AD Music Notes

Hello Everyone,

So much was accomplished tonight! Hooray! There were many moments of choral artistry in our rehearsal and I loved hearing us bring our music to life. Deb-a-lou and I have the best seats in the house because we get to hear you all!

Happy birthday to all of our December birthdays!

I will send out solo audition information in the coming days – stay tuned. Solos: Shule Agra (Chamber Singers), and Faith is the Bird as indicated in the scores.

My Thanksgiving reading was Rejuvenating Senior Voices: Enhancing the Sound and Confidence of Mature Choirs by Michael Kemp, forward by Helen Kemp (Michael’s mother – she conducted choruses well into her 90s – one of my heros!). Senior voices in this book are defined as those over 50 so many of us fall into this category. I will share with you what seems most helpful and relevant in the coming days.

Today, I also started another book, Pitch Perfect: A Theory and Practice of Choral Intonation by Donald Brinegar. It was just released this fall and I am very excited about digging in. I look forward to sharing what I learn with you. At first glance it looks VERY interesting!

I encourage everyone to practice your music at home in the coming weeks since we will only sing through the pieces we rehearsed tonight as time allows before we circle back to them all in the New Year on 1/6/19. We cannot let our music sit for that long without our continued review or we will not have enough time together in rehearsal to knock off the dust. (And I don’t know about you, but I hate to dust!).

Consider spending some individual practice time singing with and without vibrato, maintaining healthy singing habits regardless of the presence or absence of vibrato. Your breath is the key to success. Use a supported, energetic airflow, free of tension, at all times (DOWN, OUT, OPEN). To minimize vibrato, experiment using more breath on louder measures (be careful of singing sharp or blowing over the pitch) and less breath on softer measures (be careful of singing flat). Experiment! Use a tuner! Also, consider how weighty your voice feels. You will want to sing with a light, forward placement, free of tension, if you want to sing without a pronounced vibrato. You voice should feel as though it originates between your eyes as opposed to in your throat or chest. Everyone’s goal should be to sing into the ensemble, working toward a vibrant and free tone that complements the other voices in the section and the ensemble as a whole. It would be lovely if we could use vibrato as an expressive device and choose when and when not to use it according to the piece we are singing.

Thank you for memorizing Now Let Me Fly. See if you can add the details we worked on tonight into your memorization. The Valley should be memorized for 12/9/19.

Below are my rehearsal notes. If you missed rehearsal, you can go over these details on your own. For everyone else, these are for your review. I have added a few additional notes.

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Hello Everyone,

WOW!!!! Hooray for us! It was very exciting to sing all of our concert repertoire tonight. Thank you, Ann, for your wonderful insight as we began our run through. I am fully confident that we can and will work our way out of our dark places! I have faith is us! But it was reassuring to hear Ann say it – so thank you.

Some reflections:
There were some very powerful moments in our rehearsal tonight. I am sure that you could feel it, too! I know how I felt looking at your faces, and hearing your voices when we were singing and there were moments that were incredibly moving and connected. I am also confident (and have faith!) that we can overcome our musical challenges and be in a very good place after we complete our December rehearsals.

I know that most enjoy singing in mixed formation so we will definitely keep this for some of our pieces. Others, however, will sound better if we sing in sections – and this is not because we are not ABLE to sing in mixed formation but that the music will be more powerful when we have strength in sections singing together. At our next rehearsal, we will work through some alternate standing arrangements. I didn’t want us to move around tonight since we had so much to cover, but we will move to different formations during our 3 upcoming December rehearsals.

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Hello Everyone,

I am sending you a follow up email today to address concerns expressed to me that members would like to sing through our concert repertoire in its entirety as we are moving closer to our performance. I had already planned this for our December rehearsals but we can go ahead with this plan beginning 11/25.

Please be prepared to sing through all of our repertoire this coming Monday, not limited to the list that I sent out last night. If there are still notes and rhythms about which you have questions, I encourage you to iron those out with your practice tracks as your individual time allows.

