"Is this not boring for anyone?"

This was the question from Maestro Boy to conclude tonight's festivities. The answer, my musically-adept friends, is certainly not. A little scared, yes; a little blown away, certainly; but bored? most definitely not. Indeed, how could one be bored when confronted with the behemoth (a little used and underrated word) that is Cloudburst.

After a jolly beginning when we played In my grandmother's basket (a Jennified version of 'I went to the shops') using only vowels (I know, I know!), we spent the rest of the rehearsal on 'Cloudburst'. Last week we discussed the usefulness of 'Twinkle Twinkle' in finding a fifth. This week it's the classic Blue Danube that came in handy. The opening chord is basically the beginning 4 notes of the Strauss (don't ask me which of this impressive dynasty wrote it) piece.

It was a really exciting evening of chanting, learning Spanish (sorry Mexican), clashing chords and the prospect of handbells. Actually an even scarier prospect was brought to our attention this evening. In bar 75, ladies and gentlemen, the sopranos split into 7 - yes that's right, 7. Count how many sopranos there are? By a happy and handy coincidence, there are 7. As Alison put it, this is the piece we were born to do! Perhaps, however, Maestro Boy has been retaining all 7 of us purely to do this piece. Perhaps after our June performance he will do a Soprano cull, like a fox or badger (warning: noisy link!) cull but with, well, Sopranos. We are watching out backs.

Anyways, after last week's incredible linkage by Editor extraordinaire Christopher, I am hoping for similar excitement this week, though, as we agreed, if the linkage takes longer to do than the actual writing of the piece then we are probably overdoing it.

Hoping you all have a marvellous week.

CSW