Month: December 2009

Out on my walk today. These really doesn’t convey how loud it was.

I found the picture I took last year of that same corner where they’re selling trees. Quite the difference. SNOW!

I realized something last night about choir. Performances are fun and exciting and I love singing with the orchestra, but the best part about singing with the choir turns out to be the weekly rehearsals.

I feel more like I’m singing with people at the rehearsals. I can’t hear myself or the people next to me at the dress rehearsal and performances, I guess because we’re so close to the orchestra. I can hear the people behind me, and I have a lovely soprano singing behind me so that’s nice, but I don’t get that feeling of making music together with all these people. This is not a complaint. I love the performances too, for different reasons. I just realized I like the regular rehearsals more.

Oh wait, I do get that feeling in the pieces where we sing a capella, and during the carols.

Oh and the orchestra with the Bernstein is amazing. It’s a very festive, twinkling, sparkling, sound.

I was trying to get creative in this shot.

It was not a success.  This is a Santa standing up in front of a bunch of Christmas trees for sale.  In fact, I think I took a picture of the same Santa from last year.  I should see if I still have it.

I was going for a “Santa in the urban wilds of New York City” thing.

Tonight we rehearse with the orchestra!!  Woohoo. Very exciting.

John, our conductor, has me standing behind the timpani again this year. He is definitely trying to tell me something.

What I can’t wait for is to hear the quartet at the beginning of the Mendelssohn we’re doing.  We haven’t heard that sung yet, and it’s a beautiful piece of music.

This is the time of day when they start hovering, waiting to be fed. They look innocent here, taken seconds ago, but since then Buddy has eaten a New Yorker letter I copied in Durham two years ago and which I plan to post about, knocked over the scanner, attempted to eat my choir music and batted at Finney.

Finney is trying a different approach. He is curled up on my lap, purring, playing the “good cat.”

Oh, now they’re trying to kill each other. This is the “as long as you’re up” approach.

For whatever reason I was feeling so overwhelmed by the idea of decorating. I solved it by just dressing up one area. In one small corner in my apartment it’s festive.

Everywhere else it’s bah humbug and “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”

Not really. So hallelujah! Which I swear to god is playing right now.

I just skipped ahead to the Snoopy Christmas song, though.

The Grace Church Choral Society concerts are this week. This whole week is singing heaven for those of us in the choir. The best part has to be the dress rehearsal with the orchestra. Singing with the orchestra is so exciting and since there’s no audience we’re all singing and playing for ourselves and each other and it’s both relaxed and thrilling at the same time.

But pray for the tenors and basses. From Wikpedia about The Chicester Psalms, one of the pieces we’re doing:

“The Psalms and the first movement in particular are noted among performers for their musical difficulty, with the opening section of the first movement often considered one of the hardest passages for choral tenors ever written, owing to the range of the piece, its rhythmic complexity and the consistent presence of the strange and difficult-to-maintain interval of a major 7th between the tenor and bass.”

Okay, I should get ready.

And do some work.

And eat these Cheetos equivalent called Smart Puffs.