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!

Sunday, May 9, 2021

Sharing and Singing at YRCC Zoom Choir

 We sing on Monday nights because that’s what we do. We’re the York Region Community Choir and we sing. 

But, the choir has always been a place to socialize, to chat and share stories too. Now, we do more of that because we don’t have people shushing us, because we’re not learning new music, so we can do a lot more chatting and sharing. I still try to have most of our time spent on our music, but now more than ever, we need to have this opportunity to connect with people. 

One thing we do is share songs that we like and videos and even movies.

 Last week, it was Melinda’s birthday, so I suggested that she could choose which song we would sing next. Her choice was You Raise Me Up. Good choice! We all love that one and it’s one of our audience favourites so we have a number of good recordings to sing with. We sang it together. And, then, Pat, I think it was Pat, said she had heard Celtic Woman sing it that morning. Maybe it was Joanne? I had YouTube open still, after having sung Love is an Open Door with both the clip from the Disney movie and with the sheet music sample on YouTube. So, I searched Celtic Woman and You Raise Me Up was right there. I clicked on it and we watched the video together. It was so cool to watch this video together! It was a beautiful live performance, with lots of people and with a small orchestra and a small choir, and it was fun to comment and hear the comments of the other choir folk on the call. We have so much in common, and this was something we all appreciated and loved, a perfect thing to share. 



I think we’ll have to do more of that, sharing videos for fun.

Often, people send me links to videos they think I’ll like and often they are right and I love it and I love them for thinking of me. 

Michele doesn’t Zoom, but she sent me a link to an Il Volvo performance recently. They’re so adorable, and so talented, those young men! And this video was of a live open-air performance, with a huge audience, so many people! Sometimes these things make my heart race with anxiety. We’ve been in this pandemic for a year and it’s strange to see so many people so close together. On the other hand, I yearn to do that again, jealous of those people so clueless that they’re breathing each other’s potentially dangerous air. Sigh.

We watched a very emotional video, well, most of it. I skipped through it to avoid the total breakdown of tears. It was Angels Calling by the Tenors. OMG!When you need your eye sockets cleaned out, watch that.

If you have Netflix, watch The Octopus Teacher. That was highly recommended by Pat and Joanne. 

Come and join us for lots of warm and fun conversations, great music, and singing.