38th Annual Summer Reading Session for Church Choir

Now this was definitely a very different experience.......having had the chance to attend a couple of different conferences (both for church and for academia), I was very much caught off guard by this one......being a fish out of water doesn't quite encompass the inadequateness of my talents for an even such as this.......

I was thinking this would just be similar to any of the other conferences I've attended. There'd be lecturers and powerpoint presentations as they go over the finer details of leading a church choir and singing with the right voices.....and so i didnt think much of the fact that while most of the people at the event were choir directors, I was given the noble title of "selector of a fun Christmas tune"......until I was handed the package of 60+ choral pieces at the registration desk


I sat down and sifted through all the sheet music, finding only an order form attached.....interesting, i thought......no program? no topics of focus?......it was then that i realized we were sitting in front of curtained stage.....maybe, i thought, there would be a choir that would sing all of this for us, and so that's why i am here to pick one that i like

It was not until the "clinician", as they called him, stepped up that I realized how wrong I was.....the reason of why this was a "reading" session finally dawned on me.......as we flipped open the first piece of our stack and he signaled the piano to begin, I realized that WE were the ones to sing through all of this

This arrangement posed several problems. First of all, given that my professional piano career ended more than three years ago, my sight reading abilities were virtually nonexistent. Even then, I have never learnt to read voice. I would follow along the melody and completely miss all the words, or follow the words and have no clue what to sing it to. Secondly, singing aws definitely not my strength, especially not SATB. The accompanist would play the intro, and everyone would automatically know what to sing and what pitch to sing in, and i'm just left standing there wondering how in the world do they do that and frantically trying to pick up the right pitch. The of course, as if to make matters worse, my voice falls between the tenor and the bass. The tenor had notes that were too high for me to reach (I have trouble singing higher than a D4), and the bass was at times too low for me to accurately hear what I was singing.

In short, the only thing that I could sing were segments that were in slow quarter notes without huge leaps or odd accidentals. So the majority of the time was spent following along and listening to other, more accomplished vocalists do the work =P True, there were some trickier pieces that we slaughtered (especially the couple following lunch), but generally it was very well done. And I do admire them for being able to sing well on the spot like that, wish I could have done the same.......

But hey, I'm not complaining. At least it's a very different break from the regularities of work =P (and imagine if an scientific conference was like this XD "Ok everyone, this is my experiment, let's do it all together!")

PS: Saw Ms MacCulloch there, but then she never taught me and I doubt she knows me, so I didn't bother to say hi