From the tone world of the Renaissance to Broadway

This past weekend was indeed very busy socially!  The "meet the new parents and new teachers" evening at the School was nice, although my voice was tired from talking in a very noisy room.  I've written before about this problem of overly live acoustics: it really is a major problem that architects and designers should take into account when they are building spaces for socialising.  I could sing in a rehearsal for several hours without getting tired, but put me in a noisy party atmosphere for half an hour and my voice is at the limit.

I'm also a bit tired from singing falsetto with the high voices in the Dolly rehearsals... Saturday was a long rehearsal from around 10:00 until 14:00, and then I went to Bryan and Kiana's for a guitar lesson.  Bryan and India are taking the lessons together, and it went very well... They learned four chords and practiced changing between them, and by the end of the 45 minutes lesson they were starting to change hand positions quickly enough that we could slowly play through the first section of Sam Cooke's What a Wonderful World.

I have been going though my own repertoire of three and four-chord songs to try to find things that will be relatively easy to play and have come up with a few, but also want India to choose some pieces that she wants to learn.  Bryan's tastes lean toward the blues-rock genre so I have lots of songs to show him in that repertoire.

Saturday evening we went across the street to our Polish neighbours' home, and were welcomed by Eva and Tomas, and their son Kuba, who is 18 years old.  Their daughter is 24 and is living away from home for her studies... lots of other neighbours from our street attended, and there were many great dishes that Eva and Tomas had put together for the evening.  As well they had borrowed a huge charcoal bbq from a neighbour, and I was put to service at grilling the meat.  Maggie has been recovering from a tooth extraction, so she had to stick to the softer foods, and as she is on some painkillers she stayed away from the wine, and I took it easy myself.  But I did try some of Tomas' home made Polish slivovitz, which was excellent, if very strong.  Our elderly neighbour Maurice had a little too much so Christophe and I "helped" him get home safely after the party.  Everyone seemed to have a good time.

In the morning I went and had a quick 10k run, and managed to shave a couple of seconds off my last run time, getting down to a pace of around 5:43 per kilometre.  Then we had another bbq, with Lucy and Ben and their family.

Lucy is from Australia, and Ben is from France, but they are here in Belgium because of Ben's work for Glaxo Smith Kline, the pharmaceutical company that has a huge complex near Wavre.  Duncan babysits the three kids regularly, and the two youngest boys particularly really are attached to him.  They came with Newton, their young Australian Shepherd dog, and he and Yoshi played a lot in the garden while we were dining outside.  Then Maggie set out to drive Malcolm up to his apartment in Boom, along with his records, his record player, and some guitars.  Now that he's taken his turntable I guess that I need to shop for one?

Monday was another long day of review of the many pieces for the polyphonic concert that happens this weekend.  I spend most of the morning singing through the material, which is a bit challenging to get into one's head.  Here's an example: Josquin de Prez's Ave maris stella:

After several hours of that I scooted over to St. John's to work through Hello Dolly!.  Then it was the same thing again on Tuesday.  The challenging thing with teaching these young singers the harmonies is that they can't pick out their particular notes... so I end up repeating and repeating their lines many times.  I think next week I will simply sit down at the piano with a recorder and sing their individual lines, and then send them the tracks so they can listen at home and get their harmonies down.  There are only really three big pieces in the work that require sophisticated vocal harmonies, but there has not been much of a tradition of choral singing at the school for several years now, since a particularly good music teacher retired, and so many of these young singers are not really experienced in carrying an independent vocal line when other people are singing.  That's something that I find strange, but then not every family sings together.  I'm lucky that mine did when I was a kid! 

Fortunately for the rest of this week I can forget about Dolly and just focus on the Renaissance and Gregorian Chant music that we will rehearse today and tomorrow, and perform on Saturday!