I am back at Pearl's and writing from my late night office here at the kitchen table. Didn't do much today. Had one final sleep-in, which wasn't very "sleep-inny" because I woke up at 10:15 after getting to bed at 3am last night. That was because the Murnau blog took me a while to write. Anyhow, I just puttered about The Tiny, drinking twice-poured coffee and working on the anthem for church tomorrow.
What is Twice Poured Coffee, you ask?
I know you asked it.
I got it from Ozzy Osbourne of all people. He called it something else, like Rocket Fuel, or maybe he just said "if you want to make a great cup of coffee" try this.....and it's simple : you just pour the hot coffee right back through the grounds a second time. If you are doing it with a coffee maker, don't pour the coffee back into the water slot, just pull out the plastic filter cone instead, and set it on top of a coffee cup. Put your milk or cream in first, then set the filter on top, with the grounds in it, and then pour the already-made coffee through the filter and grounds, and it will fill your cup as Twice Poured Coffee, and it does indeed offer an extra little kick, just as Ozzy says.
So I worked on tomorrow's song, "The Canticle Of Thanksgiving", which we are doing after Thanksgiving, but that's cool because we are still on Thanksgiving weekend. I will be doing my first vocal solo to open the song, just the first three lines but it's still fun, just me and the pianist. It's an easy song to sing except for a few harmonies in the middle section that are counterintuitive to the way your ear thinks they should sound.
In cases like these, you've gotta show Your Ear who is boss, and it's not You - it's the music. The music is The Boss. Sometimes these composers, armed with degrees in musical theory, will throw a harmony at you that seems at odds to what you think or feel it should sound like, and for me, because I am still learning to read music, I am discovering that it is not enough to just read it as "an up-and-down ladder". In harmonies, there are jumps in modulation that can throw you off if you are a newbie like me, and so what I do now is just get a Google image of the Bass Clef, and I sit there with my guitar and I look at it, and I look at the sheet music in my lap, and I play the notes of the harmony-in-question until it is not only situated in my brain, but until it makes some musical sense to me. I listen to the notes until I can understand them. I am used to hearing rock n' roll harmonies, which are almost always intuitive. They sound like you think they should sound, which is why you can harmonise with the lead singer when you are singing along in your car. With rock, it's a piece of cake in most cases. But in choral music, you've gotta know your specific part, and they always give the Tenor section a lot of counterintuitive stuff, which means it is not gonna sound like you think it's supposed to sound.
Sopranos have it easy, because they get to sing the melody every time. All they have to know is how the song goes, haha.
But I'm glad I'm not an Alto. They have to sing the In-Between Stuff all the way through the song, and it's really and truly In Between, non-stop countermelody.
I grew up singing along to the radio, so my brain is programmed to sing along with the melody line, or to harmonize with a simple third, fourth or fifth, which I would have known just by feel, aka intuition.
So I am learning as I go along. "The Canticle Of Thanksgiving" has a High G in it, at the end. That's very high indeed, like Grab Your Abdomen high. You've got to head into a note like that at full bore, or else you will be toast. The only other thing you can do, is to take a step downward, and create your own ending if you do not feel that you are gonna be able to hit the High G. And you will only know as you move through the song, based on how your voice feels. If you can't hit it, you are gonna have to step down, and go down the ladder instead, because you can't stop singing. And if you go downward, you still have to harmonise. At that point you will be relying entirely on your musical intuition in a counterintuitive situation. So I recommend trying for the high note instead.
Thank God I'm not a Bass, either. I have no idea what they are singing. :)
That's all I know for tonight, which admittedly isn't much. I did watch an episode of "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" which was pretty cool. An unnamed Middle Eastern country had a Giant Magnetic Ray that could pull American spyplanes down from the sky and cause them to crash, so the Seaview submarine was sent on a mission to locate and destroy the weapon. Captain Crane was sent undercover to the Middle Eastern seaport to infiltrate the enemy base.
Captain Crane was played by the legendary, super handsome (and still alive) David Hedison, who starred in the original version of "The Fly".
Now that was a scary movie.
See you in church in the morn. :):)
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