Day 3 - half way point!

It's day 3 and things are starting to come together! We spent the morning practicing our group work and realising which pieces are a bit ambitious with only a week to sort them out, especially if the repertoire is brand new. We had our first rehearsal of the "scary project" - you'll find out more after the performance on Friday - and suffice to say it's pretty scary and effective!

Folk tune including markings for verses
 (something else to memorise!)

The afternoon consisted of a group meeting to show what we'd been working on again. Just before the meeting I was rehearsing a folk tune including some improvisation around "Johnny's Gone for a Soldier" - an American folk song based on the traditional Irish "Suil a Ruin". John created a lovely arrangement on which Lisa (mezzo-soprano) and I alternated playing the tune and improvising and much to our surprise when we removed the blindfolds there was a rather large audience in front of us! Interestingly neither of us had noticed anyone enter the room which you'd presume was due to a lack of sight. However I reckon the engagement in the music and with each must have played a role in keeping our senses occupied given that we were relaxed and not on tenterhooks from being able to see the audience. I also played the 2nd movement of Haydn's trumpet concerto blindfolded and actually really enjoyed it - very different to when I normally perform in front of my peers!

Logistics - a list of pieces, groups
and timings

Finally, we thought it would be a good idea to write a list of all the pieces/groups we want to include in the sharing on Friday so we wrote a big list on the white board. We included timings and how we want the audience and performers to be in terms of sight, for example, it can be quite comical to watch someone perform a memorised piece with a blindfold on so the audience should be able to see that, whereas for other projects it will be more effective if the audience can't see and purely focus on listening out for sounds or how the music is different when you remove the visual element.

In order to blindfold our audience our mentor Karl agreed to find a batch of cheap blindfolds to order (hopefully they'll arrive in time for Friday!).

Now that we've actually started some of the more logistical preparations, I'm looking forward to how the sharing turns out but there's definitely a lot more to do yet in order for it to run smoothly!
Why not come along if you've got a spare Friday afternoon?

S x