VoxHumanae

The other day I posted about experiences that I’ve been having with some local ensembles.

The mediocrity continues.

I know for a fact that R. Shaw did not have his singers count sing absolutely everything that they worked on in practice. For the same reason that you don’t have professional symphony musicians play through all pieces in some ridiculous manner.

I counted more than two handfuls of bad cues. At one point during one of the pieces (that we were count singing) we were stopped and talked to about how “everyone needs to know exactly where this is going harmonically.” The piece was RV Williams The Cloud-Capp’d Towers. The conductor went around the room triumphantly reassuring all of the parts of what the interval that they would need to remember. Enter Tenor Ones,

C- How about you Tenors?

T1- Unison

C- It is a minor second, not a unison change.

T1- Bb and A# are enharmonicly the same

C- It is a B to A#

T1- Look Closer

C- Oh… right.

T1- I win. (exact words)

End of dialogue.

I’m thinking that I would have ended the interaction in a different manner had the conductor not been smart with other sections during rehearsal. The C (Conductor) is very knowledgeable and wants to bestow on us the wisdom that the C has been granted. So when the C tells the choir to get pencils handy we comply. We write what the C has to say. But the C doesn’t give the choir enough time to let the graphite dry and gets angry with the choir when the C wants to move on. Never-mind when the miscues mess us up… it is our fault too.

The piece is amazingly beautiful, but under the crutch of a piano and count singing… beauty is stripped bare and technicality is left. It was cheesecake without any cheese.

Once again, we will spend this entire season trying to fix our flubbing on count singing and spend very little time on the actual music making portion. Get ready for another bland concert.

Another interesting observation…
We are singing a work by J. M (name withheld)… from 4 Shakespeare Songs: Double, double, toil and trouble.

The work of music is particularly expensive to purchase (more than 10 dollars a pop in the US).

So… Here is our question of legality…

Is it legal to loan copyrighted print music?

My sources point to no. Teacher’s Guide to Copyright

You cannot purchase an arrangement for your choir and then sell or loan it to another choir. Without the express written permission of the copyright holder.

The composer of the piece has also made a point on the subject. Search through and see for yourself how legal this process is and how it steals from the composer and plays into the benefit of the ensemble in the short run. This is as illegal as pirating mp3 in a P2P network.

So… how professional is an ensemble that endorses this practice?