We are back in session with our kids choirs. I'm looking forward to another growing and fun music season.
Notables
We started off with a half hour of dancing with Sam. Here's a few photos from that!
I'm happy that we had 2 new girls join us who participated in our INTO THE WOODS production last Fall, and had sung in our choirs previously. Welcome Mikayla and Rebecca!
We began 3 new songs for our March 16 VPA Showcase concert. One of the songs, "Come to the Music" was the title song for our concert in 2006 with our first children's choir, which was made up of 4-6th graders. I had created posters to teach the song by rote, instead of using music. Luckily I found the posters in the back of one of my closets, and solicited the help from our parent council secretary to create a new document, so each singer could have a copy to practice with, and so that it would run with no repeats back to another poster. Here is a copy the first 2 of the original posters. You can see that these 2 posters are the first page of the music your child has. It's pretty cool!
This song has interesting multi-meter rhythm 6/8+2/4 every other measure. There is a lot of ink on the page, and I felt initially that I could teach it with symbols more effectively that trying to teach kids to read the music. So I created symbols that helped me teach the rhythm with some clapping gestures, I wanted to show some melodic contours, some unison singing, and some harmony splits. At the end of the song it splits into 4 part harmony, which we may attempt, which we didn't attain in the previous choir. This choir however, has some kids that have been singing in choir for years, and they are pretty solid, so I'm hopeful. We got off to a good start. I will be e-mailing some practice mp3 files out to help with the learning as well.
We started a song from the musical RENT, called Season's of Love. Ask your child how many minutes are in a year. See if they can just spout it off to you. After one rehearsal, they should know that fun fact for LIFE!
Children's Chorus
We've added 3 new students to the choir, and I'm looking forward to getting to know them.
We started out exploring some harmony possibilities by learning a silly little song I wrote a few years back called "We've All Come Here to Sing". The folksy little melody says "we've all come here to sing a-ping-a ding..." using so-do intervals (which we are emphasizing in our warm ups), and lots of stepwise motion all to a lilting 6/8 meter to get them moving. After learning that tune, we divided the group into 4, and taught a simple accompanimental ostinato with the other 3 parts, complete with actions to enhance the silliness, and also to create definition to the rhythm. We'll continue exploring the song another week or two, working on diction with new alliterating words, changing the actions, and strengthening the harmonies. Fourth and Fifth graders are fun!
We also began 2 other songs for our March 16th VPA showcase concert. Both are songs our Children's choirs have sung in the past, so it will be fun for me to revisit them. Corner of the Sky from the musical "Pippin" is mostly unison singing, but introduces some simple harmonies on a few phrases. Last Fall our harmonies were mostly in the form of partner songs, and this term we will be working on actual harmonies that aren't separate melodies. We'll sing an artsy song called Morning which has a little more harmony, but is mostly unison. Both songs lend themselves to understanding song forms and structure. Your kids are great people-and they learn so quickly! I'm excited to teach them again and see what another 5 months will accomplish. I can't wait!