This will result in less detail work and more keep-singing-no-matter-what-happens. I know that you will understand that some of our challenges may go unaddressed – so I would kindly ask that everyone understands that we can only accomplish what is reasonable.

I am learning a lot about us as I have navigated this first season with WVC and I appreciate the opportunity to gain an understanding of our strengths and weaknesses in real time.

I do hope that you will use your practice tracks as often as you are able if you gain confidence by singing through pieces start to finish with lots of repetition. We have an abundance of resources on our website to help us as individuals prepare for our ensemble rehearsals.

I am looking forward to our rehearsal next week. See you soon!

Laura

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for another wonderful rehearsal. It’s so fun to work on details. Thank you for offering your “to-do” lists for us to think about.

Here is a link to the folder with our recordings. I added Faith is the Bird, 1941, and Nada Te Turbe (Chamber Choir)

WVC Recordings

As you listen, I encourage you to assess how we are doing with the notes that we took tonight at rehearsal.

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H

ello Everyone,

Thank you for your attention to detail as we rehearsed this evening in our sectionals and for your enthusiasm as we came together for the last portion our rehearsal. At this point, I am hopeful that everyone knows all pitches and rhythms of our repertoire. If not, please work with your practice tracks so that we can move forward with our music-making. Thank you, again, to Laura D. and to Debbie for your musical leadership and encouragement.

In our upcoming rehearsals, we need to focus on polishing our music by spending rehearsal time on phrasing, dynamics, and articulation. We need to think about ensemble balance, blend, intonation, timbre, vowel shapes, and consonant clarity. We need time to share our ideas with one another regarding the meaning of our texts and how we can best share our connections with our audience in January. These rehearsals can be especially fulfilling and fun but difficult to accomplish if we are chasing notes and rhythms. Please let know if I can be of assistance in any way outside of our regular rehearsals if you are having a particular challenge that you are not able to work out on your own. I know our terrific section leaders can also be of great help.

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Hello Everyone,

Thank you for a very productive “nuts and bolts” sectional rehearsal last night. Many thanks to Laura D. and Debbie H. (Happy Birthday!) for helping to lead us as we jumped through the mud puddles.

Let’s have Let Me Fly memorized by our 12/2/19 rehearsal. Please remember that the refrains are similar but not always exactly the same.

Let’s have The Valley memorized by our 12/9/19 rehearsal. 

I would like for you to listen to the recording of Let Me Fly on the JW Pepper website – it is a very musical rendition. This performance is transposed up a half step (as we are performing), tempos, articulations, phrasing, dynamics are all spot on. I also really like how they have altered page 15 with the entrances and repetitions of the voice parts. We will give it a try and see how we like it! Another  change that I think we should adopt is on page 16, m. 89 – A2s stay on your middle C# from “me” to “fly” – although you accomplished the octave leap beautifully last night! Boo! Boo! :). A1s and A2s drop out in m. 90 and rejoin in m. 91 for an accented “yes.”

Let Me Fly (click on the sound button)

Stacey V. Gibbs (short bio)

In my collection of choral music texts, I have a thoughtful and informative text by André J. Thomas, well known in the choral world as wonderful conductor, composer, and choral music educator. In Way Over in Beulah Lan’: Understanding and Performing the Negro Spiritual, Thomas writes:

Gibbs in unique among contemporary arrangers (1959-present) in that his full-time employment is not in music; he has been a manager in the hospitality industry for over fifteen years (this book was published in 2007). As a young man in Flint, Michigan, he was active in music and attended Beecher High School. He later attended Kentucky State University where he met the legendary William Dawson, a man whose compositions he had long admired. At this meeting, Mr. Dawson said to Gibbs, “always embrace the spiritual with pride and humility.” These words stayed with Gibbs and are a profound influence on his arrangements. 

