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Agh. Standing for two hours and meticulously articulating every bit of three Bach motets in front of like 200 people who actually care about Bach is not the way to recover from swordfighting soreness. I wore my steel chain shirt to chiv practice last night, so all the muscles below my jaw are overtired. And then, Bach.
The newest chamber choir member, who is from China, asked me my opinion of Bach, during that liminal eternity between call and show. I must have spent about three minutes trying to explain why I don't like Baroque music, but it felt like half an hour. She wasn't judging me, and her English, though good, isn't perfect, so I had to clarify some things after flinging them forth, but I think I boiled it down to squareness, limited chord progressions (contributing to a non-enjoyable form of predictability), limited timbral options, terraced rather than spectral dynamic ranges, excessive squiggliness (endless ornamentation that obscures a smooth melodic line, which is also something I don't like about R&B), and boring tonality.
So we did that for two hours. There were some breaks, at least, where Paul did his improvised responses. And the encore was Paul's canon, which we carried off well, I think, and it woke everybody up. One more left, and then we'll be done with Bach, and it'll be British time (well, after all the Christmas nonsense is over). We're even acquiring a notable King's Singers alum for the British A Cappella Tradition concert. I do so wish he'd still been teaching at NEC when I was there. I would probably have stayed in the classical choir. Then again, I did a bunch of other worthwhile things, and I'd already had the benefit of choral instruction by one King's Singers bass.
I arrived home this evening to find my silly little Silvestri cover (from the Avengers fic I liked so much I decided to make reality) has become tumblr famous. Somebody posted it, Sam signal-boosted, and now there are over 200 notes, some of which contain extremely flattering comments about my singing. Aw. It even ran out of downloads on soundcloud, so I wrote Sam that people could still get it from me, so Sam put it up on his Drive to save me the trouble. Aw. I'd forgotten, I put it on Youtube too. So I told him that.
What a nice surprise.
The newest chamber choir member, who is from China, asked me my opinion of Bach, during that liminal eternity between call and show. I must have spent about three minutes trying to explain why I don't like Baroque music, but it felt like half an hour. She wasn't judging me, and her English, though good, isn't perfect, so I had to clarify some things after flinging them forth, but I think I boiled it down to squareness, limited chord progressions (contributing to a non-enjoyable form of predictability), limited timbral options, terraced rather than spectral dynamic ranges, excessive squiggliness (endless ornamentation that obscures a smooth melodic line, which is also something I don't like about R&B), and boring tonality.
So we did that for two hours. There were some breaks, at least, where Paul did his improvised responses. And the encore was Paul's canon, which we carried off well, I think, and it woke everybody up. One more left, and then we'll be done with Bach, and it'll be British time (well, after all the Christmas nonsense is over). We're even acquiring a notable King's Singers alum for the British A Cappella Tradition concert. I do so wish he'd still been teaching at NEC when I was there. I would probably have stayed in the classical choir. Then again, I did a bunch of other worthwhile things, and I'd already had the benefit of choral instruction by one King's Singers bass.
I arrived home this evening to find my silly little Silvestri cover (from the Avengers fic I liked so much I decided to make reality) has become tumblr famous. Somebody posted it, Sam signal-boosted, and now there are over 200 notes, some of which contain extremely flattering comments about my singing. Aw. It even ran out of downloads on soundcloud, so I wrote Sam that people could still get it from me, so Sam put it up on his Drive to save me the trouble. Aw. I'd forgotten, I put it on Youtube too. So I told him that.
What a nice surprise.