The sunlight was streaming into the bedroom this morning, and I woke up in a cranky mood. Usually, beautiful sunlight like that in the morning makes me extremely cheerful.
Reading Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett at breakfast briefly cheered me up, but I was back to being grumpy pretty quickly.
I finally realized that it was because of a schedule conflict that I couldn't work out. I have a voice lesson every other week on Wednesday from 5 to 5:50. Lately, I've missed a few because either I was sick or my teacher was. I only have four more lessons until the auditions for the summer musical (two months from yesterday), if neither of us gets sick. We haven't even looked for an audition song yet.
However, we found out on Sunday that the Ash Wednesday service has been moved up to 6 pm this year, rather than 7 pm, which means that the choir has to get there at 5:15. We need to run through a lovely piece for viola, organ, and choir, and we haven't had everyone together yet.
My voice teacher teaches on her afternoon off from her full-time job, and she doesn't have any other open spots this week or next week.
From a choir perspective, I should cancel the lesson and get there on time, but I need to start working on an audition piece. From an audition perspective, I should skip the service, which I won't do because I really like the piece we're doing, and because the number of sopranos has been variable lately. Oh, and also because it's Ash Wednesday.
I decided to split the difference. I'm going to half a lesson, and, hopefully, I'll get to choir in time to run through the piece once. If not, I've been working on it a lot this week, and I've had it constantly running through my head.
This solution, of course, isn't ideal. I know I won't be ready to leave my lesson early. When I get to choir, I'll regret not having gotten there earlier.
Can I have a time turner for just one hour?!
Really, that was just supposed to be an introduction to the songs I'm considering for my audition. From the songs that really stuck out when I went through my Broadway/jazz books, I appear to be in a mellow, jazzy mood!
I could have done an all-Ella-Fitzgerald post because she's got wonderful versions of them.
Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me: Diana Krall's version is the one I get in my head:
How High the Moon: Diane Schuur's version is the one I know best, but that's not on YouTube. Here, Ella Fitzgerald sings it with the Manhattan Transfer:
Beginning to See the Light: Claudia Schmidt's version of this is one of my all-time favorite performances, but it's not on YouTube. Fortunately, it's on her MySpace page, and it's embeddable. I love the Dixieland jazz feel, and I really love the syncopated part!
Skylark: The version that I get in my head is done by Cleo Laine and James Galway. They're both favorites of mine so this is a wonderful album for me.
Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered: This is the one I'm leaning towards right now. My favorite version is Ella Fitzgerald's:
I'm only going to sing a bit of it so I don't have to decide which version to sing. There's this original version ("I'll sing to him/Each spring to him/And worship the trousers that cling to him"), and there's the the more innocent version ("I'll sing to him/Each spring to him/And long for the day when I cling to him," and they just drop the line, "Horizontally speaking, he's at his very best.")?
In order to shorten things at my lesson, I'm going to e-mail my teacher the songs and the ranges. Last year, I (barely) sang No Way to Stop It (from 0:58 to 1:29) from The Sound of Music for my audition. I was barely singing again from having the flu that winter. I was going to go to the auditions the second day in order to give my voice another day of healing, but I woke up the first day with a sore throat. I knew that I wouldn't be able to sing at all by the next day so I rushed over that afternoon to audition. I could barely squeak out the higher notes, but I got through it. This year, I'm going to try to stick to songs that don't go above a D - just in case I have voice problems at that point.
[This post brought to you by Dragonbreath: The Lair of the Bat Monster. Younger son fell asleep while reading it last night, and he went right back to reading it this morning when he woke up. He didn't come down for breakfast until after 10 so I wrote this post.
A love of reading is one of the main things I've wanted my kids to get as a result of the way we homeschool.]
Glad you made it to choir last night! The tempo was slow enough that all of us were needed to keep the line going with the staggering.
I couldn't spell the name of the musical to myself when you told me last night, so it fell out of my head. What is it called again? I remember the things you said about it, but the name evades me.
Posted by: Summer | February 23, 2012 at 09:01 PM
Thank you! I'm glad I went.
We're doing Dames at Sea this summer.
Posted by: M Light | February 27, 2012 at 10:29 PM