Choir Practice

Well, fall is officially here, and winter is right around the corner. So we here are enjoying the beautiful colors of the changing trees and bushes.

Every Wednesday is choir, orchestra practice, and vocal ensemble practice, and let me tell you, it does not contain the same sense of organization and talent that I am used to, but it is still fun in it's own way. The director is... what some would call typically French. She is quite flakey, which has irritated Sarah and I on more than one occasion, but I'm starting to get used to just going with the flow. Don't ask me why, but sometimes she'll schedule choir and orchestra at the same time. So she'll start the orchestra on a piece, and then go downstairs to work with the choir. Well, you can imagine how that goes. After a few minutes, we in the orchestra slowely start drifting from the original tempo and each of us finds our own, and pretty soon it's all over the place. There are only about 6 of us in the Orchestra, I'm the only American, and most of them are high school students that don't play in tune very often...

And then there's choir. The choir consists of about five of us French students, and the rest are ladies in their 40's-70's. And here's the funny part- we're singing a selection from The Messiah for Christmas, but we're singing it in English. Obviously we do great with it, but picture, if you can, all these old French ladies, warbling away on these really high notes, trying their best to sing in English, but butchering it terribly with their French accents and pronunication. It's pretty amusing. Last week, we also worked on a German song, which was fun, since none of us speak German. Boy was I glad for the little exposure I'd had in voice lessons.

After choir, we have vocal ensemble practice, which contains about eight of us that perform every once in a while. Some of the songs she picks for us to do are so bizarre, but the one we performmed today at church was REALLY cool. It was the Peace Prayer by Saint Francis of Assisi in French (obviously). Anyways, it's hard to explain what was so cool about it, you'll just have to listen to it sometime. Actually I think someone took a video of it, maybe I could track it down....

So there you have a brief description of my musical experiences here in France.