In the preface to Way Over in Beulah Lan’: Understanding and Performing the Negro Spiritual, Thomas writes:

It is not enough to know simply the music. One must know the culture of that folk music as well as the history of its people, but most importantly, the music must be sung with the respect of that culture. it is my hope that this book will provide for the choral conductor, singer, and interested person an historical background of this great music, performance considerations, a selected discussion of arrangers, and a look at how I approach several spiritual arrangements. I hope that it will assist choral conductors in reaching an informed performance of the music and hopefully create within their experience an experience for their African American singers that is an ennobling one, and, for their non-African American singers, one that cultivates a respect and appreciation of the music of the slave. It is said that it is amazing that out of man’s inhumanity to man should come forth America’s greatest art form – the Negro spiritual. 

I have thought a lot about Gibbs’ juxtaposition of I’ll Fly Away and Let Me Fly, especially in the context of our concert theme which includes connections. There is an interesting article in the Library of Congress regarding African American spirituals which includes a paragraph regarding I’ll Fly Away, from the “white spiritual” genre.

Arican American Spirituals – Library of Congress (article) read more…

Hello Everyone,

As always, I enjoyed making music with everyone. It was wonderful to meet beautiful Lily tonight – congratulations and welcome back, Rebecca!

Two recordings made by Amy’s friend, Lana are on the Recordings/Links tab on the practice files page.. One recording is the list of words under the IPA Pronunciation Guide and the other recording is the list of words under Foreign Terms included at the front of our scores for My People Are Rising. I asked Lana about Alawite since you can find examples on the Internet that indicate the last syllable sounds like “wheat” and others that indicate that it sounds like “white.” Lana advised that we use “white.” The performance recording in our practice tracks uses the “wheat” pronunciation – but we will use “white.”

Below are additional links to share with you:

My People Are Rising

Interview with Composer Carol Barnett – My People Are Rising

Mohja Kahf Reading My People Are Rising  (Carol Barnett does not use the whole poem)

The Valley

Jane Siberry Sings The Valley Very free-flowing!

The Imaginary Garden

Imprisonment Ends for Mahvash Sabet

Prison Poetry of Mahvash Sabet

The Tree of Peace

Gwyneth Walker: In Her Own Words

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Hello Everyone,

I enjoyed our rehearsal last night – I hope that you did, too!

Here are some links that may be of interest to you.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) Interactive Pronunciation Chart

Witness the Hour: Conversations with Arab-American Poets Across the Diaspora

She Carries the Weapons; They are Called Words

Pronunciation of [ae] for Banyas (probably more information than you ever thought possible!)

We will continue to work with the tuning exercise that we began last night to help us tune I Sing That My Voice May Be Heard. If you are working with a tuning app (or your piano), practice singing a D major ascending scale: Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do then descending Do-Ti-La-So-Fa-Mi-Re-Do-Ti-La-So then ascending So- La-Ti-Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So then skipping from So to low La and then ascending to Do. Check to make sure that you are high enough for So before skipping down to La and that you return to our hometone, Do.

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Hello Everyone,

I had a wonderful time with you at our retreat. Thanks to all who were able to attend – but we certainly missed those who were not able to be with us.

What a beautiful setting for our music-making!

We began our retreat with Connections and learned some very unique things about one another…we are quite an interesting community!

We then worked through excerpts of our music as we applied Laban’s Eight Efforts, enhancing our ensemble’s expressiveness. If you would like to hear our progress, here are rehearsal snippets from the WVC Retreat.
punch , dab , flick , press , wring , slash , float , glide

I have a hard copy of the Laban information printed for everyone, but if you missed the retreat and want to have a look before Monday evening, I have attached the document.

We then worked with Gwen Hall, our clinician for our retreat. She shared her creative process when composing I Sing That My Voice May Be Heard. We rehearsed the piece with Gwen giving us very helpful feedback and guidance along the way. Her insights helped us to reach a new level of artistry with this piece. You can listen here: I Sing That My Voice May Be Heard. Although we made great progress in expressiveness, we will continue to work on intonation – the opening phrase is not in tune…and then we don’t quite sit in a tonal center throughout….but we will work on this together!

During lunch (which was DE-licious! – thanks to all who brought such yummy food!), we relaxed but also discussed the lyrics of The Valley. Representatives from each of the tables shared their thoughts with the chorus in our afternoon rehearsal. Of course, there are no right or wrong answers in regard to interpreting lyrics. Phrases will have different meanings to each of us and that is FINE! It is the personal connection that we have to our music that will shine through as we share it with others.

