I remain a relative newbie at choral singing. I could do this for another 10 years and I'd still be a novice compared to most of the people in the choir who have been doing this their whole lives.
Still, having been at this for about 2 years now, my awareness and understanding is starting to grow. When I started I was just trying to keep up and do my best to respond to the conductor. But now I can participate and yet hear a lot more of what's going on around me.
After I joined the choir, I spent a lot of time getting my music theory up to speed. To me it's mostly math and I was very quickly doing grade six theory. The composition part also came quite naturally. I'm yet able to capture all the music playing in my head but getting a few rudimentary pieces down for the sake of music theory was possible. I also spent a fair amount of time on ear training. I still am not able to tell what inversion a chord is in but I can pick out any major or minor interval and can do basic music dictation.
So bottom line is, I'm not about to write a symphony but I have my basics.
Yet, I'm far from being able to sight sing – ie sing what I read – unless it is ridiculously simple. If I read something I know, even if it is a tune I haven't seen before in print, I can usually recognise it. But give me something new that's atonal and forget it.
I've also realised that my timing is pretty good – better than a lot of people. My vocal projection and confidence in pitch, however, remains weak.
Unfortunately, because I began this singing business with such a weak foundation, I developed some bad habits. I started by imitating others and learned to quickly adjust my singing to what I heard around me. But now, I continue to make these adjustments, automatically, even when it is to imitate errors. As I mentioned, my sense of timing is pretty good but if someone comes in too early or late, I question myself and usually adjust accordingly. I'm not really sure how to now find confidence in my own ability.
I suspect there are not that many people in the choir who sing with that kind of confidence. There are only a few "leaders" and the rest of us adjust. This is evident on nights when our numbers are light and we don't have the critical mass of such singers. During those rehearsals, it's a lot harder for the conductor to get a committed response from us.
So what does it take? Is it possible? Can one transcend such mediocrity?
There's really no way around it. Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it. In an actual learning experience, progress is irregular; the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way. But the general progression is almost always the same. To take the master's journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so-and this is the inexorable fact of the journey-you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere. . . .
George Leonard, "Journey to Mastery"
Labels: personal
This blog entry details how I use
Noteworthy Composer ("NC") as a tool for choral practice. To learn more about Noteworthy Composer, visit their website
here.
NC is a simple program that lets you "compose" music on a computer by typing in notes using your computer keyboard. It also has the ability to open midi files and extract the music in those files into a score!!!
What a lot of people don't know is that a midi file may be composed of many tracks – one for each instrument or voice. When software such as NC is used to open the file, the tracks can be separated into different staves.
For instance, this is the result of opening a midi for "Be Not Afraid" from Mendelssohn's Elijah:
The first four staves are for the four vocal parts. The 5th line is for the drum beat and the last line is the tempo track.
Now that NC has loaded the midi, you can change the file: you can change the instruments used in play back, you can change the length of the notes, you can change the pitch, the dynamics... the list goes on. At times I've been keen enough to type in the entire piano accompaniment to a choral piece which originally only had the vocal parts programmed in! (This takes a long time and I don't recommend it!)
For the most part, I use NC to do the following:
- Change the notes when (1) the midi file has an error or (2) the score I'm working with has somehow been modified from the original.
- Practice singing along with the piece until I am very familiar with my notes
- Replaying particular passages which I find particularly difficult (because you can stop and start at any place in the music, you can focus on difficult sections during practice - fab)
- Turning off my vocal part and singing along with the other vocal parts (ie once I think I know it, I turn off the soprano line and sing that while the other three parts play).
Weaknesses:
- adjustments to tempo and dynamics are rudimentary. This is a basic tool for getting a grip with the notes - not with the music.
- Although it is a simple program, there is a learning curve to get used to how to amend files. I've used several professional composition programs and this is by far the easiest
- Getting a copy of the program is difficult because they only send it out by CD – it's not available over the net
I find the midi files I want all over the net though recently I stumbled upon this site which is totally awesome for choral singing: CyberBass . The other great place for midis is Classical Archives.
Of course once you've amended the file you can save it back into midi format or save it as an NC file.
Notes about midis:
- You cannot play these on a CD player without converting them to wav format. You may have some software that lets you do that but it's unlikely. It is possible to use WinAmp to do this (play the midi to output WAV) but it is time consuming and who really wants to listen to a midi on a CD player?
- You usually cannot play midis on your MP3 player. Again you'd need to convert the midi to MP3 and this requires that you have the correct CODEC. If you don't know what that means then honestly me trying to explain how to do this will give you a headache! Go to Download.com and search on "midi to MP3".
- Midis are very basic files. Use them at your PC while singing along with your score. When you leave your PC, leave the midi behind and be sure to expose yourself to a real music version of the stuff you're working on so you don't end up sounding like a computer.
If you have questions, drop me an e-mail and I will update this note to answer FAQs.
