September 17, the moon was full, beautiful. It was in fact a special moon, because it was the moon of the Mid Autumn Festival, also called the Moon Festival. It's a big harvest festival, like Thanksgiving, in China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Philippines. I want to wish our friends Stanley and Mona and their families a very happy Mid Autumn Festival and days as sweet as moon cakes and as bright as the full moon. And, of course, I extend my wishes to everyone celebrating.
We started with another fun warm-up, stretching, moving, clapping and singing along to a recording of the Mamas and the Papas' Monday, Monday. It's a song we sang a lot when we were meeting on Mondays. There are easy harmonies in the ba-das so anyone can sing along. (btw, on Thursday, My Sing-along Café theme will be days of the week, so we will singing this song for sure! Remember to come at our new early start time: 7 o'clock)
1. Peace on This Silent Night: I thought this would be a fast review, but in fact lots of you hadn't sung this before. Still, you learned it very quickly! There are 2 parts and Soprano and Tenor are on Part l and Alto and Bass are Part ll. However, only the Basses start at the beginning at bar 11 and only Sopranos start at bar 19. Everybody is in at bar 23. At 67, it's soft and only Sopranos on Part l, so Tenors can join Part ll there singing Silent Night softly. Tenors go back to Part l at bar 91, strongly. Everyone needs to watch me to stay together. Pay close attention to beat 1 especially, but watch for every beat on page 11.
2. Song for a Winter's Night: We spent time on pages 9, 10, and 11 and 12 which are the only pages the whole choir sings. Pages 1-9 are 2 solos and we're dropping all of the oohs. Starting from the very end, the mm on page 12, we learned parts, including the top of page 10 where we used those ooh notes to sing the words that only the Altos were given. We added a note to create an ending, so we move on the word drif-ting. It's going to be so beautiful!
3. When You Belive: We walked through the song looking at the theme and noticing that we will be singing in Hebrew! I especially love that we get to sing very loudly: "I will sing! I will sing! I will sing!" a couple of times. Singing is our expression of joy and gratitude for all of the wonders in our lives. "Who knows what miracles you can achieve? When you believe, somehow you will." We make our own dreams come true, believing in ourselves and in the support we get from our families and communities. Expressing our wishes through prayer or song or wish lists (letters to Santa) helps us to manifest them. This is going to be a big, beautiful, powerful song. If you have some time, please work on this at home. There are links to recordings of your parts on the website.
Here's a screenshot of the recordings page of our website. You can see that When You Belive has links for each part and then a recording of a choir singing our arrangement beautifully. The only difference will be that Mona and Stanley will sing solos at the beginning (will need back-up soloists).
4. Your Song: Last tweek we learned the Segno (pg 5/6) and this time we learned the Coda (pg 10/11) so we can sing through from the Segno to the end for the second time through. I love the Coda! It's so dramatic. Remember to always watch at the endings of any song we sing. This one has changes in tempo and dynamics, so you'll definitely have to watch me. I found a recording of an excellent choir singing our arrangement and I want to emulate what they've done with the dynamics. Please listen to/watch this video. It's so good! There's a link to this video on our website on the recordings page. We also have the accompaniment, but not the parts yet. You can see that the SATB are still in black font, meaning there's no link yet.
My YouTube Playlist for this season of YRCC songs. I've collected a bunch of videos that I think will help to inspire you and help you learn your parts.
We had some sad news.
Jack West passed away. He sang with us for a while and he was Pat McCurdy's brother. He also played saxophone in the Newmarket Citizen's Band. Here is a link to the obituary and details of the visitations and funeral service and reception, Thursday and Friday at Roadhouse & Rose in Newmarket.
Next week: Tuesday, September 24th (sorry, we're starting Christmas)
- All That Holiday Stuff
- Song for a Winter's Night
- We Wish You a Merry Madrigal
- When You Belive
- Your Song
Small Group: 7:00 Twelve Pains of Christmas (please sign up on the Events Page)
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