Black History Month Choir Update

Yesterday, Violinny and I went to our second Black History Month choir practice. This time, my department secretary went with me, because she had decided to join the choir.

Unfortunately, lots of other people had backed out, and so the organizer of the choir was pretty discouraged. There were six people who showed up yesterday, and the pianist who she was planning on never showed up. So we had a discussion instead of a rehearsal, working out what we could do.

I think it's going to be a cool performance, even if it's not exactly what she had originally envisioned. I'm going to play a set of spirituals at the very beginning of the program. One of the women in the choir is going to provide me with copies of the sheet music from a hymnal. There's also another woman who plays the violin (but hadn't come to any of the rehearsals) who contacted me yesterday afternoon, so I think we're going to play at least some of these songs together as duets.

The chorus is going to sing one relatively simple song, and I'm going to play with them. And at the end, we're all going to do Lift Every Voice and Sing. I think it will be a lovely performance.


After we got back to our building, we recruited another colleague to join the choir too. And the secretary was talking about putting an announcement out to the whole department, in case somebody else wanted to join. In my plans for world domination, dominating the Black History Month choir is but the first step. ;)


In searching for some additional music to perform, I found a fascinating repository of Historic American Sheet Music. It is really interesting. I searched for "spiritual" and found about two dozen songs, including one of my favorite spirituals, Go Down, Moses, in just the right key to play it on the violin. I am definitely going to add it to my list.