Tonal Tuesday - What We Did with a Small Turnout at Practice

Sunday was Mothers' Day in Canada.  The Embro Thistle Singers practice every other week.  In order to miss a holiday weekend, we will sometimes practice two weeks in a row and then take off the next two.  However,  We had a late Easter so trying to get around Mothers' Day was tricky so we kept to our scheduled practice.   All of our basses and 1 tenor and 1 alto came to practice.  Hmm.

Kay, our alto, volunteered to sing tenor.  Now we have 2 tenors.  Hmm.

We had started two new pieces the previous practice and a couple of newer pieces earlier.

Perfect.  We took the time to go over the men's parts exclusively.  Although we do separate parts' practices, this was a perfect opportunity to spend time really honing rhythms and notes.  One that we worked on was The Lion Sleeps Tonight and the guys were really doing a great job.  The verse in our arrangement changes from women to men so they worked hard at getting the transitions to be very smooth.

We knew that we had nailed those parts when Kristy played the accompaniment, I sang the soprano and the guys rolled on through the entire piece without a hitch.  The confirmation class had been working away quietly on finding various symbols in the church while we were singing.  When we finished the song, they were all standing at the back of the church clapping.  Now, how cool was that?

What could have been a negative, become a great positive experience.  We can hardly wait for the next practice to let the guys show off just how much they learned.

Fathers' Day is June 15th.  We don't practise that Sunday.  Oh well.  We won't be able to duplicate our experience with the ladies I guess.

Thanks to our wonderful guys and Kay.  You made it great fun and created some wonderful sounds.