It's finally arrived.

Wow. After about two and a half months, we've finally arrived. The raison d'etre of this blog, is imminent this week.

Wednesday and Thursday are the big performances for my little choir. We have a whopping 2 songs, sung by an astronomical 9 people. While I chide on the numbers, I assure you, that we sounded pretty good on our final rehearsal.

After ups and downs, extra people and more than warranted dropping out (started with 14, went to 15, now 8 plus me), and many missed rehearsals due to holidays and pro-D days, we've reached the penultimate point a couple of days ago.

Ran California Dreamin' briefly. Thank heavens, people remembered the nuances that we've painstakingly worked on the rehearsal before, 4 weeks ago. Only minor touch ups, and we spent only 15 minutes on it, as I wanted to.

Sweet Surrender. I surrendered last time. We had 15 minutes left, but it wasn't going anywhere. It was somewhat looking the same, in that we alwasy go sharp. Now, normally, going sharp is not unacceptable. If the whole group does so together. But with this group, everyone seems to go up individually. I'm quite sure it starts with the basses (guilty here), but we don't even sync up when we go up. After anoub 20 bars, half the choir's gone up. It takes another 20 bars for the rest to catch up.

So, a student suggested we just start a semi-tone higher. I've never done that before, and immediately assumed that we'd just continue to go up. But, miraculously (and not quite so), it worked. I guess either the group just natrually wants to sing the song at the new key, or, more likely, it just starts to get too high, and it's just not possible to go another semi-tone up.

Spent the bulk of the time on it, even worked in some dynamics. By the end, we sounded good.

I'm going to miss the choir and the singing. Most definitely. But there's still two performances, and still need to do a coffee house type thing for all the non school attendees, such as you guys who read this blog.
Polished up Sweet Surrender, and (we start on an F#, but