YRCC Rehearsal Review 14-Mar-2022

It was wonderful having Donna accompany us and help us learn parts! You can tell she's been doing this for a while; she's fantastic. Donna is the accompanist for the police choir, so she can only do Monday nights for us until they start up again. We don't know when that will be. The Admin Centre is still closed. 

Someone suggested we blend the two choirs together, but that won't work for many of us YRCC folk who work during the day. The police choir does daytime stuff. And besides, they're a very different choir from us. I've actually been thinking for a while about changing our night to Tuesdays to see if some of those men would choose to sing in both choirs. Some of our women might want to join the police choir now that they're recruiting women. Everyone present thought that moving to Tuesday would work. We'd have to find out if our room would be available here at Trinity and later at the Admin Centre.

Something else that came up was whether or not we think we can perform a concert, or maybe just do seniors' homes since we're a smallish group. It's good to have a goal to work toward, but I guess we could change our goal to small seniors' visits, and maybe a different kind of concert, free, outdoors? 

Exciting. We'll be doing more talking and planning. 

Peggy came with all the new music, numbered and punched and ready to add to our binders. All the binders are ready for members to come back. Spread the word. 

Here's what we sang:

1. Wonderful World

I see skies of blue and clouds of white, the bright blessed day, the dark sacred night. Reminds me of the people walking through the neighbourhood at all times of day, couples, families, fast walkers and slower walkers, andante, adagio, lento even. Our audience would enjoy singing along with us, I think.

2. Blue Skies 

Nothing but blue skies from now on… we hope and pray that the pandemic restrictions can end and we can sing freely again, projecting our voices with confidence, without masks,…a dream for now. We all wore masks or face shields so that we could sit closer together. 

 Melinda and Debbie sang the solos, and were great. Lauren has offered to sing one of the solos, so she could do the first and Debbie is the soloist for the second, but we always need back-ups, so let me know if you'd like to try either of these. 

We did snaps and jazz hands: mark your music where you start and stop snapping. Sopranos snap on page 1, everyone snaps during the solos. Jazz hands on the last word. 

We talked about solos in general. We have 4 songs with solos. Let me know if you are interested in any of these:

1. Blue Skies – 2 soloists (Lauren and Debbie, back-ups needed)

2. Seasons of Love- 1 or 2 solos and back-ups are needed

3. This Little Light of Mine- 1 or 2 solos (Mary-Ellen, another? back-ups needed)

4. We Rise Again- 1 solo (Marlene, back-up needed)

3. Sunshine Medley

Here comes the sun, and I say, it’s alright, let the sun in, don’t you worry 'bout a thing. It can be difficult to relax and open up to good things after going through bad things. We will try to let the sun in and also to let our lights shine. 

The time changes look odd, but we should not have to worry too much about them, because our Here Comes the Sun sounds a lot like the Beatles'. We sang all the way up to bar 42. We'll review all that next week. 

4. We Rise Again 

As sure as the sunrise, as sure as the tides and the seasons, we rise again and again- in the faces of our children, in the voices of our song.

Marlene is an excellent soloist for this! If anyone is interested in being a back-up, let me know. 

We started at C (middle of page 5, bar 19- if you need to add letters to your music click here) :

We reviewed all the parts in C. We need to hear T/B lines, which are cool and different. I need to hear the basses at bar 19 on beat 4. At bar 25, the basses joined the tenor moving on beat 3 in "ocean" and that was a good move. So, basses, please change your notes to a half note followed by a quarter there.

We'll go over it again next week, and we'll review all of the oohs and ahhs. We did the oohs and ahhs on page 7 and it was good to look at them again. 

We sang all the way to the end. We need to review who sings what in the last 2 bars @64, 65

I had planned to sing You Raise Me UP as well, but I guess we did a bunch of extra talking. That's fine. My planning is flexible these days. 

I had hoped to start the small group Good Morning Starshine on March 21st, but let's push that to the 28th. We'll talk about small groups next week. 

Monday, March 21st:

Here's the plan for next week:

1. You Raise Me Up
2. I Can See Clearly Now
3. Sunshine Medley
4. We Rise Again
5. Hallelujah