The Project Choir

Over the past six months, I've been working closely with a soprano in the city putting together a professional, project based, choral ensemble. The choir will be sixteen voices and will concentrate on early, Medieval to Renaissance music, with a focus in the early English Tudor school, as well as early baroque German repertoire, including Schütz and his contemporaries. At least, that is the focus this year! We are mounting two concerts this season, one in late October, and one in early January. The choir is made up of professional choral singers from the Edmonton and Calgary area, the rehearsals will be intense, with only six full rehearsals for each concert.

Over the next few weeks, I will be blogging about the experience of putting together a new ensemble, managing schedules and budgets for a choir which currently has no membership and no capital.

There is a long term goal here, although for now, I think I will take it one concert at a time until we can solidify our membership, and build some kind of sponsorship base, and (hopefully) advances in the grant collecting department.

In other tidbits of news:

• it's my birthday tomorrow. My wife also celebrates her birthday tomorrow, and as hers will be the start of a new decade (the one I'm approaching the end of) I threw a sizable party for her over the weekend. It was a great party - and we sure enjoy the ease of having larger gatherings in our new, bigger, house!
• we have our Da Camera retreat this coming weekend - and it seems a good portion of the choir will not be at rehearsal tonight due to a variety of reasons. Does anyone else find that the rehearsals before and after weekend retreats have poor attendance?
• the deck I built last month has passed the county's building inspection with flying colours. I have never been so proud of something that I have built with my own two hands. I used to laugh at a former conducting teacher who after retirement turned to making wood furniture. However, I could see myself doing a lot more of this type of building in my life.
• Fall has arrived. It's so windy outside right (gusts of 80K) that I'm not sure at the end of the day, anyone on our street will end up with the same garbage can they put out for collection this morning. I also had to turn the furnace on this morning for a little while for the first time.

Hope you are all enjoying the first week of fall!