We had a very informative business meeting – your membership liaison can share those details with you if you were not present. I’m sure that others can answer questions, as well. Janet looked LOVELY in her WVC outfit – talk to her if you have questions about performance attire.

We also celebrated May, June, July, and August birthdays (and Happy Birthday to Meg who celebrated her 49th with us today!).

The remainder of our afternoon was productively spent drilling pitches and rhythms on The Valley and Let me Fly. Progress!

Thanks to Kay, Debbie, Meg, and to all who contributed to such a wonderful, music-filled day.

Cheers!

Laura

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Hello Everyone,

I had such fun with everyone at rehearsal last night. Thank you for all of your hard work and attention to detail. Once we have our “nuts and bolts” accomplished we can really dig in – and we are already well on our way. I think of “nut and bolts” as all of the information in our written music – but then we have all of the interpretive and expressive work to look forward to.

Great job looking up from your music when we repeated our tuning exercises. The cruise ship analogy is one that I often think of when conducting a chorus. I have never actually steered a cruise ship (surprise!) but I can imagine that it takes more time and distance to make a change in course when compared to steering a speedboat (or Andrew’s little fishing boat!). Really, it’s how well we are communicating with one another. if you look up, I will do my best to give you something worth seeing! A well-known choral conductor, Rodney Eichenberger, gave this advice during a workshop I attended many years ago,  “What they see is what you get!”

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Hello Everyone,

So many birthday celebrations tonight – happy birthday to those celebrating their special days in October!

I loved our WVC celebration on Sunday afternoon. Many thanks to all who made it possible and to all who were able to attend – so much fun! We missed those who were not able to be there in person, but I am sure you were with us in spirit. Thank you for my lovely flowers. My husband, Andrew, really enjoyed seeing/meeting everyone. Everything looked beautiful and the food was delicious. It was wonderful to sing A Path to Each Other.

We have one more rehearsal until our fall retreat and I am looking forward to tackling some of the sections in our music that we have not yet been through and digging into the sections where we have learned the basics.

I have attached the notes that I took at the NC ACDA Conference session regarding breathing for singing (Laura D. was in the session with me). It was a wonderful conference and I have other tidbits to share in the coming days. I am confident that we cannot go wrong with an energized breath!

Here is a link to the Rehearsal Recordings that I made tonight. I think it is really beneficial to listen to our progress so that we can hear what we have accomplished and know what we have yet to do.

Welcome to the world to Baby Spencer – Rachel, we can’t wait to meet your son and look forward to your return to WVC.

My new mantra: DOWN-OUT-OPEN!

Cheers!

Laura

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Hello Everyone,

I enjoyed being with you at rehearsal last night. Thank you for your wonderful energy and hard work.

I will be at NC American Choral Director’s Association Fall Conference this weekend – Laura D. will also be there with a group of her youth chorus singers! :). I always look forward to growing in choral music and I am sure that I will have fresh ideas to bring back to WVC.

I was with the Alto 2 section for their sectional rehearsal and offered to make a voice memo of their part in The Valley because the rhythm is tricky. Please let me know if you would like for me to make voice memos of any measures/pieces that you would find helpful and I will be glad to do so (although I can’t always sing all of the S1 parts if they are above the staff). The practice files are AWESOME but if it helps to have something slower or with the lyrics, just let me know.

I couldn’t send you the recordings as attached files (too large) so I am sending you a link to a Google folder.

WVC Rehearsal Recordings

If I don’t see you Sunday afternoon, I will look forward to seeing you on Monday night.

Cheers!

Laura read more…

Hello Everyone!

I enjoyed being with you at our rehearsal – we are making progress! Thank you for our music making and also for our improved transitions – we moved with better efficiency tonight and that was very helpful.

