Well, Sunday morning I woke up at 3:30 (I was really wired both about the upcoming service and about some plans to do with my birthday concert that didn't work out) and then was only beginning to be able to get back to sleep when the alarm went off at 6. So OK, I got five hours of sleep, certainly enough.
When I got to church, there were only three (second) sopranos, none with any training and really only one who knows how to stay on a part so of course the section sounded God awful. The Director of Music was there conducting and he had to work with them separately. There was one line (no high notes; went up to a D) that was very exposed that they could not sing at all, apparently, so the three higher altos (me and two others) ended up singing it with them.
Do I really care which part I sing on a gorgeous piece of music like that? No. Mendelssohn writes lovely alto parts that have a decent range. The reason I was so angry is that it's all about perception. I don't like being made to feel like a big oaf trampling on someone's flowers, which is so often how I am made to feel. If that were counterbalanced by the choir director's occasionally saying something like "thank you babydramatic for holding that note without breathing!" or calling as much attention to something I did well as to something I did (in his opinion) badly that would be fine.
Also IMHO it was a wrong-headed decision to arrange the women the way he did. If I were in charge of that particular assortment of women (I am being totally objective here) I would have kept me with the sopranos (there is already one alto with training) and told the sopranos not to sing the high A because really no one except a trained lyric soprano (not a trained mezzo with a loud voice and certainly not untrained sopranos) can sing it decently. I could certainly hold the part together, sing the high Gs (which were all marked forte; they were not "float-y") and the balance would have been better.
Well, now it's on to the next thing, a lengthy piece in Hebrew that sounds a lot like Copeland (and it turns out that Copeland was the composer's mentor, so yes! I am developing a trained ear!). It has eight parts and the second soprano part is quite easy to stay on (also it is written with only two parts per staff). Sometimes there are only four parts and the soprano part goes up to a G, but it is definitely something I can sing, including one note that probably is float-y. I just have to work on it.
As well as working on the music for my birthday concert. A lot of it is non-classical (although I can sing it with my "legit" voice) so I want to work on style.
And a dear dear friend, the woman who gave me the idea for the birthday concert in the first place, who has very little money and lives mostly on Social Security volunteered to send me a bouquet of flowers for my concert. She said she had wanted to surprise me but then thought she needed to know which day to send them, so I told her, and thanked her profusely. Yes, that's what thoughtfulness looks like.
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