Hello all!

Pls note NO choir practice in the morning, to meet 3.30pm this sat, 29th Aug at AJChoir room for AJ 25th Anniversary performance. Rmb to bring along ur costume(white n blue combination, same as our concert's 2nd half) If u want to, u can also wear it to save the trouble of changing. Cya all then!


Hello all!

Prac tml, 10am @ AJChoir Room. Rmb to bring scores for Sigulempong and Ride the Chariot! Cya all tml! :)

Meirong


Hello all!

Prac this sat, 15 Aug, 10am @ AJChoir Room. Remember to bring along ur scores and $25 for the 25th Anniversary. Cya!

-mr


Having a little trouble with videos hopefully i can find a way to post them soon. Meantime here are links! SSAA music for this week! Good to hear and for the guys good to watch too! Third one's a guy chorus! Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQjNH6WqaFg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtEXe4NearQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGt53KXZf60&feature=channel


Hi guys, 

Hi, guess its my turn to post this time... Nothing as epic or as orgasmic as the Philippine choirs below, this is simply NJChorale, as they were last night at their concert at the YMS. Composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, I first heard Crown of Roses piece waaaay back in my first choir SYF in secondary school from TKSS choir. It was awesome (or so I thought back then). They brought this with them to Prague in 2004 and after listening to them there, we all still thought that it was plenty awesome, though their results proved otherwise. The song is essentially about Jesus as a boy and his garden of roses, where he weaves his cherished flowers into beautiful garlands. Til one fine summer day, some bratty kids come traipsing through his garden and start plucking his roses for no apparent reason other than to piss him off. So boy Jesus lets them pluck his roses, asking them to leave the naked thorns behind. Then of the thorns they made a crown, And with rough fingers pressed it down, Till on His forehead fair and young, Red drops of blood like roses sprung. I always loved how TKSS ended this song with these. Impactful it was.

Going off tangent a little, I'd like to elaborate more on whatever I saw last night and what we can learn from the video above. As you can see, they are a relatively smaller choir, but they still manage to produce a very uniform, well-blended sound despite the horribly dry acoustics of the YMS auditorium. Respect for that, because from this and of course from their acapella pieces, we can see that they are armed with a bunch of confident and vocally talented singers. Not that we lack confidence and talent, but there was room for much more improvement and much less smoking in our own performance. Though at times, the conductor sorta lost them here and there, they were otherwise very precise in their singing; their notes were generally all there. They even prepared an encore song! Though the choice of song was quite random, at least they bothered to prepare something eh. So yeah, to sum up in a word, my little takeaway point specially for us from their concert is: Preparation.

Ok, now for the other side of the coin. Personally I felt that due to the reduced numbers, the choir was trying very hard to sound loud and big. And they succeded in that, but at the expense of the emotions in their songs. Maybe this doesn't apply much to most of their acapella pieces, but in songs like Crown of Roses and Shima E, the fact that they were rushing through was quite obvious. Too fast and too furious. There could have been more breaks in between, more stretching of the notes and more playing around with the dynamics to bring out more of their slower more emotionally songs. Without these elements, a great many of their more 'chorally-inclined' songs were simply very correctly sung, thats all. Fast and furious singing was also why the concert ended so early; effectively, it was only an hour of songs in all, after taking out the filler moments and the 20 minute interval.

So below I've inserted the second video. And that's all the salient points I have to make about njchorale. Anything else should not be put here, and instead be discussed on at an official gossip session at your request.

Hope this helps us in some way lar =)

signing out,

"North Dragon" GPT