Sunnyvale Choir of Bells - Sun, Jan 27

The Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church's Choir of Bells played in church for the 10:00 Bright Traditional service yesterday.

For the Prelude, we played the Level 2 piece Intermezzo by Paula Szalit, transcribed by Kevin McChesney. That's the easiest of the 4 pieces chosen for this year's Bay Area Spring Ring in Cupertino, so I thought we'd get a head start on it & play it for church.

The group did pretty well (despite not watching me for one ritard, grrr!) on it & so I know they will have absolutely no trouble with it at Spring Ring.

For the Offertory, we pulled a piece out of the files - the Level 2+ Peals of Joy by Douglas E. Wagner. Written for 3 octaves, I doubled the bass down an octave for most of it and added the upper 5th octave in a few places, too. Nothing too outrageous - I am not one of those "double everything all the time" people, I like a bit of contrast and I prefer to add bass bells rather than high treble.

I deliberately chose simple stuff for this Sunday because we only had 3 rehearsals to work on stuff. I usually work on 2 months' worth of music at each rehearsal, but because we do that 30-minute Christmas Eve Prelude, all of our rehearsals after our November service date are dedicated to Christmas stuff. Consequently, when we start again in January, it is with a clean slate.

We've also been working on our February music & tomorrow night will start working on stuff for March, too. After that, we'll start work on our Spring Concert repertoire. I've got some neat ideas for the concert & am really looking forward to that. :-)

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