Monday, May 22, 2006

Oh say can you sing?

We have an interesting situation with our ward choir right now. We're skating right on the edge of having enough people to sing four part songs and there isn't much of a core group. From week to week different members come to rehearsal. You can practice with one group of people for several weeks and then when it comes the Sunday to perform the practiced piece, an entirely different (and unrehearsed) choir shows up.

I'm having probably the most difficult time I've ever had in choir. For one thing, I have been moved to the bass section because I can no longer hit the high notes required of tenors. Also, all our longstanding basses have left us and just because I'm assigned to sing bass doesn't mean I can hit those low notes. I know where they are but when I try to sing them, only a whisper of sound comes out.

Probably even harder on me, though, is not having anyone to help me stay on pitch. No, its worse than that. I have two men who seem to be doing all they can to get me off pitch. One of them usually sings monotone or random notes so he is the easier to ignore. The other usually sings the melody (an octave or two lower than written) modified by some random interval so that he doesn't even harmonize with the melody, let alone with the bass part. I think there's some hope there because when we sing the bass part only he can hear our part and will sometimes follow along. The other fellow still sings randomly or monotone is such situations. Each of their voices is stronger than mine in the lower ranges so I can't even hope to outsing them. I just try to sing on pitch as best I can hoping that I'm at least not contribuing to the chaos.

No comments:

Post a Comment