| From: Karen Mercedes To: VOCALIST <vocalist> Subject: Re: starting round sing group Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>
On Thu, 6 Jan 2000, Katherine Craig wrote:
> I love to sing rounds and am interested in starting a community round > singing group that would include whole families of all ages. (I have Sol > Weber's book of 340 rounds for material).Has anyone done this and would you > mind sharing what worked, what didn't work, etc. Would monthly be about > right? Thanks.
I'm not sure a round/canon/catch singing group would be able to sustain itself for long. How about expanding your potential scope to include folk-songs and/or madrigals. I belonged several years ago to something called the Dupont Vocal Circle - it was a group of people, singers and instrumentalists, who loved to sing folk-songs, INCLUDING rounds/canons/catches. The main repertoire started as Anglo-Celtic folk music, but we soon added American and non-Anglophone folk-music, and also some early music (songs and madrigals). It was a wonderful chance to sing repertoire we all loved, but which we didn't have much opportunity to sing otherwise (ditto playing, for the instrumentalists). A few of the more ambitious of us spun off a performing group that had a two-year career before "professional jealousies" (and the hammered dulcimer player's acute stage fright) led us to disband. Unfortunately, similar unpleasant dynamics eventually caused a rift in the Music Circle, which broke off into two separate groups, neither of which was big enough to sustain itself (particularly as many of us remembered the "good old days" when it was all one group).
In any case, I do know that even with the entire potential Anglo-Celtic folk repertoire (everything from Clancy Brothers type pub-songs to traditional melodies "collected" by Cecil Sharp and Jean Redpath), after about a year we started feeling constrained by our repertoire, which is when we happily started dipping into other nations' folk-music, and also early music.
This all to say that while the idea of bringing together people to sing for the joy of it is very good, I fear that limiting your repertoire so much will sow a seed of destruction before you begin. 340 rounds sounds like a lot, but the round is, frankly, a pretty simplistic musical form, and after 5 or 10 or them, I suspect your singers will be craving something different.
Karen Mercedes ===== There is delight in singing, tho' none hear Beside the singer. - Walter Savage Landor ----- MY WEB PAGE: http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html MY NEIL SHICOFF PAGE: http://www.radix.net/~dalila/shicoff/shicoff.html
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