As some of you may know, I was an 'intern' with the Choral Project for the past month. I sang with them on only four songs but I got to listen in on their other pieces and experience their rehearsal process actively as part of the choir, and passively from the audience. While they are a very professional, extremely talented group, I was surprised to learn that, as a group, they were still working on correcting things that high school choirs work on. Like us, they had some trouble matching vowel shape. The director Daniel Hughes said that they needed to be more unified on their German pronunciation and even for some of their songs in english.
They also had a reoccurring problem of not watching the conductor for cut offs and entrances. I have to admit, I sometimes missed cues too because the positions of the sections had the basses standing behind the sopranos and the tenors standing behind the altos. That meant that we not only had to watch for cutoffs to our side of the choir, but we also had to watch for when he was cueing to the front section(women) or the back section(men) of the choir. But also, people were buried in their music a lot of the time. When the singers were watching their music, they wouldn't sing at the correct tempo and they would miss cues and the entire piece felt rhythmically off.
Working with this choir in the mentorship program, it really put things into perspective for me how important our technique in our high school choir is. This just shows that even when you get to the big leagues, there are lots of problems that still occur in a higher-level choir.
No comments:
Post a Comment