Amethyst's Shiny Pebbles

My chamber choir Convivium hosted a group called The Queen's Six for a workshop and concert last weekend. The Queen's Six is a professional six-member male a capella group that live in and sing at Winchester Castle. It was a really wonderful concert! Here's a video of them doing one of the pieces they sang last week (they commissioned this piece as part of their 10th anniversary celebration).







And here's a video of Convivium singing Melissa Dunphy's O Oriens to open that same concert!

I went to JoAnn's after posting the previous sewing entry to acquire more lace.  While they had another spool of lace in the same pattern, it wasn't exactly the same color - more of a stark white than the cream I had already pinned in.  And they only had the one spool left, period.  So I shrugged and bought it - that's one of the nice things about knowing that nobody will see it closer than many feet away!

I was able to use my mom-in-law's sewing machine, from circa 1951.  (You can tell from the centenary medal they put on it.)

As I mentioned, it only does straight stitching, but it still works!


After I hemmed the whole thing (yeah, it's puckered, big deal for my purposes), I decided to hand-sew it to a hairband, so that I'd have a way of actually putting it on without having to hide my whole head.  I ruffled it to give the affair some height. I think it came out pretty well.

Later this weekend, I'll put up photos of me in the whole outfit!

I've been wanting to get these up for a while, but the DVD of this past year's recital only just became available.  So... here's me, singing Adele's Laughing Song (Strauss, Die Fledermaus) in May of 2010:



And here's me, singing Adele's Audition Song in May of 2011:



Enjoy!

Busy last few weekends, these.

Easter weekend started a bit early, with a midday service sung by our choir in a FREEZING COLD!!! church.  (Easter weekend was cold.)  Easter day, we sang a whole lotta music, because, well, Easter!  And we went over to my in-laws for lunch and afternoon hanging out.

The following weekend - last weekend, our bishop visited our parish.  This meant whole lotta additional music, because, well, Bishop!  Bishop Marc Andrus is a really cool guy who likes good modern music, and who preaches a really excellent, clear sermon. 

This weekend went like this:
Saturday morning: go to skating class as usual.  Fail to understand why our frame is going completely out the window after the mohawk turn in the Fiesta Tango.  Come home, shower.
Saturday afternoon: Sing for a while at home, to clear throat of gook.
A little later Saturday afternoon: Go be part of recital, in which I demonstrate to those present that I own a high D.  :)
Saturday night: Watch some more of "My Left Foot."  Get completely discouraged by how grim it is, and turn it off at the attempted suicide.  As Huz puts it, one moral of the story appears to be, "Don't be born Irish."

This morning: go to choir and do somewhat spiffy music because a good friend of our choir conductor, who is a really excellent composer and organist, is in town and is playing with us.  Sit and listen to some of his short recital afterwards.
Early this afternoon: go home, change into street clothes.  Pick up Huz, retrace steps and overshoot church to end up at in-laws' for Mother's Day lunch and hanging out.
Late this afternoon: go home, do an errand.
This evening: go south a few towns to meet a friend who's temporarily in the neighborhood for dinner.  Good times were had.  Thanks, haamel  - see you soon!

Fun!  But tiring.  Ready to have a quiet evening at home now.

As posted earlier, our choir did the Rutter Requiem last Friday night, and our director recorded the performance.  Normally I don't do this sort of thing, but here's an .mp4 file of me doing the Pie Jesu.  (People told me it was really good.  After getting a chance to listen to it... yeah, I'm really pretty pleased with it!)

EDITED to add: Our church site has been completely revamped (it's now all Flash-driven and pretty and stuff).  Among the other bells and whistles, it's got a "Music Clips" section under Worship.  I am rather pleased to note that this piece is one of the three on display (that's where I'm linking the file from now, actually; please let me know if the link quits working).

Often in the evening after dinner, I'm tired, and very much not in an "I wanna practice singing" mood.

Yet, much more often than not, once I start, I get extremely engaged in what I'm doing and generally feel like I've accomplished something come the end of it.  (Like, I think I managed to sing the sillily high D - the one up above the treble staff - cleanly, twice tonight.  That's once more than I did in lesson this past week!)  And I have energy while I'm practicing, once I've gotten into it.

Now, why can't I remember that?  Why can't I just remind myself, when I don't feel like practicing, that I'm almost always glad that I've practiced once I've gotten started?  Must be a little like various acquaintances and the gym...

Like ladybird97 , I haven't posted anything of substance in a while.  So, I post!

Work has been going along in a mixed-to-reasonable fashion.  We've got positive expression for enough of our genes to make it worthwhile to start on The Big Interactome Project.  One thing stands in our way: the ELISA that we're figuring on using to detect interactions isn't working.  Again.  We plan to work on the problem next week.  But meantime, just about everything else is ready for launch.

