Ensemble singing #2

  Videos from todays lesson: 

in todays lesson we worked as a class on two of our main songs that we are working on at the moment. These include - 'Somewhere only we know' and 'And so it goes'.

We started the lesson off by doing a vocal warm up. During this we did things like physical body warmups to start off to make sure that our bodies where prepared and ready to sing - This included stretches and face massages. By warming up our body before hand this makes sure that we do not damage any of our muscles when we start singing. After this we then went on to proper singing warmups. Firstly we started off by doing simple breathing exercises. This involves breathing in for four, holding for four and out for four. We then repeated this for six and eight counts to make sure that we are using as much of our lung capacity as possible. To then follow on from this we then began to do some simple siring with the word sing so that we could make sure to warm up our whole entire vocal range equally. Following on from this, we also did warmups such as, Holding onto a note and letting out for as long as possible, I like the flowers song in groups and more that we do every time we go to sing.

After we had vocally warmed-up for the lesson we then went onto singing. We went straight into the song 'And so it goes' so that we could see how much we could remember, and surprisingly mostly all the harmonies were still there and present. After we did one go through we then re- went over all the harmonies for each of the vocal groups before we went to re sing it again. Once we re went through these vocal harmonies we then sung it again, But this time we did it standing in a circle facing inwards as this allowed us to be able to hear all the harmonies against our own harmonies which was very nice to hear as now we could hear the song with all the harmonies working together. We did a couple of run-throughs with the piano which can be seen in the videos and then we tried it acapella style. Doing this piece in this style was quite fun to do as it sounded quite whole in my opinion and made it feel more complete in a way.

We then repeated the same thing with our second song 'somewhere only we know'. Doing this song was also as fun as the first, however I found the harmonies easier in this one that I did in the first song.

Targets

For when we come to do this again, I have given myself some things to work on, targets. The first thing I want to work on is my harmonies for the first song as I struggle when it comes to singing them against the other harmonies. With this I also wanna work on my ability to use crescendos and diminuendos in the songs along with the volume markings in the piece as I feel at the moment I seem to sing it all at the same vocal volume.  Other than that I do not believe there is much more that I need to work on in terms of ensemble singing.