Hello Everyone,
Happy New Year, although we are certainly off to a rough start today in our country and world, I am so very sorry to say. I am looking forward to brighter days ahead.
I look forward to each Monday evening when I can see your faces (wish I could hear your sing!) and we can immerse ourselves in music for a time. This past week I had the good fortune of being assigned to Brenda Edward’s break out room – it ended up just being the two of use. Brenda spoke so eloquently of her feelings for WVC and how it has sustained her mind and spirit, especially during the pandemic. Listening to Brenda’s beautiful and heartfelt words, I felt a sense of deep gratitude for Brenda and for being part of such an amazing and wonderful organization. I can’t imagine the pandemic without having music to look forward to, and having the company of the lovely human beings in WVC makes it beyond special. This afternoon I recorded several pieces for virtual projects and it felt good to sing beautiful music with meaningful texts while chaos was happening beyond my doors. For me, making music with WVC is a way to stay grounded with an artistic purpose while being part of something bigger than myself.
We polished Snow Angel, movement 5, the last piece to be recorded for the fall season (yay us a million times). Recordings are due on Monday, January 11th. A very important aspect of this movement is the storytelling created by expressive singing – giving syllables their proper weight so that the meaning of the text is clear. This is also (for me) the most difficult to edit because there are so many words and notes, so please sing the rhythms and text as cleanly as possible – I thank you in advance! Please remember to wear blue, black, or gray when you record. Everything you need to know is on the website.
We also reviewed our Basque and Russian for Izar ederrak and The Angel and sang through the beginning sections of those pieces. If you need extra time with the pronunciation, there are excellent resources on our website (thanks, Karla!). I know I need some more work on my Russian – lots of sounds to think about!
I mentioned that I applied to Choirs for Cancer (in Ireland) for WVC to participate in their virtual concert with a theme of Togetherness, submitting our virtual project of A Path to Each Other. I have not heard back from them regarding our participation. In their letter (which Kay attached to last week’s announcements), they invited participants to join in a collaborative project, ‘From Now On’ from The Greatest Showman. I don’t have any other information about that. Since I have not heard back from them, I will write them another email to say that we are interested in participating and will let you know what I hear. That way if some of us want to record for that project, hopefully we can, of course, subject to being invited to participate in the event as a chorus. I’ll keep you posted.
Marsha introduced a project that will have members record very short (under 30 seconds) videos for our upcoming virtual concert. These videos will have members speaking about various aspects of participation in WVC, our sisterhood, our music-making, our virtual challenges and successes, etc. A sampling of these videos will be included in our virtual concert, interspersed with our music. More information to come.
Looking ahead to 1/11/21
Izar ederrak – mm. 17-24
The Angel – mm. 19-25
If Jasmine and Ayumi are able to be at rehearsal, we will have them lead us in the next phrases of pronunciation journey.
We will also spend some time in small groups in breakout rooms working through ideas for our mini-videos for our concert, should you want to make one of those.
I have not yet planned beyond 1/11….I have all of my hatches battened down editing our virtual projects. I am beyond excited to share our hard work and beautiful music with the world and I’m especially looking forward to seeing how Snow Angel will all come together.
Wishing you peace and health and the love of friends and family,
LJ