We had a fantastic time over the holiday weekend at the giant gaming party hosted by cerebralpaladin and orichalcum.  We saw a number of people that we hadn't seen in quite some time, and met some new - and of course cool - people.  I played two D&D games: one set in ancient Babylon, in which my thief character helped figure out why it was raining on the Jewish Quarter and nowhere else (everyone else in town was blaming the Jews for stealing their rain - turns out that basically, they were right!), and one in which all the PCs were members of a theatrical troupe.  The troupe put on plays of heroic adventures, and in this one-shot, we had to basically *become* adventurers to get our hands on a kidnapped playwright who'd promised he'd write us a play.  The last game that I played was in a system called "Dogs in the Vineyard," in which the PCs were essentially lawgivers of the One True Faith in something like mid-1800s Mormon Utah.  You can get a sense of the mechanics of conflict resolution from this Wikipedia article and the character creation and gameplay from this review.  It is significantly more freewheeling than any game system than I've ever played before (not that that's very many).  The traits and relationships that you use to define your character have essentially no limits on them in terms of their definitions: "sense truth", "skeptic", "healer", and "joyful celebration" were some of the traits in our group.  Having played a session, I can pretty definitely say that the more vague you can be in your traits and relationships, the better - it means that you can more easily bring the die values of those traits and relationships into conflicts.  It was fun, and I wouldn't at all mind playing in the system again.

We had our first choir rehearsal of the season a couple of nights ago.  We have two new people: a strong bass and a strong soprano.  Having two whole basses to our name makes a huge difference, as does having a soprano who can actually generate volume on Wednesday nights.  I'm really excited about choir this year - we're gonna be goooooooood...... :D

And next weekend we're going to see Spamalot and Yellow Face, both should be good pieces of theater.  I'll be interested in hearing what y'all think of the movie 9; it's on my 'hmm, could be interesting' list.

Yesterday was quite productive.  We:

• got taught the steps to our first true ice dance, the Dutch Waltz

• got work done on my car
    This took longer than it was supposed to and I failed to bring anything to entertain myself with while waiting.  So I hung out in the customer lounge and watched a bit of Game Seven of the Boston/Chicago basketball game.  It's the first time I've watched pro basketball in literally decades, and the main thing that struck me was, wow those guys are beefy!  Muscles on muscles in their torsos and arms.  Way back when (in my kiddie memory of Larry Bird and his ilk) I remember that the typical basketball-player phenotype was tall and skinny.  When did that change to tall and burly?

• performed in the voice studio's recital
    Which went quite well, really.  Laurie's Song went at least as well as it's ever gone in practice, ditto the Doll Song.  The Green Dog was fine till the very end when I flubbed the timing.  Pretty much everyone was an active pleasure to listen to - it was really nice!

• had a fence between us and a neighbor built after the old one blew down a couple of weeks ago

And today, I've already done church and we've gone skating.  We need to go over to Stanford so I can pack up some supplies I'll need, take care of the neighbor's cats, and go grocery shopping.  Yes, busy.  But good.

The Stanford Symphonic Chorus and the Peninsula Symphony are joining forces next weekend to present a concert of American music. The program includes Copland's Quiet City, Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, and (most exciting) the world premiere of local composer Brian Holmes' Amherst Requiem, a setting of the traditional Latin text mixed with several of Emily Dickinson's poems medidating on various aspects of death. (I haven't heard the whole thing yet, as the chorus is present in only three of the movements, but I really like what I've heard so far!)

Performances are this Friday Nov 21 at 8 PM, and Sunday Nov 23 at 2 PM. Both performances are at Memorial Church on Stanford Campus. Tickets are $10 student, $20 adult. You may purchase tickets in advance from Peninsula Symphony's website, or purchase them at the door.
Hope to see you there!

Local folks should go see the Hillbarn Theater's production of Elton John's and Tim Rice's Aida.  The first fifteen minutes feel a little like watching a low-quality Andrew Lloyd Webber show, but then it definitely picks up.  Really strong cast - I keep disbelieving that this is an amateur theater group! - and the story is as powerful and moving as it was when Verdi dreamed it up.  nezumiko, a lot of the music is right up your alley.

And if you're interested, the Stanford Symphonic Chorus, Stanford Symphony, Stanford Taiko, and I forget who else are presenting the world premier of Cosmic Flames, a recently commissioned piece by Chinese composer Zhou Long.  It's about fifteen minutes of interesting stuff for, well, orchestra, taiko, and chorus.  Tonight is our first dress rehearsal, and I'll be most interested to hear what the orchestration is like.  It will be performed with the final movement of the Beethoven 9th Symphony.  We'll be performing these pieces, as well as Carmina Burana, when the music department tours in China at the end of June/beginning of August.