Ensemble

At the encouragement of my wonderful mother-in-law, I am going to give a briefing about the group I will be singing with this semester.

Last year I sang with University, which was fine.  It's the large auditioned group and consists of many music majors, although maybe of them are young (18-22ish).  It was a nice group to sing with but it was a little boring and the pace was very slow.

This year I will be singing with Chamber Choir, which is what it says it is- a chamber group of about 32 singers.  Some of the singers also sing in University.  Some sing in the jazz groups, some sing with some other group.  At any rate, I am really excited about the Chamber Choir.  Most of the singers are vocal performance majors and many are older than the traditional undergraduate.  There are also a handful of graduate students.  Chamber is a larger time commitment.  The music is normally of higher difficulty level and the pace is faster.  There is more music and I am more personally responsible for my part.  With 8 people on the alto part and 4 if we divide into 8 parts, I will really enjoy the added focus.  We have a three day retreat in September and a week long tour in January.  There will be other weekends and added dates that I will get tomorrow (during choir from our syllabus).

The audition consisted of (and I find this interesting):  An aria, some sight reading, and singing through the French choral piece given to us.  I auditioned on alto.

As I left, my teacher told me I would be joining them later at the call backs.

At call backs (and this was the really interesting part), we warmed up by sight reading a piece we didn't know.  Then each section came up front.  At this point, each individual in the section sang "Row Row Row Your Boat" so my teacher could voice the singers and put them next to voices that made sense.  Then we divided up into our first and second sections (with me in alto 1), excellent!  We sang in a circle.  We also sang in mixed formation (at this point we were singing the French piece).  He had a few people stop singing and then start singing.

Afterwards, we received an e-mail with the list of singers who would be singing with Chamber.  And we start on Monday.