Please work on your scales and interval exercises as you have time – individual accuracy will improve our ensemble intonation. If you are not already comfortable using sol-fa, hopefully as you become fluent you will begin to connect with how scale degrees (Do, Re Mi, etc.) function in a melody (Ti feels high and leads upward to Do, Re moves a whole step or a Major 2nd up from Do, etc.). Scale degrees have functions within harmonies, too. Do is always our home tone in a major key, La is our home tone in a minor key. There are other modes, of course, but that is for another day.

Please memorize the text for A Path to Each Other. The intonation using sol-fa was very sparkly tonight – brava!

Cheers to all – I am already looking forward to our next rehearsal!

Laura

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Hello Everyone!

I enjoyed being with you at our rehearsal! Please excuse my not sending these notes Tuesday. I was already well on my way to Boone when I realized that my laptop was not in my computer bag. Please accept my apologies as I know this may have negatively impacted your personal practice schedule.

One item that is not specifically musical but does affect our music making…

Let’s give our attention to ensuring that we make the most of our time together each week. I can tell by the number of times that I hear shushing during the rehearsal that members are not always able to hear instructions or notes because of chatter. I ask that collectively we all do our best to minimize conversations that slow us down and that can be a distraction, especially during transitions. Our acoustically live rehearsal space amplifies even soft conversations. I will do my best to keep rehearsal moving at a musically appropriate pace so that we move forward with intention and purpose. I know that the social aspect of our community is very important so we will certainly continue to connect with one another during our mid-rehearsal break.

We will continue to work on strengthening our audiation skills as I feel sure it will help our overall intonation. Please include scales in your individual practice sessions and challenge yourself to audiate pitches. You may want to consider an app for your phone to check your progress. I use an app called Sing In Tuna for my iPhone (so far there is not an android version). This app gives me immediate feedback because it shows the note that I am singing on the staff and indicates whether or not I am singing in the center of the pitch. If you can’t use that app, here is a link to other tuning apps that might be helpful. If you use an acoustic piano, obviously it should be in tune or it won’t be much help with intonation exercises. Forgive my stating the obvious but my own piano is overdue for its tuning so I know how that can happen even with the best of intentions.

Cheers to all – see you Monday!

Laura

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Hello WVC!

My apologies for an extra email this week but clarification is needed on our part splits. Attached is a PDF of your part assignments. Below is our repertoire and the splits we are using. These are all indicated on the practice files that Karla made so you may already have this information. It would be helpful if everyone marked this in their scores. Ask your section leaders if you have questions please – they will know how to best assist you.

Some of you may be wondering about the card system that WVC has used in the past. We will probably use these cards later in the fall.  Right now, as we are in the beginning stages of working through our music, my preference is that we sit high voices to low voices (as you have been sitting) and that you choose your individual seats within your general section area according to where you learn most efficiently.

In the future, we will also use the Square System that divides you into smaller mixed ensembles but we aren’t ready for that quite yet.

Thank you so much for all of your work and dedication to WVC. I am having a wonderful time working on our music together – see you Monday!

Cheers!

Laura

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Hello Everyone,

Than you for a wonderful rehearsal and fun social time! Welcome, again, to our new members, and welcome back to everyone else.

I did not realize that my rehearsal notes in purple (last week) did not translate well to our website so I am changing my rehearsal feedback to paragraph/bulleted form. Since you have the rehearsal plans now for the coming week (you didn’t have them last week because it was our first rehearsal) I won’t include them again, but you can refer to them as needed.

I am already looking forward to next week.

Cheers!

Laura

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Dear WVC Singers,

Thank you for your hospitable welcome and for your amazing energy. Thank you for your passionate singing and attentive listening…and thank you for singing through our break. We won’t make that a habit because breaks are important not only for our personal needs but also for us to connect with one another socially. An enormous thank you, once again, to all who worked so hard to prepare for our first rehearsal and for our auditions last night.

Attached is the voice memo recording of The Path to Each Other that I made at the end of our rehearsal last night. It is a wonderful start on the path of our musical journey. You can hear what we have already accomplished and what we have yet to accomplish!

Below are the rehearsal notes with my post-rehearsal comments in purple. The rehearsal notes for 9/9/19 follow so that you can prepare for our next rehearsal. I look forward to our music-making.

Cheers!

Laura

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