Christmas Carolling
Dec. 15th, 2006 12:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyrasantae
So I was carolling with some peoples from choir for the last couple of days.
Now, I'm supposed to sing alto for this stuff, which I really didn't want to do, not to mention that I didn't go to quite a few of the rehearsals where we plowed through most of the carols in the book. The latter is mostly because I don't like my assistant director's attitude terribly much. I mean, I think it's great that he's putting pressure on the non-music readers to learn to do that, but it feels almost condescending in the way that he does it. I also didn't like how the swarm of participants singing soprano (about 3 times the size of the alto section) sang quite awfully shrill with no roundness of tone and weren't taking the whole thing seriously at all (just because you have aneasy easier job singing melody doesn't mean... yeah).
Basically how carolling works is that we get a list of all of the gigs that are available and we sign up for whichever ones you are willing/available to do. There only needs to be 4 singers because all of the songs are SATB, but often there's more - about two singers per part.
It's understandable that male singer turnout for these things is low; there aren't that many males in the choir to begin with, and only a fraction of those men sign up for the carolling troupe. But for some reason (as already evidenced by the proportion of altos to sopranos in the group) women were being all lazy this year.
Maybe it's because the sopranos weren't taking anything seriously and didn't feel that they cared enough to participate, but they just weren't signing up for anything! I sang mostly alto for the Wednesday morning gig (some songs I went up to soprano because I didn't know the alto part and didn't feel confident enough to sight-read it - and there was someone else there to do that part anyway). I was signed up as a soprano for Wednesday night and Thursday morning because the other one signed up for it was uneasy with singing alone, but she called in sick and I got to sopranoize it alone (!!!!!) on Wednesday. She managed to make it back for Thursday, but I still had to carry the high notes alone.
The Thursday gig.
Now more about Wednesday night.
It was fun messing with the melody line (singing what I knew rather than following the notes on the page exactly) and starting on the wrong pitch, turning "The First Noël" into a cacophony of three parts in D major and one in G-flat.
Anyway, it's not fun to sing in sweltering heat (Wednesday night). My dress was getting wet from the sweat and started to feel very heavy on my shoulders, which meant that my shoulders were very sore by the time we were done. We were background music, and so the chit-chat in the room (it was an office party) made it very difficult to hear the other parts. We normally stand SBTA, so it was really nice to tune to the bass instead of to the tenor because tenor parts (like alto parts) tend to get ornamentation and bass parts don't.
I had a bit of initial intimidation because of the "OMG, I have to carry the tune and I don't know some of these tunes and I have to sight-read them on the spot" sentiment, but it passed quickly and was actually kind of fun. A couple of songs we had to cut off in the middle and skip over because I couldn't read it fast enough, but it's not really a big deal when you're background music.
=====
I still don't like secular Christmas/holiday season songs. I don't care about St. Nicholas, or reindeer, or bells, I just wanna sing "O Holy Night" in Finnish† because it's way easier to do the octave jump at the end on "yö" than it is on "glory" (at least until you get used to it). I want more songs about the virtues associated with Christmas like "Varpunen joulaamuna" (or "Good King Wenceslas" for an English example of the sort of thing I mean).
Christmas carols contain spoilers and should be marked as such.
The Old Testament doesn't predict that Jesus would be specifically crucified, only that he'd be pierced by nails and so on. How did the three kings know he was going to be put in a stone tomb anyway? It hadn't happened yet. One moment they talk about him being born, and the next he's already dead and risen. Can we save those details for Easter?
There's no sense of chronology whatsoever.
And whoever wrote the lyrics to "It came upon a midnight clear" needs to be thwapped for using the verb "bend" in three verses out of five. What the heck is it being used to mean anyway? It's obviously not bowing, because it's awfully difficult, even for angels, to sing or "touch their harps" while bent over (whoa, bad mental picture there). I'm sure the Finnish version has a totally different text that avoids this problem.
† It's basically these lyrics except that I sing "toi kansat kaikki..." because I heard it on one version and it's easier to sing than "siis" for some reason. It could have been a mistake by the singer but he does it in both verses.
