Rudsamblog

I agreed to take notes last night, tell Jenny if you could help out another week, as the list seems to have gone AWOL!

All the men here [well except Angus, hope to see you soon!] but 3 sops away, Helen came then departed quickly [hope it wasn't anything we said?! No, we know you have a lot on!] and poor Kay's throat was suffering, so Elaine and AnnaLauren had to hold the fort! Anyway we had a good rehearsal and got to grips with some of those tricky moments!

1. Dance to th' daddy

And remember it's th' for the and thoo not thou for pronunciation.

We focused on the last 2 pages.

• Stay crisp, light and staccato especially 1st line of page 32.
• Make sure we're together on entries [we practised that with Ollie during the warm-up].
• Follow the dynamics. ie ff, p and crescendo in 1st line, cresc and getting faster 2nd line.
• Last word on 1st line page 32 is si-ngngng, ie a long ng not a long vowel!
• Tenors page 33, count carefully the rest in 2nd line 1st bar , ie "in" , 2 , "have it"
  
• Everyone: very last bar is p, crisp, staccato [don't hang on to "comes" but keep it short] and supported, not a breathy p.

2. Lullaby to Lucy

• Again, quiet bits not breathy but well-supported and good tone. From "Rowan and lamb" it should be legato, well-phrased. Men listen to the women's line and women breathe after "lamb" then straight through "salt and sweet", keeping the final "t" tidy and together on salt and sweet.
• All breathe before "Entreat", and there should be more tone and cresc from here as marked. All breathe again before "A pledge and a promise".
• In "Lonely they were" no breath after were, and cresc to the word "long", then dim.
  "Rackwick" is crisp but only a gentle staccato, ie we should hear the 2 "ks" but no break between the 2 syllables.
• Sops watch your tuning on the top E in "pledge", page 3, and "light"on page 4, you were a bit under.

3. By Falshood

Our favourite! We bashed this out with the piano and Ollie was very encouraged! He said we should all be really chuffed. [But did he notice the very well-suppressed near hysteria from some people??!!] No, we counted carefully and focused mainly from bar 13.

• Lower 3 parts need to make sure you keep with the sops, as it should flow they may not sing it absolutely in perfect rhythm [I don't mean because they get it wrong!] so we need to make sure our entries match where they are.
• Count quavers to start and remember that a triplet = 3 notes sung in the space of 2 quavers so "triplets are a bit faster than quavers", as he said! So bar 16, sops, is 8 quavers long with 2 triplets. Write 1,2,1,2 if that helps or whatever, but LOOK at it this week, especially if you weren't at the rehearsal.
• From bar 21 think in crotchets or it gets too disjointed.
• Bar 25, think of the first word "Not" as being 2 notes in a 3-note triplet, so mentally think of 3 beats = "rest, no-ot". And bar 26 starts really with a triplet, just a break between the end of "sham-ed" and "with".. the light. With the light is a cresc, especially for basses.
  
• Everyone try to play your notes from bar 25 to the end as there are some real crunches, bass and tenor had a few problems. Sops and bass sing the same notes in bar 27 so mark that then one of you might be right!

4. Komitas Set

We ran through the set to keep it well-rehearsed.

• Stay bouncy, look at the words.
• Ollie will beat at least 123 after Shogher Jan and Cheenar Es, so men watch Ollie at that point.
• In Im Chinari Yare, poor Kay's voice nearly gave out but being a real trouper she kept going.
• We agreed that the final chorus [C] needed to be loud, so again watch Ollie.

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Ollie will email a list of music for the 15 April concert soon. We have to know the Komitas set and Une Puce FROM MEMORY so start learning now.

Tell all your friends/family about the concert, John has forwarded the email to you that's gone out to our mailing-list.

I'll try and have a look at the Gallery tonight on my way in to the Queens Hall concert so I know roughly where we'll be singing. Helen Monaghan from the Gallery suggested the 3rd Bay/Room on the Left.

We'll use the North Meeting Room for rehearsal from 5pm. Concert starts at 6 and lasts about 30 minutes.

Not much in the way of notes last week. What I have follows:

Began with a practice of "Dil mano dil bero", inserting a clap on the 'be's and leaning another 4 bars: kazi mi kak se sadi pipero [Кажн ми как се сади пиперо?]

Ollie told us some of the programme for up and coming concerts. To include:

• Armenian set
• French stuff (une puce, la la la, de quil a fait)
• Folk songs (dance to the daddy, she moved through the fair)
• Modern Classical stuff (Whitaker)

Got into 'une puce' groups and brainstormed ideas for performance of 'la la la' based on the words. Some notes on this:

• La la la no longer arranged in quartets - all to sing
• Important words to articulate in V1 - 'homme' 'famme' 'ja lou' 'son cause' 'cocu du tout'

Then did the same for 'une puce'

Lullaby for Lucy - sang through

Im Chinari Yare - sang through

That was about it.

