Kevin & I taught our "Try Your Hand at Bells" workshop at the 9:30 session this morning. We usually have 20 or more people, so I made up booklets of chime-along music (10 songs, each progressively harder) & brought two 2-octave sets of chimes along with us. (There are actually 2 more cases of chimes back @ Kevin's parents' house in Burley!)
This year, however, conference attendance is pretty low - there are less than 100 people here & there's usually closer to 300. So, we started out with 2 people in the class (plus me), then another person joined partway along.
UPDATE, Saturday, July 4, 2009: What the..?? Is there a character limit as to how much I can post via email? I didn't think there was. My phone shows that my entire long post got sent, so why didn't it post here?? *sigh*
Anyway, as Paul Harvey used to say, here's the rest of the story:
This actually turned out to be a good thing because we got a lot farther along than we could have if we'd had a room full of people!
We started out with each of us having one bell, which we played according to my "V=Play, X=Damp" indications on the chime-along lead sheets. Because there were only 3 of us, we had just a single G major chord, which was the tonic chord. As Kevin played the song ("She Moved Through the Fair") we only played ocassionally & I actually found that to be remarkably soothing!
We did another piece the same way, then for the 3rd, we got a little fancy. Since these guys know their chords, we each took 2 bells & stopped reading the "V/X" markings & read the chord symbols to play at thr right times. We also started singing along as we played. We did 2 pieces like that, then got even fancier!
We started playing the melody lines while we sang (& Kevin supported us on harp). Again we did 2 pieceslike this, the 2nd of which was "Greensleeves" which has some accidentals, so we had to switch out bells as we went along. They did really well!!
At that point, Kevin mentioned that we play an arrangement of "Greensleeves", so they asked to see us play it. Well, Kevin didn't bring his cross-strung harp, so he couldn't play along, but I could do it alone. I put two foam pads on the floor, kneeled down & played it. They were fascinated!
Then, I decided to teach them how to weave with 4 bells. I kneeled on one side of the foam with 4 bells & (one @ a time) they kneeled facing me with 4 bells of their own & mirrored my actions. They caught on really quickly! It was really fun to get that far with people who had never ever played bells before!
Who knows? Maybe if we'd had a little more time, we could havedone 4iH!!
After lunch, there was a special session called "Deborah Henson-Conant Tells You Everything She Knows!" in which Deborah answered questions from the audience. She had some really great things to say & once I get the notes we took from Carol, I'll share them here. She's such an amazing performer & an amazing person & has been an inspiration to me since I first saw here DVD back in 2005. The pic with this post is me with Deborah after the session. I'm such a fangirl! :-)
After lunch Deborah's session, Kevin & I taught another class about harp & handbells, where to find music, and/or how to create it yourself. Again a very small class, but that made it very personalized. At the end, instead of them helping us make a new arrangement, we played our new version of "Slane (Be Thou My Vision)" for them. Before playing it, we talked about how we created it & how at one point, I had music that said "harp stuff" where Kevin was supposed to play & he had music that said "bell stuff" where I was supposed to play! LOL!
After dinner, there was a concert. John Metras started out, playing old standards on cross-strung harp, sometimes adding a melodica, which sounds like an accordian & is a small (one or two octave) keyboard with a hose that you blow into to activate the reeds. It was pretty cool.
After John, the show was stolen by Joy Yu Hoffman, who played a double-strung Chinese pedal harp. I think we all expected her to play traditional Chinese music, but she blew us away by opening with Gershwin's "Summertime" from "Porgy & Bess", then following that up with "Take Five" and closing with a few Irish tunes!
What was really cool was that the harp always sounded Chinese, even when playing this Western music. The 2 rows of stings are actually connected to each other - that is, a sting starts as the top of the right side, goes down into the resonating chamber, then back up the left side. Both sides are the same pitch. This means that she could bend the notes by pressing on the string on the other side from where she was playing, like an Asian zither player would. This worked remarkably well for the jazz pieces!
This string set up also results in the 2 sides not being exactly "in tune" with each other - at least not to Western ears - which gave everything a distinctively Asian sound. It was simply amazing & blew me away. If I didn't already have my hands full with handbells, I would love to learn to play this instrument myself!!
After Joy was Sunita Staneslow, from Israel. She played some very relaxing Jewish & Celtic music - sometimes combined!
Last on the program was Kim Robertson, one of my favorites. I've seen her @ both the Somerset West (2005 in CA) and regular Somerset (2007 in NJ) festivals. She was great, as usual.
After the concert, I went to a rehearsal of a new piece for SAB choir, violin, viola, cello, flute, clarinet, harp, -- and handbells! We'll be playing this for tomorrow night's after-hours event, the ceilidh - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Céilidh
I also signed up to play a 6iH solo - "Noel Nouvelet" from Christine Anderson's "Carols for All Seasons". I think I might be joined by a harpist for it, just for fun, but I'm not sure. Whatever happens, it should be fun!
OK, time for bed! More tomorrow. :-)
-Michèle (sent from my mobile phone)
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