Whitacre to Debussy

How versatile are we? From the former to the latter in 90 minutes. As usual though we opened with a warm up. Jen led which is always jolly (see last week's wee game) and we attempted to sing some really quite straight forward ditties. However, we struggled slightly quite a bit, which I put down to either being tired after a hard day at the office/making jam/lounging around music departments/concocting peculiar experiments (that one's for you Robin, in your absence) or else just being very stoopid. I will leave you to make up your own minds, blog fans. Poor Jenny looked a bit miffed at how rubbish we were. Sorry Jen! We'll try harder, honest.

Anyways we spent most of the evening (as last week) on Cloudburst and I must say that, after A-L's brief language class, our Spanish (sorry, Mexican) is really starting to sound quite good. I may buy a sombrero to celebrate. Actually, we had managed to remember much of what we had learned the week before which was fairly impressive. Comment of the night certainly went to Maestro Boy who suggested that the Tenors "come out of the ladies". What he meant of course was that, since the women have a beautiful floaty passage to sing, the gentlemen should be equally ethereal (great word) on their entry (oo-er). I, however, had an image reminiscent of the Alien films (which I haven't seen BTW so I may well be making the next bit up) where the, well, alien comes straight out of a lady's tummy. Nice image for you there, hope you are all enjoying your supper! Suffice to say that by the end of the evening it was all starting to sound rather lovely. I think a lot of us are very excited about the prospect of singing this fabulous piece.

We moved on to Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder!, our new bit of Debussy [Wow, he looks like he should be one of our Tenors there!] which Maestro Boy thought was going to be hard but actually, after the pyrotechnics (not literally, sadly) of Cloudburst, it proved to be a straightforward and beautiful piece. The only thing you have to watch is the rhythms. Oh, and the amount of incidentals accidentals [cheeky editor] but that is by the by (incidentally - ha ha - I'm not sure if I have used the term incidentals in the right way here... what I mean is sharps and flats and stuff but as I only passed my music theory exam on my second attempt - and that only because the paper included some choral music much to the relief of yours truly - I am never quite sure what I am talking about. And that could probably go for most areas of my life...). I must hereby apologise for the grammar of the previous sentence; even I lost the gist halfway through.

On a couple of final notes, welcome to Kay2 who is filling in for Nat while she is on sabbatical. Hope you can stick it out. And big hugs to Tom who came back to visit. We have missed you man but are glad to see you looking so well.

Anyways, Guitar Hero World Tour beckons for a quick game. I have progressed to hard but am struggling slightly with the orange one, if you know what I mean. For another week.

CSW