I Attended The All East Women 's Choir Concert

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For my second activity essay, I attended the All-East Women’s Choir concert, held Saturday, November 19th, 2016 in the Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre. This choir is an all-female choir who were participating in the All-East competition in order to be scored on how well they performed their pieces. The Belmont choral music professor Lesley Mann conducted this concert, with Maryville College music professor Christy Lee accompanying. As stated in the playbill, the choir sang a multitude of songs, but in this essay I will be focusing on three: “Now I Walk in Beauty”, “Songbird”, and “Take me to the Water”.
The concert began with the song “Now I Walk in Beauty”. This song is a traditional round song and was also used as a warm-up for the choir. The song begins softly, with all women’s voices singing, but throughout the song quickly builds to provide a louder amplitude. This gives the song a certain dynamic as the song continues to go on, always staying loud but dying down just a little bit at certain moments. Despite this, the high pitch of the women never wavers. The tempo of this piece is relatively slow, just providing an audience a sneak peek of what is to come during the rest of the performance. The melody at the beginning is simple, as it does not stray from the same notes. As the song begins to be a round, the singers layer the melody over itself, providing slightly more complexity to the piece. This comes together to provide the piece with a beautiful harmony, as the layering compliments itself. This creates a different timbre within this song than there was at the beginning, with the intensity of the piece beginning to slowly rise. With this song, the women are not only able to warm-up their voices for the following pieces, b...

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...happy note.
This concert was certainly a magnificent concert to see. Nature themes dominated the songs and performance, giving the listeners a pleasant and insightful consider something that they might not consider in everyday life. With individuals in the modern world being so busy nowadays, it is often hard to appreciate and think about the simplicities of life and what the earth has provided us, whether it be through the trill of a songbird or the rolling waves of an ocean. With this performance, the listener could do so, even if it was only for a little while. If the choir had not performed the pitch, melody, rhythm, and harmony to the extent that they did, it would have been much harder to convey such a magical tone to the entire concert. This concert shone in the simplicities it occupied, providing a wonderful and beautiful show for everyone in the audience.

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