Bouncing back and forth between the healing and the hollering

god loves ugly

It's been a little under a month since I last posted, and as much as I'd love to pass it off as my life just getting away from me and not having time to write, it's really much more that I haven't had enough of a handle on what I'm thinking or feeling to want to put it into words, let alone to have the language to do so. And I wasn't much interested in doing a basic day-to-day on my schedule. That's kinda dull. Heh. Though it's quite possible my thoughts and feelings are equally dull.
I've still been working with the children's chorus; I'm working with the West End House training choir (those are my little guys, slightly older than the Villa Victoria kids), and with the Premier Choir (much older, much more fabulous), and I'm starting to reap the benefits of the work I've been doing with them all year. By which you'd think I mean that they've improved dramatically and are better musically educated and have an enriched appreciation for what their singing. I like to think that's there too -- in fact I know that's there, only I can't see it as clearly because I've been growing with them. What I mean when I speak of the benefits of working with them is
how it's bolstered my shaky spots musically; things like complex rhythm used to be daunting, even a measure of quarter note eight note pairings would sometimes trip me up (dah-ah dit dah-ah dit). That may be unclear. Or stoopid. Lemme try to explain myself really quick, that's where the first beat of the measure is held over into the first part of the SECOND beat of the measure, then the second part of the second beat is articulated. Okay, that sounded like baby poop I'm sure, lemme do a very rudimentary rhythm lesson (this'll be a really hard exercise for me too)

Each 'beat' represents a quarter note. And a quarter note gets one beat. Here's a regular measure of quarter notes in 4/4 time:

[ beat beat beat beat ] (bears, beats, battlestar gallactica. sorry.)

we would count that measure of quarter notes like this:

[ 1 2 3 4 ]

I can't draw notes here, so I'm going to use the Q symbol for quarter note.

[ Q Q Q Q ]

say it aloud:

[ ta ta ta ta ]

Each quarter can be divided into two eighth notes (there are also sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and so on, but, um, not right now), so one eighth note (E, here) takes up half as much time as one quarter note. Thus idea being that two eighth notes can make up one beat, but you articulate the beats inside the beat. If that makes sense. I promise I'm not this confusing with the kids. Below is a measure that still has 4 beats in it, but each beat is composed of eighth notes:

[ EE EE EE EE ]

So we'd count that measure aloud like this:

[ 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and ]

Yes, we need the last 'and'. It's the second part of beat 4. This is called subdivision, where you articulate two pulses within one beat. If you prefer, maybe this is clearer:

[ tee-tee tee-tee tee-tee tee-tee ] the kids giggle their asses off at that.

Each syllable is an 8th note. Man this is difficult without a chalk board. If anyone's still following this I'm stunned. This is now just for my own deranged pleasure to see if I can explain basic rhythm without music symbols.

'Scuse me, can I have your attention back? Up here please? Chyanne feet down please. Yasmine put it away. I need your eyes up here please and I want to see your finger on your music following the measure we're looking at. I like how Kevin is sitting quietly in position 1, he's ready to sing. Raise your hand when you've found where we are.

So what used to really trip me up (not conceptually but when I was doing rapid sight-reading) was when I saw a measure that went something like this

[ DOTTED quarter - eighth - dotted quarter - eighth ]

I emphasized the first dotted just cause it's new, it's not different from the second dotted. So what the dot does to a note is divide it in half, and add that half beat to the original value of the note. So with a quarter note, the dot cuts it in half (again half a quarter note is an eighth note) and adds the value of the eighth note to the quarter note. This means that a dotted quarter note takes up the value of 3 eighth notes.
So lets say you had an empty measure subdivided thus:

[ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ] Each of those spaces can hold one eighth note.

[ 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ]


There are supposed to be really clear spaces between each of these so you can see how the beats would line up with the counts, but blogger's not helping me out here.

A Dotted quarter note would take up the space of 3 eighth notes, which would be ALL of the first beat (the first two spaces) and HALF of the second beat. So you hold a dotted quarter note for 3 eighth notes. This means you would say "1" and then think "and 2" This means the second half of the eighth note in beat 2 would still be hangin' there, unfilled. I'm gonna fill it in with an eighth note. Make sense? (if not email me)...(if you still care).

So here's the measure I was talkin' about in the first place, the kind of thing that would often trip me up when sight-reading:

[ Q. E Q. E ]

So you'd speak that like this:

[ ta-ah-ah ti ta-ah-ah ti ] See? Each syllable is an eighth note? Say it aloud.

Or as I so feebly attempted to describe it to you at the beginning-

[ dah-ah DIT dah-ah DIT ]
1 (and 2) AND 3 (and 4) AND

When you count it right you can't help but emphasize the hanging eighth note.
Man, I really didn't mean to devolve into a lesson there, I got kind of excited to see if I could explain it using basic terminology and without actual music visuals. I'd kinda curious to know if that was clear at all. Just re-read it. Heh. Not so much.

******

Yesterday I had a small bit in a Chamber Singers concert. I haven't sung with them this year (not an option as I'm only enrolled in the one symmetry class which makes me a part time student and not eligible for the choir), but for this concert Andy invited back some of last years seniors to sing two pieces from last years repertoire, one of which was the Ave Maria I'd conducted. So I conducted it yesterday. We alums were supposed to gather with choir members we sang with last year who haven't yet graduated, but I was the first alum there, everyone else was late, and we decided to start the run-through without them. There's something about singing with a choir that makes you family, especially the older members. Incredible bonding. I didn't develop life-long friendships with these people, but this group of seniors I sang with formed a tight intimacy around the experience of the music itself. We'd done pieces together where it was just the 7 of us and we'd found an internal tactus among us and we were anticipating each other's cadences, shared common breaths without preparation, gave and took where the music begged it and knew one another's voices inside and out.
They hadn't showed up yet, and I stood in front of the rest of last year's choir, gave pitches, and began the Nathanial Dett Ave Maria. There are moments in that piece where I cue individual exposed parts because the rubato gets so flexible, the tenors here, the basses after the alto's pick-up, and so on, and this strange magical thing happened. I'd been totally focused on my sheet music as we sung the first few pages, unsure of myself and reacquainting myself with the piece, that when I looked up to cue in the bass, Andrew was suddenly there, turned to the Sopranos for their lofty entrance and there was Diana, and so on with Daniel and Brett and the rest, as though they'd materialized like ghosts to sing, and the moment I looked for their voices there they were - the first time I'd seen any of them in quite awhile and it was just right that our reunion would be this piece, and that our first reconnection was their cue to sing. I grin when I conduct. And I cry a little. We shared moments of contact in their entrances where I swear fell in love with each of them as we acknowledged and appreciated each other for what we had done and what we were doing now. Relief to be back in the music like that, in the thick of it not just on the sidelines assistant coaching the team. And the concert went beautifully.

****

At the moment I'm in Ted's office in Hanover hangin' out with him while he works. Last night we read a story to Eli about a chick that loves to sing, and then gets eaten by a fox, who then discovers he can't stop singing, fox gets eaten by a wolf who finds he has the same affliction, and so on. Then Ted and I played Mario Kart until late at night.
Things aren't perfect, I'm still wrestling the same Boston - LA decision, and my personal life could be better managed by an autistic child, perhaps even Paris Hilton.
But I prayed this morning and felt some connection that I'd been missing for awhile, that hadn't come when I was just going through the motions of prayer. I'm alone and I meant it and it's out of my hands.