Welcome


Welcome to Renate's Baton. This blog is mostly for and about my choir, The York Region Community Choir.

But, While I'm holding the baton, I'm in charge. So, if I want to talk about other parts of my life, I will. :)

The choir itself is a community and I'm discovering that we have a lot in common with one another besides our love of music and singing.

When I go off on a tangent, there is always a crowd coming along. Join us!

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Rehearsal Review: Monday, January 19th

Monday, January 19th
Sapphire and Renate recorded the accompaniments for Boogie Woogie Man, Button Up Your Overcoat, Another Op'nin', Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and Hello, Goodbye. We also did all the parts for Jesu so you can review them at home :-)
Most of the recordings for this season are already up! Spend some time singing at home- or, how about singing in the car?

Warm-ups included Mi Me Ma Mo Mu.

1. Button Up Your Overcoat was amazing!!! The tenor and bass section was especially strong.

2. Tup-Tuppa was hard. We learned our individual parts for the second half. Wow! 32nd notes are fast! Everybody has challenges in the second half.  Look at your music and divide things up into manageable bits. Which parts are the same, repeated? Mark up your music with pencil. Listen to Sapphire's recordings and listen to versions on YouTube. The more familiar you are with the song, the easier it will be to read your music. The first half is already sounding pretty good after only 2 rehearsals. Trust me. It will be great.

3. Hello, Goodbye is fun and not very hard (Yay!) but we do have some work to do. We started with Penny Lane, with the bm-bm part. We noticed that the bm-bms are supposed to be detached, and that's similar to what we're doing in Tup-Tuppa. If it helps you to detach your pa-pas, think of them as pm-pms. We did say that the Tenor and Bass parts have pa-pa-pum and quite a bit of it sounds like pum-pum.

4. Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring got messed up last week when we sang the second verse. So, this week we started with the second verse. No worries. Whatever happened got fixed. It was fine this week :-)
Looking ahead, we want to be very strong on our parts in both verses, and remember to sing very softly at the beginning and to give pages 5 and 6 extra attention. There's a lot of drama there.

5. This Little Light of Mine. We just sang through once, sight-reading, and it was already pretty good! Gerry is going to sing the solo in the section that starts "On a Monday" and that section repeats. Sopranos lead the key change out of that second repeat. We'll have to work on making the many repetitions of the chorus interesting by varying the dynamics.

Monday, January 26th: Social Rehearsal with Coffee

6:30 Musical Medley small group rehearsals start! Sign up and come early to sing special selections of our past musical medleys. 

  1. All I Have to Do is Dream
  2. Another Op'nin'
  3. Do Wah Diddy-Diddy
  4. I'm Always Chasing Rainbows
  5. You'll Never Walk Alone





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