Time For A Breather

The Holiday Rush is Over

Well, we got through another year's Christmas/Holiday season. In the month of December, I performed in two concerts with the Delaware Valley Choral Society, and four performances with the High Point Harmonizers. The Harmonizers had to cancel one of their gigs due to bad weather. Now we get to relax for a couple of weeks.

It's always a treat to do these jobs because of the happy audiences we get at this time of the year. They want to hear the old carols and Christmas songs, and we're happy to oblige. Though one of the places the Harmonizers sang we were just background music for people picking out toys for their kids.

That was at Project Self-Sufficiency. This is a terrific organization over in New Jersey that helps people, mostly single mothers, get on their feet so they can take care of their families without further assistance from anyone else. What better service could an organization provide? The occasion for us singing was kind of a "free store" where there were thousands of donated, new toys that qualifying families could come in and pick out for their children. There was a limit on how many toys they could take for each child, but it was a pretty generous limit - five toys per child, if I remember correctly. So we were far from the main event on this occasion. I think the only people who really took note of what we were doing were members of the Project staff. Still, we added to the holiday atmosphere, and that's what we had been invited to do.

After Project Self-Sufficiency, several of us went over to the Hampton Diner to have a bite. As we usually do, we sang a few songs before we left. We got a nice round of applause for each number from the other people eating in that particular room. For whatever reason, we always seem to sound really good in a diner or restaurant. Maybe it has to do with being more relaxed or something.

The Next Rush Begins Soon

I'll need to rest pretty quickly, it seems. Now that the holiday season is over, I get to put away all of the barbershop Christmas music, but I have to learn O Canada and have it memorized cold by January 6. Then I get to turn in all of my Delaware Valley music, but I have already received the music for the Spring concert, and we'll start working on that seriously on January 4.

While we are fairly far north in the USA, we never perform in Canada, so it does seem a little strange that we need to know their national anthem. The reason is that the Harmonizers have an opportunity to do a show at a minor league baseball park. This will be a paying gig, I believe, and will be wonderful publicity. The one basic requirement is that we be prepared to sing the national anthems of both the USA and Canada, as it's an international league. We will have to submit an audition video by January 15, so this has to come together Right Now.

The stuff for the Delaware Valley chorus looks seriously intimidating.The biggest, and baddest, piece of it is the "Mass in A-Flat Major" by Franz Schubert. I don't know how long it's supposed to run, but it looks like a solid half hour of singing, and none of it simple.

I'd better get busy.

The Problem With Christmas Concerts

It's the winter weather problem

I was expecting to go with the chorus to serenade some folks at a nursing home this past Wednesday. Then it started to snow. It wasn't really snowing that much at our house, nor was it snowing a lot near the nursing home. Unfortunately, it was snowing more near our director's house. Besides that, one of our best lead singers doesn't care to get out in bad weather, and neither do I. I will modestly allow that I'm one of our better bass singers.

I had been watching the weather reports and forecasts pretty closely because I drive for about 45 minutes to get to most of these Christmas gigs. If the weather gets nasty, I could be stranded a long way from home, and it doesn't have to get very nasty for that to happen. Our house is up in the mountains, such as the local mountains are. Even though I have a hard time calling them mountains - I've driven through the Rockies a few times - the hillsides are pretty steep and the roads are hard to get over if they're icy and snow-covered.

So on Wednesday afternoon I got the car out and made a run into town. We hadn't checked our post office box in a few days, so that provided a good reason to make the trip. That way I could check out the road conditions and make a decision about whether I would be able to get to the gig. I already knew that one of the other basses wouldn't be going due to illness, so this was a serious question.

Happily for me, the roads into town were perfectly clear. No problem. So I was thinking that I would be willing to give it a try that evening. Then my phone rang. When I answered, it was our director asking if I thought I'd be able to get to the nursing home that evening. After exchanging a couple of comments, it became apparent that she was just looking for a good reason to call off the performance. The roads near her were icy and dangerous to drive on, and she had found out that our wheel horse lead would probably not show up.

What could I do? I agreed with her. We have to have Fab singing lead if anyone is going to hear the melody properly, and I wasn't all that enthusiastic about taking a chance with the condition of the roads holding up.

We'll try it again this week. We're enjoying a warm spell right now, so travel shouldn't be a problem for anyone.

This means that I'll be doing one performance on Wednesday evening, another on Saturday morning, and a third one on Saturday evening. Then it will all be over.

By the time we're done, I'll be very happy to quit singing Christmas songs.

Christmas Singing

It's been too long...

since I posted anything here. First, I haven't established a good habit of posting - shame on me. Then, it got to be time to start working on Christmas music.

Besides singing in the barbershop chorus, I have also joined a community chorus, the Delaware Valley Choral Society. The DVCS started working on Christmas music in August. Seems way early, right? As it turns out, it may have been too late.

Just to complicate things, the DVCS also took on a second concert. This one was full of show tunes, opera, and Gilbert & Sullivan pieces, with featured professional soloists and an orchestra. That amounted to nearly an hour of singing, much like the Christmas program. As if that wasn't enough to overload my ability to learn music, the degree of difficulty was a lot higher than the barbershop music I've been working with for a couple of years.

So there's my mea culpa. I could have just said I've been busy, I guess.

The Various Performances

We got the extra concert done in the Masonic Temple in Scranton. We made various mistakes, but not all that many. Nobody seemed to notice, really, so that was good.

Then the Christmas stuff started.

We did the DVCS Christmas concert on November 30 and again on December 1. Seemed a little early to me, but I didn't make the schedule. We made more mistakes during these performances, but again nobody seemed to notice and we heard about how good it all was.

In the meantime, the barbershop chorus started its Christmas appearances. Now, we hadn't really rehearsed the Christmas music more than a couple of times. In years past, I've been accustomed to starting to work on the Christmas songs in October. This year, we didn't even look at them until the middle of November. Most of us were not entirely comfortable with singing these songs in public, but we managed.

First, we sang for the folks at an assisted living facility, and sounded pretty darned good. Still, "White Christmas" didn't work all that well for us. For some reason, that was the one song that we have been having problems with.

This past weekend, we did a show for the German Christmas Market in Sparta, NJ. Again, we sounded good, and struggled with "White Christmas" somewhat. People still told us that it was a good show, which is what really matters.

I'm looking forward to singing at another nursing home this evening, providing the roads aren't too bad because of the nor'easter that's spreading snow, sleet, and freezing rain around the area.