Learn your part!
Chilcott: On Christmas Night
Click on this link to learn your part.
Thanks to Angela Wilkes for sending me this link. Do give it a try, but be prepared for horrid electric organ sound, and ‘martian’ vocals!
For forms and information about the Flanders trip, look towards the bottom of this page.
Join the Community Choir
If you are not already a member of the choir and would like to join, fill in this
Community Choir Application form -2017-2018 (Word document)
Community Choir Application form -2017-2018 (PDF)
and either send it to the choir administrator, or just bring it along to a rehearsal.
Starting the new season
Rehearsals begin again on Monday 18 September at the Performing Arts Building on Mountfield Road.
The full rehearsal schedule is here
Our biggest concert is on Saturday 5 May 2018, Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise with full orchestra and star soloists Dame Felicity Lott and Paul Austin Kelly. This was the only date available to us at Lewes Town Hall. Therefore we do not have a concert at the end of Term 2, instead it is after 3 rehearsals into Term 3.
Please note that Term 1 has 11 rehearsals, including a 2 week break at October half term. Term 2 has 10 rehearsals. Term 3 has 9 rehearsals but includes the concert on 5 May.
Trip to Flanders and Term 3.
If you are not able to join us on our trip to Flanders, we will still have a performance of the Flanders programme in Lewes. This may be on Monday 25 June (our last rehearsal), making it an informal concert for friends and family as well as a dry run for our trip to Flanders.
Programme for Flanders trip
This will be a varied programme of smaller pieces which we will be working on All Season but especially in the latter part of term 3.
Here is Mary’s most recent letter about the trip – as a PDF file
Download this form to make your 3rd payment for the trip by Monday 16 October
The following is some useful information and links to articles including how to learn your part, singing technique and sight singing:
1. Learning Your Voice-Parts
2. Singing Technique and Vocal Health
3. Sight Singing and Music Theory
1. Learning Your Voice-Parts
The internet provides a wonderful selection of audio practice files that can be downloaded and played directly on your computer or (in many cases) also played on portable MP3 players. In addition to a number of commercial on-line businesses offering practice files, there are also many choral music enthusiasts who create these files and very generously make them freely available for download. It is perhaps appropriate to mention that at least two of these sites have a mechanism (i.e. PayPal) to make a donation toward their support and which you may consider doing if you choose to use those files.
Although there are many possible file formats, the two most common are the MIDI (i.e. .mid) and the MP3 (i.e. .mp3) . Where there is a choice, you will of course need to select the format that meets your particular need.
If you’d like to be able to see the score, control the tempo and be able to start and stop your playback at particular bar lines then you should use midi files when they are available. This does however require you to use your desktop, laptop or even a mobile devise for the playback. Assuming you have a Windows 7 or 8 or Mac OS 10.4 or later operating system, I’d recommend that you download a programme called Midi Sheet Music available from here. When the page opens, click the button labeled “Download Windows” or “Download Mac OSX” as appropriate. A pop-up titled “Opening MidiSheetMusic-2.6.exe” should then appear. Assuming the pop-up does appear, click the “Save File” button on that pop-up to get this piece of software downloaded to your computer. If the pop-up didn’t appear then click the Midi Sheet Music ( the white text on black background) and then click the green “Download MidiSheetMusic-2.6.exe”. When the download is complete, go to your download folder (that folder will be called Download in Window machines, unless you’ve changed it) and click on the file labelled MidiSheetMusic-2.6.exe to make it run.
When the programme opens, click “File”, then “Open” and then select the midi file you wish to play – you should have already downloaded your .midi practice files. Note that this programme will download very rapidly as it is only 1.372 MBytes in size and does NOT install itself on your machine i.e. it is a free standing application like the Notepad and Calculator programmes on your Windows computer.
If you prefer to listen to your downloads on a CD player, then it is possible to convert “.mid” and “.mp3” files to an intermediate format (named as “.wav”) and then into a format suitable for burning onto a blank CD-R disk. Unfortunately, you will need the appropriate software and hardware to do this.
The list below identifies a selection of commercial and open source sites and provides the site’s name, its URL (a.k.a. web address) and some general comments that you may find helpful in deciding which one to use.
| Commercial | General Comments | |
| Chorus Rehearsal | www.chorusrehearsal.co.uk | CDs available. |
| Note Perfect | www.note-perfect.com | CDs and a limited selection of MIDI & Scorch formats. |
| ChoralLine | www.choraline.com | CDs and vocal scores also available.
Telephone number: 01285 644845 |
| CyberBase | www.cyberbass.com | CDs also available. |
| Open Source | General Comments | |
| John Fletcher | www.johnfletchermusic.org/ | The largest selection of files in MP3, MIDI and two Scorch formats available anyway (probably). |
| Choralia | www.choralia.net | MP3 with electronic voicing (also helps with learning the words). |
| ChoralTech | www.choraltech.us | Midi files only. |
| John Hooper | www.learnchoralmusic.co.uk | Good selection but in midi format only. |
2. Singing Technique and Vocal Health
This section will be developed over the coming months but to begin with, here are some excellent sources of information available on the web:
- Breath and Support for Singing
- Exercises for Warming-up in Preparation to Sing
- Damaging Vocal Techniques
- Advise from a great voice teacher
- How Humans speak, sing, squeak and squeal
3. Sight Singing and Music Theory
This section will also be added to over time but to begin with, here are some useful web based tools:
- Learning to recognise intervals
- Checking the interval between any two notes
- What is the tempo of this piece?