Every once in a while, you have a rehearsal that makes you realise, you don’t frequently use all of the brain power available to you… Monday evening was a real knuckle down and work out those tricky harmonies and pick apart every complex ‘ooo’, ‘hmmm’ or ‘lalala’ section!
We began with Life Has Loveliness by Greg Gilpin. It’s a beautiful song, however I’m pretty sure the choir will be ecstatic to know the arrangement is now on YouTube… time to get practicing!!
Next up was ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers. We’ve very lightly attempted this piece before, but I can now quite confidently say that we’ve well and truly ‘had a good go at it’. I think it was a slight shock when we glanced at the clock and saw 9.15pm had snuck up on us and we’d only sung through two songs. Yet, personally, I treasure these types of rehearsals. You leave feeling incredibly satisfied, knowing you can be quietly confident that the first 20-or-so bars of a song are permanently etched into your brain.
Katy threw it to us in the last 5 minutes and one of our lovely sopranos decided we should close what was quite a focused evening, with something fun! So, Heroes (a Eurovision classic) was really the only option!
As we all began to pack away, the general chit-chat turned into a rather insightful, if not slightly impromptu ted-talk by Katy, all about our soft palate. There was a lot of ‘pop your finger in your mouth’ and ‘if you do x,y,z can you feel your soft palate lift?’. As someone who sings for fun, I love moments like this, where the musicians around you get all technical and by osmosis you feel as though you’re becoming a well-informed singer!
Written by Becky Fowler