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!

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Oct 19: Election night and a Jays game too, but we had a big, wonderful rehearsal.

Monday, Oct. 19

Roxanne brought posters and tickets! We started buying/ taking tickets and taking posters to post where we work, where we meet with others, anywhere.

We are still looking for someone to take over the Music Librarian position. We are willing to look at accommodating anyone willing to help. If you have the space but not the time, maybe someone will partner with you, someone with time but not enough space. It doesn't have to be an Executive position if you're not interested in the planning thing. Talk to us if you have any ideas. Trix really needs to give up this position asap.

Coventry Carol met early and Breath of Heaven sang at 7:15 with the accompaniment recording. Breath of Heaven people need to pay more attention to blending and enunciating so that the words are clear and the parts are balanced. Be sure to quiet down when you're not singing melody.

Warm-ups included watching hands and quickly responding to changes. Some of us are better than others at this, but we did well before our hands got too heavy.

1. Little Tree. We reviewed pages 6 and 7 and remembered to enunciate carefully, especially final consonants. It's not always easy, but try.

2.Shine Hanukkah We reviewed the special Soprano 1 ending, the Descant part, and added a few volunteers from Sop 2 for extra strength. It's cool, but we really need to hear it.

3. Shepherds (aka What is this Lovely Fragrance) We reviewed the a cappella part on page 5 at starting bar 56. It really helped that a bunch of us learned it the week before! Bam! We got it. And, Melinda and Blair sang the solos at the beginning so that we could do the whole song! It was awesome!

4. Jesus, Jesus We got all the way through! Again, it helped so much that some of us already knew the chorus from last week! It's so pretty! The altos and tenors and basses were excellent on their oohs, and everyone was great on that very challenging part at the bottom of the page, "Winds were blowing..." So cool!

I hadn't planned to get that far on Shepherds and Jesus, Jesus, but we did so well that I kept going with that instead of singing through the 12 Songs of Christmas. That will have to wait until next week.

Next week: Monday, October 26th

We are having our Meeting with Coffee and Treats, and hopefully it will be fast so we can sing more than talk. It's just a bit of financial business: approving our Financial Statements and Budget and officially changing our financial year-end. The doc was sent in an email for you to look at.

6:45 Coventry Carol

  • Twelve Songs of Christmas
  • O Holy Night
  • Jesus, Jesus
  • Sussex Carol






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