Now, I'm supposed to sing alto for this stuff, which I really didn't want to do, not to mention that I didn't go to quite a few of the rehearsals where we plowed through most of the carols in the book. The latter is mostly because I don't like my assistant director's attitude terribly much. I mean, I think it's great that he's putting pressure on the non-music readers to learn to do that, but it feels almost condescending in the way that he does it. I also didn't like how the swarm of participants singing soprano (about 3 times the size of the alto section) sang quite awfully shrill with no roundness of tone and weren't taking the whole thing seriously at all (just because you have an
Basically how carolling works is that we get a list of all of the gigs that are available and we sign up for whichever ones you are willing/available to do. There only needs to be 4 singers because all of the songs are SATB, but often there's more - about two singers per part.
It's understandable that male singer turnout for these things is low; there aren't that many males in the choir to begin with, and only a fraction of those men sign up for the carolling troupe. But for some reason (as already evidenced by the proportion of altos to sopranos in the group) women were being all lazy this year.
Maybe it's because the sopranos weren't taking anything seriously and didn't feel that they cared enough to participate, but they just weren't signing up for anything! I sang mostly alto for the Wednesday morning gig (some songs I went up to soprano because I didn't know the alto part and didn't feel confident enough to sight-read it - and there was someone else there to do that part anyway). I was signed up as a soprano for Wednesday night and Thursday morning because the other one signed up for it was uneasy with singing alone, but she called in sick and I got to sopranoize it alone (!!!!!) on Wednesday. She managed to make it back for Thursday, but I still had to carry the high notes alone.
The Thursday gig.
Now more about Wednesday night.
It was fun messing with the melody line (singing what I knew rather than following the notes on the page exactly) and starting on the wrong pitch, turning "The First Noël" into a cacophony of three parts in D major and one in G-flat.
Anyway, it's not fun to sing in sweltering heat (Wednesday night). My dress was getting wet from the sweat and started to feel very heavy on my shoulders, which meant that my shoulders were very sore by the time we were done. We were background music, and so the chit-chat in the room (it was an office party) made it very difficult to hear the other parts. We normally stand SBTA, so it was really nice to tune to the bass instead of to the tenor because tenor parts (like alto parts) tend to get ornamentation and bass parts don't.
I had a bit of initial intimidation because of the "OMG, I have to carry the tune and I don't know some of these tunes and I have to sight-read them on the spot" sentiment, but it passed quickly and was actually kind of fun. A couple of songs we had to cut off in the middle and skip over because I couldn't read it fast enough, but it's not really a big deal when you're background music.
=====
I still don't like secular Christmas/holiday season songs. I don't care about St. Nicholas, or reindeer, or bells, I just wanna sing "O Holy Night" in Finnish† because it's way easier to do the octave jump at the end on "yö" than it is on "glory" (at least until you get used to it). I want more songs about the virtues associated with Christmas like "Varpunen joulaamuna" (or "Good King Wenceslas" for an English example of the sort of thing I mean).
Christmas carols contain spoilers and should be marked as such.
The Old Testament doesn't predict that Jesus would be specifically crucified, only that he'd be pierced by nails and so on. How did the three kings know he was going to be put in a stone tomb anyway? It hadn't happened yet. One moment they talk about him being born, and the next he's already dead and risen. Can we save those details for Easter?
There's no sense of chronology whatsoever.
And whoever wrote the lyrics to "It came upon a midnight clear" needs to be thwapped for using the verb "bend" in three verses out of five. What the heck is it being used to mean anyway? It's obviously not bowing, because it's awfully difficult, even for angels, to sing or "touch their harps" while bent over (whoa, bad mental picture there). I'm sure the Finnish version has a totally different text that avoids this problem.
† It's basically these lyrics except that I sing "toi kansat kaikki..." because I heard it on one version and it's easier to sing than "siis" for some reason. It could have been a mistake by the singer but he does it in both verses.
