearsals.

::happy sigh::

Seriously, I can't wait for next year :)

1. Shoes: check
   
   
2. Make-up: check
   
   
3. Munchies for intermission: check
   
   
4. Wallet in case I want to bid in the Silent Auction: check
   
   
5. Music: ...OH CRAP.

Well, I had contemplated leaving my music at home anyway, as the other choirs participating don't use music, and I knew the songs, and it's always a plus when at least one person in a section actually looks at the director... so: made lemonade :D :D :D

The concert was awesome. The kids's choirs were incredibly cute, the songs went really well, the munchies were devoured as though a swarm of locusts had settled upon the table, the Silent Auction made mucho $$$, the Black History Month concert is always my favourite one and this year's was no exception, we have got to sing Witness again, nobody fell off a riser, nobody fainted, there was no earthquake (all of which have happened at previous Black History Month concerts) and our Weekend of Great Busyness is over.

::contented sigh::

On tomorrow's agenda: skating the length of the Rideau Canal. Let's see who makes it :)



ETA: I'm really hoping our version of Witness was a little less... um, white than the one on Youtube. I think it was. I mean, the University of Utah Singers sound great and all, but. Yeah.

Spent several hours today going through my mom's sewing/embroidery supplies (she died in 2004), getting wheezier and wheezier. Stopped to go to a choir event, and realized I had huge allergic shiners. Marvelous. Sang from the back row. Here's hoping the camera never wandered anywhere near me, which is very likely as we only did two songs, both mostly as backup to soloists.

The soloists were wonderful, btw. And! I got to go into one of the Parliament Buildings, which, I realized as I was walking in, I have never been inside in my entire life, despite being almost forty and living in Ottawa since I was eight.

So, all excited from being able to sing second soprano for a few songs, I promptly go and lose my voice. Spend the next two days hyperdosing on Echinacea and Vitamin C, with some hot lemon, honey, and ginger thrown into the mix. Get my voice back! W000t!!

...aaand we sing a total of one song that even has a second soprano part, and said second soprano part consists of five notes that are different from the first soprano part.

::facepalm::

On the other hand, it's a bloody good thing I got my voice back; we just started a Mozart piece. Boy, a first soprano must've kicked over his sandcastle when he was a kid. Think I lost whatever voice I had.

Am hosting a choir sectional this Sunday. Eeep.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to be singing in our choir right now if you don't like the Messiah. Because it's all we're doing, every single rehearsal. I'm in heaven, personally, because I love it and have sung it many many times, but it must be brutal if you're not a fan. And... well, it's also rather rough going, especially for the sopranos. Tonight we screwed up so badly on one song that our director actually skipped right on to the Hallelujah chorus without another word. Oy vey.

It's an odd mix, too. We've got equal numbers of men, altos, and sopranos - which, for those of you who don't know about choirs, is not generally the natural order of things. Normally the soprano section is huge and the men are few. Tonight we also had eight second sopranos and four firsts; again, not the natural order of things at all. We're struggling. I'm trying to sing more loudly than I usually do because I've actually sung most of the songs before and sopranos are not generally well-known for their sightreading ability (actually, we suck at it), but the problem is my voice is teeny-tiny, and gets harsh when I try to give it volume.

Anyway. I really hope the sectional helps. We're still struggling with notes, never mind expression and tone and all that fun stuff. It would be very nice to get on with making the music sound good, rather than just sound technically correct.

Apparently, we're on Youtube! Our choir director just posted these news snippets of our Black History Month concert onto Youtube, in case anyone's interested:

• Rehearsal, on CTV news, 20s. BTW, right before the clip ends you can see me! I'm the one closest to the camera for about a second ;)
  
  
• Concert on CJOH News, 35s. Chris said the song we're singing on the clip was the song we sang worst in the entire concert :D :D
  
  
• News clip on A Channel, 1:08 min. Clip shows mostly our guests, World Voices Choir, singing a South African song (we're singing too, but they're a lot bigger than us so you can't really see us), and Cathy Grant Mahone, one of the guest soloists.

Right, so I had a bit of an issue with misposting a link in an earlier post today, but now I've sorted it out. These are two songs from the Black History Month concerts that happened this month, both by the World Voices Choir from Brookfield High School. The first is Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika (God Bless Africa), the "pan-African anthem" often sung in South Africa before Apartheid. The second is Follow the Drinking Gourd, an American slave song. Both are from their CD, Ubunti, which they released earlier this month.

