This past week I had my first choir concert; it was a really enjoyable experience. I wore a long black gown with low heels and it felt great to be apart of something. All the girls in my class wore the same outfit and we looked beautiful. The concert started off with the men’s choir going first and then the women’s choir went. Before going on stage I will admit I was a little nervous. I have not been on stage before singing with others before. I am sure you remember all of those times I played in the band on stage, but for some reason singing on a stage felt completely different. The first song we sang was “Magnificat” by John Rutter, you would have really loved that song. It has multiple parts to it and a few male singers joined us. I think the piece sounded a lot fuller with the use of male and female singers. This piece also had an orchestra that played with us. I enjoyed having the live music of the orchestra in front of us. It helped me stay in tempo a lot better than just beating my hand against my leg. The balance between the males and females voices was something I wish you could have witnessed. It just flowed so well and just was an instinct click. There was no one who stood out more …show more content…
I sang Alto for this song and I loved how I was able to go from the lower range to the upper range throughout the piece. You would have loved the sound of the Altos, the deep tone in our voices really helped balance out the sopranos. The next song we sang was called Night and it was in Russian. I will admit at first it was really hard to pronounce a lot of the words, but once I got it I ended up loving the song. It starts off with the pianist and then the choir comes in singing the same note in harmony. I love how we started off of the same notes then split into the soprano and alto parts. The tempo for this song was on the slower end. I had to be careful that I was not rushing the
I thoroughly enjoyed this concert from beginning to end. The opening piece, “String Quartet in F Major, K 590”, was both soothing and moving with an engaging theme that followed through the piece. The sudden stops and starts with changes in theme built the suspense and pulled the listener in to a jaunty gallop through the second section. Also the bass tones in the back ground seem to be slightly off kilter with the violins, providing a complex texture and harmony that provides depth and poignancy to the music.
Palmer, the choir did a wonderful job at singing freely and with resonance. This helped the emotions created by the text to easily be portrayed. They also did a wonderful job at following their conductors gestures for changes in dynamics. This helped to intensify their crescendos and diminuendos. However, their consonants would occasionally be harsh, which interrupted the beauty of the piece as a whole.
This song began with a strong 4 part harmony in SATB, balanced due to the fact that their were two boy parts and two female parts, that way you couldn’t hear more of one gender. However in the second half of the song the strength of the harmony faltered; this is due to the fact that the boy’s were letting go of the volume, making it sound unbalanced. I did find that the words in this song got jumbled and their meaning lost because of the lack of diction. During the chorus the sopranos were showcasing their ability to sing high notes, they did a good job hitting them and remembering to hold back on the volume so that the rest of the choir could be heard. For the entire song the choir sang in forte and had no dynamic changes, I found that this made it seem boring because they weren’t doing anything to keep us hooked. I think that this song could have used more articulation, like staccato and slurs so that they could showcase their technique as well as their voices. At the end of the song the entire choir cut off at the same time showing that they had been watching their conductor. I wish that they had projected their emotions more in this song, whether that be by smiling or using a tone of voice to suggest feeling, I think that it would have enhanced their performance. The Humberside Collegiate Choir did an amazing job making sure that they all breathed on time and together without c...
