Things are just getting crazy in time for the ward Christmas events! I'm the director of our ward choir, and also I am a decent pianist, so that means that I am accompanying about half of all performances this Saturday night for the ward Christmas party, and then I am directing and/or accompanying all the music on Sunday's Christmas program. Then in the evening of Sunday I'll be accompanying a community caroling event in Urbana.
I just decided that for the ward Christmas party, I'll be playing and singing Down in Yon Forest, a cool hymn I just discovered like two days ago. I arranged myself a version of it an hour ago and I'll teach the ward to sing the chorus parts (the 2nd and 4th line of every verse are the same each time). Here's a choir singing it:
So pretty.
Also for the party, I wrote an arrangement of Silent Night and It Came Upon The Midnight Clear as a medley for piano and violin (surprise! I'm on the piano).
For Sunday's program, we'll be singing Lo How A Rose and Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.
If our choir were an audition-only British boys choir, and they sang a way cooler and more difficult arrangement than we are, this is how they would sound:
I have SUCH A CRUSH ON THAT SONG. I wish we could pull off this... or well, anything by John Gardner.
We are doing an easy rendition I got for FREE (yay free, esp. when you have no budget for your choir), based on this melody featured in Rutter's arrangement:
I also love Rutter. Ah. Love him so much. Wish we could pull off a Rutter, too. Oh well.
I also wrote an arrangement of the Huron Carol for performance in sacrament meeting. It sounds only vaguely like this (in that it has the same words! yay):
And in final news, I decided that next year FOR SURE I want to perform Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion by Handel at some venue.
The end.
Showing posts with label ward choir. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ward choir. Show all posts
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Easter program
As some of you know and most of you don't, I am the choir director for my ward. It's an interesting job. In the past I've always been the choir pianist/organist, and I always thought how I could be such an awesome choir director--and then I actually became one and realized that it's pretty hard to be a good choir director when the choir is non-audition and no one has any real reason to come to practice.
The past few months have been really hard for me. All my staple musicians either moved out of the ward, or were going to be out of town for Easter, so since February the choir has had like 5 people show up each week, and it was basically just hard and depressing.
BUT the Easter program went well! The choir sang "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" and "I Stand All Amazed." Also, I got to perform a piano/violin duet I wrote, with my BFF Julie. We had two Laurels come up and sing "O Savior Thou Who Wearest A Crown," and then one of our Beehives played an Easter song on her Irish harp (or whatever it's called). It was pretty nice. We had a lot of congregational hymns, and then in between, the bishop read excerpts from conference talks about the Atonement and the Resurrection.
Best part was when the bishop called me by my maiden name and mispronounced Julie's last name when we got up to perform our song. Ha!
The song we did was a mashup I wrote of "As Now We Take The Sacrament," "All Creatures of Our God and King," and one other Atonement-themed one that I can't remember now that it's all over. It ended on "All Creatures," which I thought was a nice way to end it. We just played the "Aleluia" sections over and over a few times, with varying bass lines for piano. I messed up a smidge at the tail end, but in my defense, I didn't write the piano part, so it was pretty much all memory, and sometimes memories fail ya when you're in the middle of a performance.
But I'm still way too lazy to actually write down the piano pieces I wrote on Finale. Even though I have SongWriter 2010, and even an electric piano to hook up to it to auto-write for me or whatever, it's still just takes so much time, I always procrastinate it forever.
But, I was thinking I should write out at least the past two piano/violin duets I've written, and I could put them up here in PDF format for download just so other musicians can use them. I had to write them because other arrangements I found were either too hard or too easy, and I think what Julie and I have come up with is pretty doable on short notice. We totally threw our Easter medley together in under 9 days (we are awesome).
Anyway, whew! Glad the Easter program is over! Now this ward choir director can chillax until Christmas. ^.~
The past few months have been really hard for me. All my staple musicians either moved out of the ward, or were going to be out of town for Easter, so since February the choir has had like 5 people show up each week, and it was basically just hard and depressing.
BUT the Easter program went well! The choir sang "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" and "I Stand All Amazed." Also, I got to perform a piano/violin duet I wrote, with my BFF Julie. We had two Laurels come up and sing "O Savior Thou Who Wearest A Crown," and then one of our Beehives played an Easter song on her Irish harp (or whatever it's called). It was pretty nice. We had a lot of congregational hymns, and then in between, the bishop read excerpts from conference talks about the Atonement and the Resurrection.
Best part was when the bishop called me by my maiden name and mispronounced Julie's last name when we got up to perform our song. Ha!
The song we did was a mashup I wrote of "As Now We Take The Sacrament," "All Creatures of Our God and King," and one other Atonement-themed one that I can't remember now that it's all over. It ended on "All Creatures," which I thought was a nice way to end it. We just played the "Aleluia" sections over and over a few times, with varying bass lines for piano. I messed up a smidge at the tail end, but in my defense, I didn't write the piano part, so it was pretty much all memory, and sometimes memories fail ya when you're in the middle of a performance.
But I'm still way too lazy to actually write down the piano pieces I wrote on Finale. Even though I have SongWriter 2010, and even an electric piano to hook up to it to auto-write for me or whatever, it's still just takes so much time, I always procrastinate it forever.
But, I was thinking I should write out at least the past two piano/violin duets I've written, and I could put them up here in PDF format for download just so other musicians can use them. I had to write them because other arrangements I found were either too hard or too easy, and I think what Julie and I have come up with is pretty doable on short notice. We totally threw our Easter medley together in under 9 days (we are awesome).
Anyway, whew! Glad the Easter program is over! Now this ward choir director can chillax until Christmas. ^.~
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