Today we attended the Oxford ward on our way out to the colleges. We sang three numbers in church, all hymns. The setting was ideal for truly bearing my testimony of the savior through song. I felt pretty passionately about the text of "I Stand All Amazed" it nearly brought tears to my eyes to bear testimony in the intimate setting of the chapel with this ward all eyes and ears for us. It felt so right to perform that way.
Our next stop was to practice with our respective colleges. I sang with Lincoln College. What an exciting challenge. I felt the greatest challenge was following this choir master. I just struggled to get used to the down beats being where the upbeats are in his conducting pattern. It wouldn't be a big deal to do this and just keep tempo but, we were practicing the psalm and these are always performed with more free rhythm. Ahhhh....struggle. In the end we managed to pull ourselves together on that one and the director was patient and very understanding with us. Eventually the members of the choir started to show up and that made things way easier. The piece we were all obviously strongest on was "Hail Gladdening Light". We also did Purcell in G for the canticles and sight read a few hymns. The first hymn was a since to sight read because we had just sung it in sacrament meeting "I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say". muahahaha. Our Purcell in G could have used another rehearsal for polishing but, the English don't seem too worried about perfection for their evensong and they are all pretty amazing sight readers.
After the rehearsal we had tea with the Oxford students and chatted about school, music, and everyone was pretty interested in hearing about our study abroad. I found out that this particular choir is auditioned but it's composed of students from some of the different colleges at Oxford and many of them aren't even studying music, like many of the students in our study abroad. We also chatted about the differences between their hymns and ours, the differences in musical terminology, and the differences between our unis (what people call University in England). I had a particularly fun conversation with a girl who was asking how many counts a dotted minim (dotted half note) would get in 6/8 time and I had fun explaining that it's the same count wise, just a different name...6 beats of course. A little bit of basic theory mmm fun.
My experience at Oxford was absolutely wonderful. I could see that the tradition of choral music is incredibly alive there and we were fortunate to sing with an interesting and talented group of individuals. More than anything, I could tell that these individuals were all friends. They enjoy singing together and they get a kick out of sight reading each Sunday together.
-first we attended the local LDS services
*chatted with the locals
*had a munch and mingle
*sang in the meeting
*they do their meetings backwards
-headed out first, after some confusion, to rehearse with Lincoln College
*just us at first
*others joined, one girl asked me if we sing a cappella in America...ummm yes.
*tea with the students
*evensong
*drinks and mingling with people in the congregation and the clergy
*dinner-so fancy, felt like Harry Potter, great conversation about music and culture and social things, Tim gave me his meal and got his late, students stand as the fellows walk in, invite for more drinks but we had to go to catch our coach
-met up with everyone and boasted about how awesome our experience was, it seemed like nobody felt their experience was that great
-slept on the bus ride back
-scott carried me home because he's awesome like that
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