A Musical Soup

This last chunk of time has been really overwhelming with so much activity going on. I've also had the privilege of working with some really top class people in their field- mostly music but there are so many crossovers within music and art. At the end of October, at Hallowe'en in fact I spent a really lovely joyous and challenging weekend with Liane Carroll, Sophie Bancroft and Sara Coleman who were running a jazz vocal workshop in Cromarty on the Black Isle. It was attended by 12 people who were at various stages in their singing lives. Me - I'm just an enthusiast who loves singing. We all got such a lot out of the weekend and I woke up on Monday morning with Bye, Bye Blackbird, Come Fly With Me, Willow Weep for Me, Jordu and all sorts of other songs rumbling around in my head in a big jazz soup. Despite having 3 different community choirs that week, each doing very different songs and harmonies, the jazz soup persisted. The thing is when I'm singing these songs in my head, the harmonies are spot on! So we come to Friday and someone has talked me into going along to a conducting masterclass with Alasdair Nicholson, another giant in his field. Now this was really challenging. I don't read music and classical isn't really my thing and I've still got Fly Me to the Moon in my head, so despite bringing along the music he had suggested, I was totally floundering.But after a while we all decided to dump the notes, remove the lectern and just go for it with a gorgeous rendition of All Through the Night which I do with the Rosemarkie singers called Village Voices. I learned such a lot but then you can't fail to learn if you've got an amazing teacher. So confidence restored, I joined the scratch choir for a whole weekend of rehearsals for Mozart's Requiem.  Did I mention challenging? Holy Moly! Good Gordon Highlanders! It was absolutely fabulous - such very hard work, listening really carefully to the great singers around me and trying to catch their notes. It really was the best thing ever and if anyone reading this ever gets a chance to do a scratch piece like this, don't give it a second thought. Just do it! Jump out of your comfort zone and go for it. You definitely won't regret it. So who's in my head now? Mr Mozart of course! I hope he hangs around for a while. It's crazy, mad, over the top, deeply moving and smiley too. He wrote some great tunes!