Choir practice

Yesterday on the seventh of December my choir had an out-the-the-ordinary extra-long Sunday rehearsal. It was the first Sunday practice we've had this year, and it was great. As often happens during Sunday rehearsals when the natural light comes in, our director asked me to bring my camera and document the day so they can use the pictures for promotion on the choir's official Facebook page.

 

We worked a lot on a song that was written specifically for our choir by a contemporary Moroccan composer, and he came and joined us to see our progress and give us tips. It's an extremely challenging and not very rewarding song, so getting a bit of recognition for our hard work was very motivating. Once we get to the end it'll surely sound very different, and we got a glimpse of that yesterday. We'd been just muddling through, but it seemed to finally start coming together with its creator watching us, which had us all breathing a small sigh of relief.

Our director also had everyone do some breathing exercises with balloons! It was a great photo-op and a way to practice limiting our exhalation, which leaves us with more breath for the challenging songs we're doing.

Also, a subgroup of the choir will be doing a song called Rain Dance by Karl Jenkins (unfortunately the extra rehearsals conflict with my schedule otherwise I'd be part of it) and we practiced making rain for them. It sounded much more like rain than I'd have anticipated!

At the end of the rehearsal which lasted most of the afternoon we had a mini potluck, for which I brought a coconut flour carrot cake that was a big hit. It's actually a recipe for carrot muffins which I baked in a loaf pan with plenty of walnuts and raisins, so not really cake-like. It was very funny trying to highlight the difference between cake/cupcakes and muffins while explaining why it wasn't very sweet. I'm not 100% sure I succeeded, but I tried! Oh and no picture of the cake, it was gobbled down too quickly!