Labels: music
This is yet another very quick guide to technology for friends!
What is BitTorrent?
This is a way of sharing files between computers over the internet ("peer-to-peer"). In some ways this is similar to Napster or Kazaa ie you use a piece of free software to download files from other users and they can upload from you. The difference is that instead of downloading an entire file from one other person, you download bits of files from a number of different users and your software pieces it together. This makes downloading more efficient but, if you're reading this, it is a geeky detail you're not likely to be interested in!
First get the software:
There's a ton of different programs ("BitTorrent clients") you can use for this (see here). I personally can vouch for uTorrent as being nice and easy to use.
Now find files to download:
Unlike Napster, Kazaa or LimeWire, the file search facility is not embedded in the downloading software. You need to go to certain websites to get the file ID (the "torrent") which when you download/open, will give your BitTorrent client all the info it needs to start downloading.
The sites that have detail on torrents can come and go (they are being shut down all the time). However some websites try keep updated lists. At the moment, the two websites I like best for finding torrents are isoHunt and TorrentSpy.
Things to Note:
- Obviously files you download may be subject to copyright so you have to be responsible about this.
- The selection of files available with BitTorrent far surpasses anything you will find with Kazaa. Just about any TV show you want to see is there. You can also find movies, books, software and music.
- As you download you will also be uploading. That's how the software works: the bits you download can be shared with others.
- You can download files that may be over a Gigabyte. This means downloading can sometimes take days depending on how many users are sharing the file. So unless you have unlimited broadband access, this may not be very useful to you.
- Even if you are only able to download part of a file, you can turn your computer off and resume later. In that sense it's far superior to the old forms of file sharing. Note, however, that if you are downloading a file which very few people are sharing, you may find that there can be times when it is not available.
Labels: howto, tech
The Creator God of the Old Testament, the Demiurge, was generally regarded by Gnostics as not the genuine ultimate God who is the source and "the depth" of reality. Since the God of the Old Testament is jealous, vengeful, judgmental, and undoubtedly masculine, [...].
Kelley L. Ross , Ph.D.
Enter the story of Elijah brought to life by the music of Mendelssohn as an oratorio. Elijah is an old testament prophet who takes on the king of Israel who is following a false God: Baal. The true God, not impressed by this idolatry, shows his character early on in the story:
For I the Lord your God, I am a jealous God
And I shall visit all the father's sins
On the children to the third and the fourth generations
Of them that hate me.
- Elijah, "Yet doth the Lord"
The people of Israel are sentenced to drought and Elijah goes into retreat. After three years in the wilderness, Elijah returns to take Ahab, the king of Israel, head on in a religious bake-off: You and your prophets prepare a bull for sacrifice. I'll do the same and we'll ask our respective gods to provide the light for the fire. Whichever god answers by fire will be declared the true god.
This contest appears mid-way through the first half of the performance and is the highlight of the story's action. Mendelssohn illustrates the excitement well with three successive choruses of the prophets of Baal calling to their god. Each cry gets more desperate but the only response is silence.
The it's Elijah's turn and the fire rains down. Now the crowd is positively panicked as they see they've been backing the wrong deity. The music takes on a frenetic tempo (the composer's directions literally say – "con fuoco" – "with fire"). When finally they realise that Jehovah is the true god, there is a beautiful exclamation from the chorus of "Our Lord is One God." It is touching.
But no sooner is this sentiment laid down, than the mood is interrupted by the bellowing announcement of Elijah:
"Take all the prophets of Baal and let not one of them escape you! Take them down to Kishon's brook and slay them everyone!"
Elijah, "Oh Though, who makest thine angels spirits"
There is little room for universal love and religious tolerance in the name of Jehovah.
The slaughter ensues. God, thus appeased, finally gives into Elijah's pleas for an end to the drought. When the rain arrives, the people thank God for his mercy, not mentioning of course that he's supposedly the one who brought the suffering in the first place. Part 1 thus draws to a happy close.
It is quite apparent that the creator god who visits humanity with the disaster of the flood is not identical with the "true God" [...]. Viewing the character of the deity of Genesis with a sober, critical eye, the Gnostics concluded that this God was neither good nor wise. He was envious, genocidal, unjust, and, moreover, had created a world full of bizarre and unpleasant things and conditions. In their visionary explorations of secret mysteries, the Gnostics felt that they had discovered that this deity was not the only God, as had been claimed, and that certainly there was a God above him.
Stephen Hoeller
Notes:
- Felix Mendelssohn: born Hamburg, 1809; died Leipzig, 1847 after a series of strokes.
- Elijah was written in English from an English translation of a German libretto. It was given its first performance in English on 26 August 1846 at the Birmingham Festival, conducted by Mendelssohn himself. Mendelssohn (who spoke fluent English) took great pains that the English version would be as accurate as possible.
Labels: music
