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last few days
Sunday morning the Pennsic camp met for the annual post-mortem. Things actually went pretty well this year, so while there were issues to discuss, it wasn't all that long and involved. And everyone there agreed that there would be no problem with my leaving on the final Friday next year to avoid the Shabbat problems, which is good to hear.
Sunday evening we had dinner with Ralph, Lori, and Mike. It was a fairly normal dinner until the plumbing rebelled. Fortunately, Ralph has plumbing clues and was able to take the kitchen sink apart and find the clog. (Diagnosis: the disposal wasn't.) Unfortunately, that can't have been a pleasant way to spend the last part of the evening. I hope they're able to get it fixed fairly easily.
Last night at choir practice we went through the repertoire, deciding what to remove from the active repertoire and what to bring back (from previous culls). I was surprised by some of the choices; I didn't know anybody actually liked "Pastime with Good Company" or "Belle Qui". No accounting for taste, I suppose. :-) But *whimper*, people wanted to kill one of my favorites, "In Pace", a lovely three-part piece that just flows wonderfully. Oh well; maybe it'll come back in a year or two. Or maybe there'll be an opportunity for a subset of us to perform it at some point.
It sounds like the choir is going to do its usual concert of Christmas music for the 12th Night event, so I get to take a couple months off again. This is fine; I don't mind the break at all.
A couple of the non-Christmas songs that are coming back, and one new one that a group member is proposing, are problematic for me. I'll continue to just sit those out. Fortunately, the choir director understands the issues and is very accommodating -- much moreso than a previous director was. I'll never understand people who say "it doesn't matter what the words are if the music is pretty". (What this usually means, in my experience, is that their own sensitivities just haven't been bumped into, and they can't appreciate other peoples'.)
Last night after rehearsal some of us went to Dave & Buster's for dinner, which meant we got to watch Chris do impressive things with Pump It Up. One song in particular was quite impressive (level 5 and fast), but I didn't note its name.
Sunday evening we had dinner with Ralph, Lori, and Mike. It was a fairly normal dinner until the plumbing rebelled. Fortunately, Ralph has plumbing clues and was able to take the kitchen sink apart and find the clog. (Diagnosis: the disposal wasn't.) Unfortunately, that can't have been a pleasant way to spend the last part of the evening. I hope they're able to get it fixed fairly easily.
Last night at choir practice we went through the repertoire, deciding what to remove from the active repertoire and what to bring back (from previous culls). I was surprised by some of the choices; I didn't know anybody actually liked "Pastime with Good Company" or "Belle Qui". No accounting for taste, I suppose. :-) But *whimper*, people wanted to kill one of my favorites, "In Pace", a lovely three-part piece that just flows wonderfully. Oh well; maybe it'll come back in a year or two. Or maybe there'll be an opportunity for a subset of us to perform it at some point.
It sounds like the choir is going to do its usual concert of Christmas music for the 12th Night event, so I get to take a couple months off again. This is fine; I don't mind the break at all.
A couple of the non-Christmas songs that are coming back, and one new one that a group member is proposing, are problematic for me. I'll continue to just sit those out. Fortunately, the choir director understands the issues and is very accommodating -- much moreso than a previous director was. I'll never understand people who say "it doesn't matter what the words are if the music is pretty". (What this usually means, in my experience, is that their own sensitivities just haven't been bumped into, and they can't appreciate other peoples'.)
Last night after rehearsal some of us went to Dave & Buster's for dinner, which meant we got to watch Chris do impressive things with Pump It Up. One song in particular was quite impressive (level 5 and fast), but I didn't note its name.
Re: The annoying thing...
Could be. I don't actually know the origin of this one. I do know the midrash about how we're supposed to be imitating the angels in the heavenly host when we way it, so presumably there's text somewhere that attributes these words to said host.
in some of the kedusha -like prayers (like right after barechu) you get the kedusha with midrashic interpretation of the text.
So that's what that is!
Setting studying to music: love it! :-)
Here's a hypothetical question for you: if you have a child, who is in a public school and who inherits your musical abilities, and who wants to be in the chorus: what will you tell your child to do?
Ask him to sit out the Christmas show (get insistent if necessary but try diplomacy first), and that he should tell me if anything he's given to sing bothers or confuses him. If I had a kid I would want to know what he was learning in school anyway (granted that kids are resistant to sharing this), so I would hope that questions about choir music wouldn't stand out as compared to questions about algebra or biology or art classes.
The public school I went to mostly stuck to secular stuff, with the exception of the Christmas stuff. I don't know what the public schools are like these days. I had problems with that school's choir not because the songs were offensive but because they were insipid. (Also, the alto lines tended to suck, and since I wasn't a soprano I must have been an alto.)
We were never graded in choir, fortunately. (I wonder how they would go about assigning individual grades.)
Re: The annoying thing...
I think that for my classes, if you attended regularly and payed attention, then you got an A. I don't think that I knew anyone who signed up for Chorus and didn't attend and pay attention -- I mean, it was an elective; if you didn't want it, you could've had study hall or something... (One fun thing about it was that it was "E" period, which meant that it fell during lunch half the time. And that meant that rather than being 45 minutes, the class was an hour, with 30 minutes for lunch. Our director decided that that was silly, so instead on those days we had sectionals (i.e. base/tenor, alto/soprano) for 45 minutes and 45 minutes for lunch. (I'm not sure when or if he ate.))