Nkosi Sikelel'i Afrika
( Lyrics )

Follow the Drinking Gourd
( Lyrics )

The Drinking Gourd, in case it's not obvious, is the Big Dipper, which can be used to easily identify the North Star, which points, by a staggering coincidence, straight North ;)

It's funny, I never miss choir when I don't go, but then every time I go back after an absence I ask myself how I could've stayed away.

Here's a couple songs from our last concert of the year, in May of last year. Neither one sounds as good as they did in person, but they're still pretty good.

Tiny Fish For Japan, by Stan Rogers (SSA version)
Liner Notes: This song is not intended as a slur of any kind on the countries who import food products that our government won't let us eat. It is Stan's sadly ironic way of describing exactly the status of the Inland Fisheries as seen through the eyes of many a fisherman our of a job. There IS a Norfolk Hotel - Stan played there years ago. The village was dying then. Now they have one of the best Summer Theatre houses in Ontario, but that's little consolation to the men with the boats.

Lyrics
Where Patterson Creek's muddy waters run down
Past the penny arcades, by the harbour downtown,
All the old Turtlebacks rust in the rain
Like they never will leave there again.

But leave there they will in the hours before dawn,
Slip out in the darkness without word or song;
For a few more years yet they will work while they can
To catch tiny fish for Japan.

No white fish or trout here, we leave them alone.
The inspectors raise hell if we take any home.
What kind of fisherman can't eat his catch
Or call what he's taken his own?

But the plant works three shifts now. There's plenty of pay.
We ship seventeen tons of this garbage each day.
If we want to eat fish, then we'll open a can,
And catch tiny fish for Japan.

In the Norfolk Hotel over far too much beer,
The old guys remember when the water ran clear.
No poisons with names that we can't understand
And no tiny fish for Japan...

So the days run together. Each one is the same.
And it's good that the smelt have no lovelier name.
It's all just a job now, we'll work while we can,
To catch tiny fish for Japan.
And we'll catch tiny fish for Japan.

***
Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen

This really doesn't capture the magic of the performance, but you have to imagine a church at the end of a concert, only about 100 people in the audience, and this song just sort of rising out of nowhere. The swell at the end was incredible.

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this,
The fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
Though I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter what you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah




Our version didn't have this verse, which I think is too bad:
Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

• Countdown to Chris' final exams: 6 weeks
  
  
• Distance from ideal weight: 16 pounds
  
  
• Distance from realistic ideal weight: 6 pounds
  
  
• Number of times my car turned over this morning: .5
  
  
• Parking money saved by not driving in to school today: $6.50
  
  
• Money spent on taxi: $23.
  
  
• Our concert: 4.5.

So yeah, our Black History Month concert.

It rocked. We rocked. Our guests rocked. The earth literally moved.

That last bit wasn't caused by us, though. There was a small earthquake, 4.5 on the Richter scale with the epicentre in Thurso, Quebec (incidentally, where Guy's family lives) and since we were in Orleans, Ontario, we all heard about three or four rumbling sounds and a bit of vibration, like a few very large cement trucks had just lumbered by. Only found out it was an earthquake during the intermission.

Which is SO cool because I've always wanted to feel an earthquake, and now I have. I'm from Chile, land of many major quakes, but I left when I was very small and so I missed all the big ones. And I've been in about 5 or 6 small earthquakes (a few in Ottawa, and one during a visit to Chile) but never felt a thing. So, neato. Now I know what one feels like.

On to the concert. First, the not-so-good.

Our director had words with us during the rehearsal. Rather sharp words. Rather loud words. Words that utterly offended much of the soprano section (since we were the targets of the biggest and loudest set of words) both because of their content and because they occurred in front of the other two choirs and a few early members of the audience. A few sopranos contemplated just walking out. One of the sopranos had a bit of an anxiety attack. They were not nice words.

In a way, though, I kind of understand. We really, really need to know our music better than we do. The final rehearsal before a concert is supposed to be used for perfecting dynamics and practicing how to get on and off-stage. Not for going over some of the notes.

