We’ll Meet Again Some Sunny Day
There were precipitous highs and dreary lows this term, but we’re grateful we went through it all together. In the end, we closed out our Summer Term a little earlier than anticipated as our plans to hold a few in-person rehearsals were foiled by continuing restrictions. After the optimism of our last post, we faced the disappointment of the delay of ‘Freedom Day’ to after our term was due to end. So singing together this term wasn’t possible after all. In the height of summer, even the cheeriest of enthusiasts is bound to experience some ‘Zoom fatigue’, and so it was with us. Instead of holding three additional remote rehearsals, we thanked our faithful contingent of singers for continuing to stick with us and encouraged them to enjoy the summer evenings and come back refreshed and raring to go in September. Plans for September are currently under way, and we will be updating our Current Term page with details soon so keep an eye out!
After the half term break and our social complete with summer-themed quiz, we returned our attention to the music. We hosted a ‘Bring and Sing’ of Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man (or L’Homme Armé), and enjoyed a rehearsal devoted to this mass of peace. I wasn’t familiar with this particular piece, and it was fun to get to know it better over the course of an evening. We learned a bit about the shorthand for time in SolFa and applied it to parsing bits of this text. Adam also talked to us about aural memory and tips for memorizing a piece during rehearsal.
Our final rehearsal was devoted to French Baroque music and specifically Charpentier’s Magnificat. We were able to put to use a lot of the techniques we’ve been focussing on throughout the term for sight-singing and how to break down a fugue into more manageable parts. We also took this opportunity to look back on our four remote terms and reflect on what we’ve managed to achieve.
We’ve been able to focus on musicianship skills which will lead to quicker learning and help foster more productive rehearsals.
We’ve had the opportunity to have vocal and musicianship workshops and learned a lot. Particularly liked the straw technique and the focus on body work.
A silver lining is this has been a golden opportunity – we have looked at more works than we’d normally touch in 2 years.
Enjoyed learning more about the context of pieces – history of and links between musicians.
Everyone got something different out of it, we’ve learned to take the highs with the lows.
We’ve had the opportunity to do things we’d never get to do in a normal term.
I’ve loved the variety and the sense of community! All the extras like quizzes, compozer crazies, cocktails!
We’ve kept up our practice – it’s like riding a bike…. we will build back our muscle memory.
Though we ended the term earlier than planned, and slightly frustrated at being unable to return to singing together as we’d hoped, as you can see there is still plenty of optimism and gratitude amongst the group. And in the end, we did manage to get together at an end of term picnic in early July, once again at Postman’s Park just near our usual rehearsal venue, the Voces8 Centre.
Thanks to our members for braving the City of London on the day of the Euro final at Wembley. As you may have seen on the news, there were crowds of raucous fans throughout London that day, especially on the tube, so we appreciate everyone who came out to say hello for the first time in 10 months. They were rewarded with themed baked goods for the Euro final, and a sunny day in the park with fellow music lovers. We really can’t wait to sing together again in the autumn, it will be a wonderful feeling after all this time.
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[…] We hadn’t seen each other in person since our previous picnic in September 2020. It was so great to see everyone – you can read more about the picnic in our recent blog post. […]