"Bach's" Lunch

It's been a LONG time since I performed publicly for anything other than some sort of church-related function...alright, about 12 years. When I decided to finish my master's coursework, I also decided that it would be a good idea to go back to studying voice. I thoroughly enjoy singing, and could stand to learn more about teaching voice, so why not?

There's been a ton of "untraining" going on in my voice lessons...particularly unlearning the "super dark" tone from my Diocesan Choir experience and learning the difference between choral diction and solo singing diction. I've worked on several short songs, mostly American folk songs, which has been very refreshing. Professor Kennedy has been wonderful to work with and I'll never forget the day that he told me he had signed up not just me, but his entire studio for the "Bach's Lunch" concert.

It was about a month ago, and he had asked me if I had ever heard of the concert series. Since this was my first time on campus during the academic year, I had no knowledge of the concert series. He explained it to me and of course built up the drama to that pregnant pause where I was wondering, "Okay, what did he do??" Then he said that he signed me up for the March 26th concert. "As a matter of fact," he said with a smile, "I signed up my whole studio!" I was a little relieved that it wasn't just me, but also still a little anxious about the thought of singing for something that wasn't church-related.

That being said, I've been working really hard on getting the words in correct order for "Come again, sweet love doth now invite." The song is not as easy as it appears. It's REALLY easy to swap the words in verse 1 for verse 2, etc., and in no particular pattern. My knack for swapping one part of a verse for another has created both some humorous moments and frustrating moments in rehearsal. I've learned a new level of patience with myself.

My accompanist is a doc student friend of mine, Lauren Kooistra. She has a pretty heavy load with both taking classes and teaching classes and probably didn't have the space to take me on, but I'm very thankful that she did. Our rehearsals together were efficient and fun, and so was the performance. I can't say "thanks" enough.

Now we go to today. The performance was at 12:10 this afternoon, and I was second on the program. I am one of two females in Professor Kennedy's studio. Something that I'm absolutely thrilled about is that I FINALLY put all the words in the right place in the performance. I seriously didn't think that I'd ever get one fully correct performance with the lyrics. Enjoy the video!