Cough, splutter, cough...

...so went the Rudsambeelets last night. Lots of sickness around at present and the air was scented with Olbas Oil (other natural sinus clearers are available). Hopefully we'll all be on the up by next week.

So we were late beginning the main rehearsal because we were moving through the fair with the small group so Maestro Boy's warmup was as follows: "(note on the keyboard) can you sing that? (Rudsambeelets sing beautifically) Right, let's try the 'Huron Carol' then shall we?" Surely the shortest warmup ever attempted.

Yes, you hear right, the 'Huron Carol' has been dragged out of the folder for Christmas 2009. So it's Gitchi Manitou all over again. For those who haven't heard this one before it is a jolly Native Indian song celebrating Christmas. The final chords take us into a major key which makes the whole thing a little cheesy/emotionally affecting (delete as appropriate). As we sang we remembered the last time we performed this a couple of years ago. There is a wonderful moment where the lyric is 'kneel' but the representative rhyming word is 'pelt' (as in beaver pelt don't you know). In order to rhyme it with the former it would, of course, have to be 'peel' which brings a whole other image to the table! We decided that Beaver peel could either be a type of shoe leather or the rodent equivalent of candied peel. So 'knelt' to rhyme with 'pelt' seems to be best.

There is also a moment in this piece where the basses split into three. Since we only had two basses last night this posed a bit of a problem. We did consider doing a 'mother in front of Solomon' and chopping Arno in half but decided against it.

We used to do this piece with rolled 'r's' as far as we remember but as we couldn't imagine our Indian friends singing it as though it were Italian opera we decided just to emphasise the 'r's' instead. Claire 2's laughter at the sops' lovely rolled 'r's' confirmed our decision... We also created two new musical terms last night (we are right on the cusp of the British experimental choral scene) - 'bigging' and 'littling'. Basically I think it refers largely to crescendos and...erm...the opposite.

So we also bashed through 'Veni, Veni' again and a new piece about trees (the title has escaped me). The latter was hard with bars of 9/8 and notes with little '2s' above them which means...the 2 version of triplets. So the piece feels like it is slowing down, like squishing your way across a muddy field. A tough little number but we'll get there as always. We even had time to sing through 'Dormi Jesu' which we've nailed. Huzzah!

So that's all for now. Lots of pills, Vitamin C and throat sweeties. Cough, cough...Hugs to all the Rudsambeelets who are struggling through the dreaded colds.

Until next week...cough...cough
CSW