Poster for next week's MagSoc concert of Carmina Burana in which I'm singing. I thought I'd have a go at singing soprano in a chorus big enough that it wouldn't matter if I made a mess of it. Not having been able to get a look at the score in advance, it turned out to be a bit more soprano than I'd anticipated, but I've survived the onslaught of A's and even the occasional B so far. The one C that appears is, however, a semitone too far.
Anyway, it's definitely been a big improvement on my choir experiences in Cambridge up til now, with generally friendler people who don't take it all so seriously, and a conductor who tells jokes in the style of Julie, e.g. "What did the small pebble say? I wish I was a little boulder..."
Previous choirs include The Nazi Chorus (not their official name) who had a phenomenal number of rules, and gave no quarter if you infringed any of them. For example, if you turned up to a concert not wearing an ankle-length black skirt and long-sleeved white blouse you weren't allowed to sing. And that was just the men. They also had a conductor who avoided ever looking at the choir, even by accident. Perhaps he was scared of them. And, indeed, who could blame him.
The next choir was generally less demented and friendlier, but the rehearsal style was a bit chaotic, and it suffered rather from the whole Cambridge problem of everyone trying to show off how learned and brilliant they were all the time. So more often than not you felt like you weren't singing with everyone so much as against them, and this didn't result in a very coherent sound. Or much fun.
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