Natalie

By Falshood
We did quite a bit of work on this.

First of all the whole singing softly but not breathy thing came up again, i.e. maintaining clarity and intensity in your voice at mp - pp levels. C.f. the openings of Lauridsen's Magnum Mysterium, Whitacre's Lux, etc. etc.

Second, we're still getting to grips with timing, so in places we're still dragging tempowise, probably because we're waiting for everyone else to 'make the first move'. Though this results in dragging, Ollie says it's good for cohesion that we're listening to each other in that way and that we'll simply speed things up later as we get more confident. As was said before there's no point (for now, perhaps for ever) being mathematical about the counting, as we'll aim to develop into something that flows without being metronomic.

We worked on dynamics, as follows:

Page 1:
Bars 0-1: start mp, then crescendo peaking on "Fals-", followed by a decrescendo for the rest of bar 1.

Bar 2: Altos & Tenors sing out a bit more with your "to express". You'll have to wait for the basses to synchronise perfectly (!) and bring everyone into bar 3 on "truth". Then, in one breath, "very cunning of lyne" (bars 4 & 5). Note there should be *no break* between "cunning" and "of lyne".

Bar 6: everyone come in clearly, at the same time, and somewhat strongly (piu f) on "Ower", i.e. that first note should have an emphasis. The next note on "eye" has a little swell ( <> ) on it, especially (only?) for the basses as they clash very nicely with the tenors. Key here is enunciation, including a nice hard 'k' sound on "cunning" in bar 7.

An important bit on page 1 is bars 10-11. We start bar 10 not too loudly (whatever we were on end of bar 9 I think). But during bar 10 (which is short) we do a rather speedy crescendo to f, peaking with a noticeable climactic/dramatic emphasis on the first note of bar 11 ("rulle"), followed by a sudden dim. to p (p sub.).
One thing Ollie wanted is for us to sing bar 10 ("without") more snappily, we tend to drag considerably here, possibly because people are uncertain of the duration of the bar (see note above).

After the double bar line on page 1:
At the beginning of bar 14 everyone else should wait for the sopranos to snatch a breath where they've got a breath mark, before singing their first note of the bar.

Page 2:
Bars 15-17 (a.k.a. the sopranos' headache): despite all talk of not counting, it seems the simplest thing is to do just that in order to get it into the head. Confusion and trip-ups of the kind bemoaned by Kay(2) stems from non-triplet quavers that are tied in to the beginning or out of the end of a triplet of quavers (two occurrences of the former in bar 16 and one of the latter in the transition between bar 15 and 16). Maybe try clapping this out at home? Should help to keep the tied notes clearly in mind as separate entities despite singing 'through' them. What'll probably happen is that once the soprano part for these bars becomes familiar enough to forego explicit counting, overall time will be kept by the underneath parts, which the sops can then use as a reference point to do their fancy antics.

That's mostly it. We notebashed through to the end a few times, and people will have some private notes for this. The bottom of page 2 ("for beautie...") is a change of character compared to the bar before, and sounds like, well "[...] beautie and good favor [and] cleare truth". There's a nice dramatic clash in bar 27, followed by a great strong chord first note of bar 28.

Une Puce:

We revived the flea.

Some points:

Forte != shouty (!= means does not equal)
What we want is light & bouncy
Again, this should not be breathy.
Don't swoop/scoop/poop
The expression changes quite quickly, and we want to convey what the text describes so we need to be switched on.
The second half of each verse (i.e. second system page 1) is staccato.
The first half of the refrain ("Nul remede n'y puis donner ...") is legato, and speeds up a bit with excitement on "Je cours de ca".
The "la" in "je cours de la" should be a bit nasal.
The end of the first half of the refrain (i.e. end of page 2) segues a tempo into the second half ("Oooooh toute belle secour mweh"), i.e. no hanging around/slowing down.

The lingua franca:
"moi" = "mweh",
"Qui" and "cours" should have a nice crisp 'k' sound,
"je t'en" = "je t'ahn" (kind of nasal), rolled 'r' preferable

On the whole, a slightly nasalised sound (see also the early french gossipping song - "La la la je ne l'ose dire" [and examples linked from an e-mail from Arno]) seems to help with pronunciation, to maintain intensity/clarity and avoid breathiness, and (I think) produces a nice effect similar to what I've heard early music ensembles do with this type of music.

I think we also ran through a bit of 'Dance to da daddy', but to be honest I can't remember! Anyway no new dynamics because I've got nothing written down for it.

Rehearsal at Priestfield March 10th