December 2018, 11th grade student
1. Reflect on your experience last night: how do you feel it went? What was your favorite part and your least favorite?
The new space was difficult to adjust to, but I think the chamber choir did well generally. There were a few unlucky hiccups, but those aren’t preventable. I thought Ocho Kandelikas went well, so I’ll call that my favorite part. Pure Imagination was pretty embarrassing, though — we couldn’t execute the words of a song almost entirely in unison that we had performed twice already.
2. Identify two areas in which our choir has made significant growth during the rehearsal process for our first concert. Explain and give examples of why you believe we have grown in these areas.
The Norwegian text of Eatnemen, the Latin text of Gaudete, and the body percussion in Silvie took significant effort to learn on the part of some people, which shows perseverance.
We also improved our ability to change our tone for what specific pieces demanded. Gaudete and Eatnemen in particular required specific changes that I think we executed effectively.
3. Identify two areas in which our choir needs to continue to grow as we look toward our net concert. Explain and give examples of why you believe we need to address these areas.
We need to improve our tempo reading skills. In both Ocho Kandelikas and Pure Imagination, it took us far too long to learn very simple rhythms. In general, I think our reading skills are lacking. I also think we need to explicitly bridge the gap between the theoretical introduction to interval recognition that we’ve been doing and actual application of that skill to pieces — recognizing and executing a perfect fifth on the page in the moment is a very different thing from singing “do to sol is a perfect fifth”.
4. Using the two areas that you identified in Question #3, write two specific goals that you have for our choir as we begin rehearsing for our next concert. Include specific things that we can do to achieve those goals.
a) Recognize intervals on the page and learn voice parts with motion more complex than stepwise independently.
b) Execute simple rhythms consistently.
Both of these goals could either be achieved through a graded assessment or by making them prerequisites for entering chamber choir (which probably isn’t realistic for a few years)
5. Reflect on your personal work in chorus over the last few months. How have you grown as an independent musician? What do you need to continue working on?
My range has moved; I can’t go as low as I could, but it’s easier for me to reach higher in both my chest and head voices. I think I’m better able to hear when I go flat and avoid it. On the “needs improvement” side, it would be nice if I could read my parts more quickly than I can now. I’d also like to improve my musical analysis skills and better understand the chord structures being used in the music we sing.
6. Set two individual goals related to the beginning of your journey toward independent musicianship. Why did you choose these goals?
a) Improve my sightreading. More specifically, I’d like to be able to sightread a bar or two in solfege. I think that skill will be expected of me (or at least very helpful to me) in any college singing group I join.
b) Improve my tone quality at the top of my range. I don’t like the way I sound when I’m struggling to reach higher.