Learning music without, well, music

I know, pretty impressive stuff but we really are currently learning a song by ear and it's in Czech though it must be said we haven't actually looked at the words yet. It is a jolly little ditty as you heard last week and we found it hard not to dance... or at least move rhythmically. Kind of. Jen's hands in the air number was particularly striking.

The Rudsambee-lets were all a little sleepy last night for some reason. Some folks indeed had particular reasons - both Maestro Boy and Diva Helen had heard the tweeting morning birds that morning as they finished off their dissertations. Congrats to both on handing in.

So what did this lethargic musical group do last night? Well, we spent most of the evening working through 'Cloudburst' and, in particular, the 'tough section' in the middle. Muchos jolly fun. Let me tell you something interesting, there are no lisps in Mexican. Seemingly our South American friends have never experienced the difficulties of speech impediments, indeed the art of speech therapy is entirely unnecessary. At least that's what A-L said and she speaks Spanish with a cool accent and everything.

We also had a long conversation about the way to click. Monsieur Wexler had seen a pretty spectacular version of 'Cloudburst' recently, as lef by the composer himself, and tried to describe the way the choir clicked. Maestro Boy took over and asked for 'big wet clicks' and then for clicks at, as Arno prompted, a 'higher frequency'. Queue quote of the night from Kay numero uno: "do you mean faster? Then why didn;t you just say faster!?" Ah, plain English! I particularly enjoyed Anne's Latin translation of 'fast clicking' which was something like "accelerando clickio". Brilliant! 'Cloudburst' is really coming on and is great fun to rehearse.

Anyways, just to tell anyone who cares (that's y'all), you can now book your seat at the 'Cloudburst' concert in June. It's a free night for charidee but you can reserve your place (we'll put our coats over them or something).

Until next week then...

CSW