YAY!  Everything is up on the download page now, and I'm going to see if I can get some CD's burned for rehearsal tonight.

I told everyone last week that I'd change the key of "Merry Little Christmas" lower so it wasn't a strain. (Sorry basses, can't do that for Immanuel).  I've posted  the new music up on the music download page for those who wish to snag it.

Last night's rehearsal was pretty good.  Af first it was scary, since there were only four people that were there, but after a while, more and more folks filtered in, till I was pretty comfortable with things.  We worked on the new piece, "I Saw Three Ships" that we're doing with the band, and got parts down on that.  The kids sounded very good again, which makes me proud.  Also, we're going to take "White Christmas... Or NOT" a couple of steps so that we don't have to worry about bleeding vocal chords.  All in all, things wen't very well, and I'm looking forward to rehearsal NEXT THURSDAY (not Tuesday).

There is new music in the files section up above.  I re-did the parts of "Immanuel" that were bothering me, and put up the vocal and piano parts for "I Saw Three Ships" that we're going to be doing with the band.  I'll have all of the other music posted by next Monday, and have all the parts for the band to Bob by then as well.  Things are starting to come together, now that my head is back in the game.  Whew.

was odd.  We had five people there.  Fortunately all of the parts were covered and they sounded REALLY GOOD.  They were pretty surprised to hear it, but it's true, nonetheless.  If I'm not mistaken, pretty much everyone is scheduled within an inch of their life, and periodically we'll see these temporal perfect storms where competing events suck the participants out of a particular activity.  So much for my take on the theory of relativity.  In any case, Rachael and I are going to try to get a handle on rehearsals and synchronize our watches to see if that helps out at all.  What this means bottom line is that the schedule that has been posted all nice and neat from now till December 12th may change, so please keep an eye on it.  I'll endeavor to keep everyone appraised of any schedule changes at rehearsal as well.

BTW, Barb (our accompanist) is awesome. 80)

The third rehearsal was pretty nice.  There were quite a few people there and we all had a pretty good time.  The brouhaha over the rehearsal times, places, and whatnot were dealt with as well as can be expected, and things just... went well.  Of course in the mean time, my daughter has been in and out of the hospital and had surgery.  This was not particularly easy for her, and was also a little bit of a strain on the rest of us.  The upshot is that I haven't done anything meaningful on community music for the last couple of weeks.  I fully expect to be back to my regular life Wednesday afternoon at 3:30, so I guess we'll see how THAT goes.  I've posted some mp3s of the music as well as one of the scores of the hardest tune we have so far.  Look on the top under "Music" if you're wanting to get at those downloads.

The second rehearsal went both smoother and rougher than the initial one.  First, we had a whole LOT more people show up.  This rehearsal, we had 12.  Things are starting to look up!  Everyone did a fine job, and the only problem with the whole affair was with a specific piece of music that I arranged, "White Christmas ... OR NOT".  This may seem like a callous title, but it's not really.  I worked most of the day getting the harmonies and all that good sort of stuff worked out, and about an hour before rehearsal, I was finally finished with the vocal lines, but not the piano accompaniment.  After hurriedly printing it out, I went into town to make copies and tape them up so they'd be usable.  Well, the first thing that I noticed was that I must have had some sort of 'episode' or something because I'd actually arranged "Merry Little Christmas".  OK, fine.  I amended the title with a sharpie, quickly made the copies, taped all of them together, ran out the door, and went to rehearsal.  After I handed them out, one of our top notch and observant bass vocalists noted "Our part is cut off on the bottom of the page".  Yep, sure was.  After running through the other two arrangements, we attempted to do parts on "White Christmas ... OR NOT" and were fairly successful with the soprano and alto parts, but not so much with the tenor.  We didn't even attempt the bass part, for reasons which were discussed earlier.  In any case, the REST of the rehearsal wen swimmingly and we got a lot accomplished.

I'm looking forward to fixing "White Christmas ... OR NOT" for next rehearsal, as well as working up a couple more arrangements for us to work on.  We're even going to do one with the band, which should be big fun too.

The first rehearsal went off, as scheduled September 28th at 7:00 PM.  We had a grand total of five vocalists which I think is a pretty good start.  Beats all the numbers that are less than 5 for sure.  We first established that we'd have rehearsal at 7:00 on Tuesdays by an overwhelming landslide vote.  After all that dilly-dallying, we got down to business and worked on two of our pieces; O come Immanuel, and Carol of the Bells.  After that... we stopped and went home.