ACDA - Oklahoma Day II

Another beautiful day in Oklahoma. My wife let me know that Edmonton received probably a foot of snow overnight, add the blowing snow to that and it was most unpleasant to walk or drive anywhere. Well, it's not the case here. It was a day to walk with out a coat on, eat lunch outside, and watch people drive by in their convertibles. That being said, I have spent most of the day indoors.

Another fantastic concert this morning, including the finale by the 8 voice "choir" from England called Voices8. A sort of King's Singers style spin-off group, this time from Westminster Abbey choristers, with two young female sopranos. This young group was quite fantastic, not quite at the standard that the King's Singers are at, but give them time, they will be an octet to be reckoned with.

I went to the Conducting Competition for a while, but left partway through, mainly due to the "heat" in the room, both the actual temperature, and also the uncomfortable feeling one gets when watching conductors in a competition like this. I may post more again about conducting competitions. Having done a few in my life, both successfully, and unsuccessfully. For example though - the candidate which I felt had the strongest "technique" of the seven that I saw did not advance. The rehearsal technique wasn't as strong, perhaps this is why the candidate didn't advance. What is a "conducting" competition supposed to judged on? Conducting? or Rehearsing? More on that another day. A quick lunch (outside on the patio as mentioned above!) followed by an afternoon interest session on doing group auditions was then followed by a spending spree at the Exhibits (I bought one of these for half-price to replace an aging and outdated minidisk recorder) I've now bought all I need, or can, at this conference. The evening interest session or Jazz choir concerts didn't spark an interest for me, so a little R&R back at the hotel was in order.

I'm now enjoying a brief rest once again, catching up on some emails and concert prep for next weekend (and watching .. ahem .. American Idol ... please don't judge me), and then I'm off to the feature concert of the Evening with the Oklahoma Philharmonic Orchestra and various choirs with a convention world premiere, and Vaughn Williams' "Dona Nobis Pacem". Mmmmm.. RVW!

Update: Back from the concert - which was great, particularly the RVW. The commissioned work had its moments, but it wasn't as inspirational as I had hoped.

I'm particularly looking forward to tomorrow's interest session on technology, i.e. blogging, podcasting etc, for conductors and choirs. It's a "Bring your own laptop" event. Podcasting is something I've always been interested in, and is something that our church is exploring. In fact, Vidcasting is what we are gearing up towards, and the more I can understand the process, the better prepared I'll be to enter the 21st century!