Still. The severe tongue-lashing in public was not a nice thing to hear.

Next, the good.

Our guests were the Crosstown Youth Choir and the World Voices choir from Brookfield High School. And good lord, they were good. Much, much better than we were. Their African songs sounded so... African. The songs we did with them were totally inspiring. Nkosi Sikelele (African anthem) was gorgeous, even though - or perhaps because - we were actually singing from different arrangements. Which was kind of neat, as the two choirs were intermixed on stage, so we could hear people around us in our same section singing totally different notes.

Our soloist, Cassandra, who has a very nice soprano range but a gorgeous voice in her alto register, totally ruined one of our songs. The song was going very nicely, people were swaying, looking happy, and then she opened her mouth and belted out her first solo bit, and even before she was done, the World Voices choir was bursting into thunderous applause and cheers, and was soon joined by the rest of the audience. Cassandra looked quite startled, as were we, and the applause drowned out our chorus, but it had to be one of the nicest song-ruining moments I've ever experienced. Got a standing ovation after the song was done, too :) :) :)

And the boys were there too. They don't normally come to choir concerts, because it's just really not their thing, but I figured a concert with lots of upbeat music and variety and three different choirs and drums and all that funky stuff might be something they'd like, and Chris reported that they did indeed. Even though Justin fell asleep near the end. 10:00PM is a little late for a six-year old to sit and listen to music, even music accompanied by clapping and drumming and weird little shooting-at-birds movements.

So yeah. Good concert. The kind that make you glad you're in a choir. Minus the scolding at the beginning.

Haven't written about choir in a long time, not sure why.

So we're fully into rehearsals for our February concert, which will have the theme "Black History Month". Kind of a funny theme for a choir consisting mostly of middle-aged Ontarian Aryans, but you won't hear me complaining. We've got African songs, gospel songs, spirituals, you name it - if it's got a beat, we've got it.

Even we have a beat. Of sorts.

( Program, for the curious )

And today we got to practice a few of our songs with a group of drummers, which... um, wow. Songs that had been kind of "Yeah, that's pretty good, nice little beat" abruptly turned into "Holy ****!!" Like, I had an extended atheist-touching-the-face-of-god moment. Mbinguni Kule, which is sweet but a little repetitive on its own, totally grew wings with the drums backing us up.

::happy sigh::

Oh and I dropped my Cheerful Idiot facade at one point in the rehearsal. I think one of the reasons I haven't written much about choir lately is that I'm much less frustrated these days after a rehearsal. I attribute this wholly to a seating rearrangement which has put me a few seats away from my previous neighbour, whom I shall politely call MoaningWhiningJustShutUP! TroubledSoul. TroubledSoul spends the better part of most rehearsals complaining about everything. Her feet hurt, she's too old to stand up, and the music sucks. All of it. All the time. Especially "this type of crap" - crap being defined as anything un-WASP-like. So the whole black-themed set? Not her cuppa. I had fond hopes that she'd drop out, as she's been threatening to ever since she joined, at least until after the February concert. But no. She shows up every week and bitches as if bitching were an Olympic sport.

Anyway, like I said, I'm not next to her any more, which makes choir infinitely more enjoyable. But I still get to hear her when there's a lull. And today, as we paused in between parts of Peter on De Sea, she moaned once more "I hate this crap," and I said, "Yes, we know." Which made a few people turn around - not that I was being rude or loud, I just said it very clearly and I normally don't say much in rehearsal.

TroubledSoul looked at me, really surprised, and said, "You actually like this thing?"

"Yes, I do," I said, and TroubledSoul looked rather insulted for about an hour.

But hey, she didn't complain about the songs. Score!

What was funny was that Peter on De Sea is the only song on our list that I actually don't like.

There was at least one song that she likes in our program. Nigra Sum, by Pablo Casals, the only women-only song we've ever done in this choir, though Kurt normally gives the men a song or two on their own. I guess he figures the women get enough exposure, and he's right. Still, it's neat to be on our own for once, especially for a song as lovely as this one.

It's not terribly Black History-ish, though, other than the title, "I Am Black". The lyrics are in Latin, and from the Song of Songs, and it was written by a (white) Spanish dude, and the melody doesn't say much that's African. But still. Gorgeous song. And we do it well.