Check Dropbox regularly for new additions, and beware, Your Song is a new version, so make sure you bring this one with you and not the previous version you may already have.
This week was a full-on learning experience, and from now on, we will be learning some new songs to sing at our concert in July.
Eamonn is making more complex arrangements for us from now on.
Don’t panic! He believes we can do it.
If we believe it too, we will make an absolutely wonderful sound.
After last week’s disastrous Crossing the Bar, Eamonn gently guided us through it again.
We seem to be singing the right notes (well, mostly), but the strange timing and elongated phrases are challenging.
The secret to this? Watch Eamonn, and he will steer us through.
Each verse has its own character, which will be explained to us in future weeks when we start polishing things up for the concert.
It is an exquisitely beautiful song that needs to be felt within us and felt together.
We successfully sang some of it to the end, and we sounded like a choir! The aim is to sing a capella unaccompanied for the concert.
Next up was finishing What’s Up. A song sung with attitude. Don’t be polite and scream out the high notes!
As we near the end of the song with the ‘Hey, yeah, yeah eh, eh’, it gradually gets quieter until the last time. Sop 1s sing the very last time as usual, but everyone else has long ‘Heys’ with a definite ‘y’ at the end.
Timing is critical, so, you guessed it, watch Eamonn!
You will certainly know the words without looking by then as we will have sung it so many times!
After a glass of wine or cup of tea, we started the top thumper of a song, From Now On.
From Now On is a musical number from the film The Greatest Showman. The character P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) performs the song as he faces a crucial stage in his life and career.
The Greatest Showman is a 2017 American biographical musical drama film directed by Michael Gracey ; the film is a heavily fictionalised depiction of the life of P. T. Barnum, a showman and entertainer, and his creation of the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the lives of its star attractions.
The film grossed $435 million worldwide, making it the fifth-highest-grossing live-action musical film of all time.
In early 2016, the cast performed a read-through before producers to green-light the film. Pasek and Paul approached Jeremy Jordan to sing the part of Carlyle since Jordan recorded demos for the film in 2015. The day before the read-through, Jackman underwent nasal surgery and was ordered by his doctor not to sing. Pasek and Paul asked Jordan to sing the part of Barnum while Jackman acted out the scenes, to which Jordan agreed. While the cast performed "From Now On", Jackman disobeyed orders and began singing along with Jordan. This brought the read-through to an emotional end, which resulted in the film being greenlit.
Having watched the performance, it is a hard act to follow.
We made a good start with the Basses and Tenors joining together to make beautiful music.
It is very spacious and slow at the beginning, and Gents, beware of Eamonn’s famous Dunce Hole in part, ‘..lead me back ………to you.’
Lady Tenors, you have long, spacious bars.
Then we come to the ‘Ooohs’ (always a mental block for the Sops!). Keep smiling!
It is like the string section underneath and will sound like an angel choir.
We then skipped to the chorus, which gradually builds with everyone singing in unison to begin with. The harmonies split as the chorus grows to a crescendo.
Next week we will do some more work on this as well as look as some of the other new songs.
From now on, please do your homework so we are prepared, but also listen to the songs we have previously sung to keep them fresh in your mind and keep that memory muscle working.
Eamonn believes in us. Believe in yourselves.
Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.
Trillers on a Perch
NYE at the National Theatre
Still, time to catch Nye at the National Theatre with Michael Sheen. I thoroughly enjoyed it but found it slightly too long. This life story begins at the end, with Aneurin “Nye” Bevan in a hospital bed, befittingly for the visionary political colossus who created Britain’s National Health Service in 1948. In a production written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris, there is some inspired stagecraft as the hospital curtains of Vicki Mortimer’s ingenious set swish to reveal debating chambers and libraries. Nye is still a vital play because Bevan is a vital man in British history. It succeeds in showing us just how high the hurdles he faced were. When he describes pre-war healthcare – one service for the rich, one for the poor – it rings of today’s two-tiered system. “I want to give you your dignity,” he says as the NHS launches. It is a rousing moment yet contains a terrible, tragic irony, given what is coming to pass with his precious legacy.
Until next week.