Music is virtually everywhere we go, no matter if it is background noise in a coffee shop or singing along while shopping for groceries, we can find music somewhere. The event I attended was the Flint Symphony Orchestra on October 8, 2016. I have never attended a symphony before so I was excited to go, especially since I had invited my friend to attend with me. For this event, I was already informed by my teacher that the symphony will be formal so we needed to look the part since others will be dressed fancy. This made me curious how this event will turn out. Walking past the ticket area and through the doors to the lobby made me feel instantly memorized at how grand it was on the inside. I went downstairs and there were a vast
The choir opened with “I Sing the Greatness of Our God” by Fred Bock and words by Isaac Watts. This piece began with the organ playing the melody softly in triple meter. The choir came in on an off beat and sang a homorhythmic arch contour. The choir began softly and crescendoed quickly. After the introduction, the first verse was sung alternating between the men and women, they started out acapella. The choir came back together and sang the chorus of the song in unison and crescendoed with the organ until they were singing fortissimo. This piece had an overall allegro tempo and had a generally repetitive theme. It was apparent that
The first band performance of the night was jazz band. The first song was “Alright, Okay, You Win” and I think it sounded great. I feel like I could’ve played out just a little more in the beginning because you can hear my notes but not too well. Jeremy’s solo sounded good and I think that my solo sounded good too. The next song was “Fly Me to the Moon.” I
For this critique, I was fortunate enough to attend a jazz performance by Deborah Davis and Ben Rosenblum. Davis was the vocalist and Rosenblum was the pianist. This concert was part of a jazz concert series presented by Preservation New Jersey and the New Jersey Jazz Society. I enjoyed this performance because I was able to witness a professional pianist play up close in a relaxed setting. I was seated in the second pew of the sanctuary, directly in view of Rosenblum’s hands as he performed. This allowed me to not only listen to Rosenblum’s music, but also view his technique and positions throughout the performance. In addition, I am not often able to witness professional jazz performances, but I look forward to attending more in the future.
Each one of them had their own instruments and everyone did a great job. There was a man playing the guira and another playing the tambora. Also, one person was playing the saxophone, which I found very interesting because it seemed to be an instrument hard to play because they had to put so much effort to play it. Moreover, there was another person playing a second drum that was not the tambora. Lastly, the other person playing an instrument was Fefita, whose instrument was the accordion. I have to admit and mention one more time that she was excellent playing her instrument and singing at the same time.
The first song played was from a genre that I had previously taken a test on, Sonata. The musicians played the song by the book. There were three movements and polyphonic texture. It was even fast and jerky. Nonetheless, this is the part where my rollercoaster was going down. In my opinion it was boring. Although very well played, the song itself did not interest me. I did not like the roadrunner, coyote essence of the song. The piano accompaniment would sometimes play the melody and let the clarinet follow and then they would switch. This to me seemed force instead of like the Sonatas that I listened to in class. However, apart from the musical aspect of the first piece there was a certain intensity expressed by the performers. I had never seen a
The choir immediately captured my attention and seemed to do the same for everyone else in the audience. I was very impressed by the fact that the choir was made up entirely of college students. It was also stated that some of them sing in the choir just for fun as they are not music majors. There seemed to be an appeal in the fact that the singers were mostly very young. The piece as a whole was also very enjoyable.
The second piece, Paratum Cor Meum, was a much shorter piece with very few lyrics. It was interesting to hear a piece by Haydn, since we had discussed this composer in class. I was impressed by the choir members’ ability to remember words in another language, and I enjoyed the sounds of the piano accompaniment.
I enjoyed watching the way the conductor conducted the choir and I noticed how much effort goes into conducting. At first I thought that he was just waving his hands in the air, but then I realized that there was a pattern to it and that not only keep it on beat but it also did other things as well. I like how when the choir was singing that different parts of it would stop and other parts would keep going and then it would switch and the parts that stopped would start again and the ones that were just singing would then stop.
The piece itself had a disjunct melody which added into the catchiness of the tune and the change in tempo. Although this song was in a different language, it was upbeat and people were smiling and having fun with the
Following the brief cadence, the music and singing rapidly escalate, faster than the opening tempo before coming to a smooth closing cadence. I was most impressed with the actor’s ability to sing the tremendously fast paced verses and the harmony he is able to maintain with the instruments while doing so. The distinctive variation of pitch coincides with the tempo. Paired together are the fast paced measures that we hear in the beginning and end of the aria with the performer singing a higher pitch, and slow sections sung with a lower pitch as we briefly hear during the middle. The texture of this piece is mostly polyphonic but briefly becomes monophonic during the middle cadence when Figaro is signing without the accompany of the instruments.
... is very exciting and joyful to hear. The singing of male against female is particularly interesting, and the video helps to show that clash of voices against each other.