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I'd rather be
I now sing regularly with Figgy Pudding, a renaissance trio with good cholesterol. But I don't spend all of my time in the pudding, so I'm still looking for more singing opportunities.
I would like to join or start a small serious a cappella group. "Small" essentially means one person to a part. I sing full voice tenor and high falsetto. "Serious" means that we listen intensely and perfect our songs musically---rhythm, pitch, and blend. I care much more about the musical quality of each song than the details of the repertoire and venue.
I have amateur experience since the 1970s in barbershop chorus and quartets, church choirs and solos, madrigals, catches, solo recitals of art songs, Bach Chorale Society, operatic excerpts, Gilbert & Sullivan, community musical productions. I have no conservatory education, but I have a solid understanding of music from early experience as a mediocre viola player in orchestras and quartets. I studied voice privately around 1980, and started again in 2003. I can keep myself very busy with solo recitals, but I love good ensemble.
I would like to branch out into other forms of contemporary and traditional a cappella music. The more variety, the better. I am ready to work very hard, as long as I don't jeopardise the day job. I am addicted to tight blend and focused pitch. I'll do contests for the good of the group, but I get my kicks from singing well and pleasing an audience.
I have a brief resumé with a list of teachers and groups that I have studied and performed with.
Contact me by e-mail (michael_odonnell@acm.org) with
audition opportunities. We might find more singers at Chicago-acappella (a Yahoo group).
When I couldn't find people to sing with, I tried a bit of multitracking. Here's a quick one-take that I cooked up by singing a catch once through, and looping it with Garage Band. Perhaps slightly less boring: I sang Part I of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" as a ballad, against a drone cooked up from a doctored vocal "ah."
If I could, I would write the Great American Novel, or even the pretty good American short story. I woke up one morning with a sentence fragment in my head. It would be the beginning of "Along the Road." Oh, well.
I'm doing a bit better at American High Koo. Read at your own risk. I got the idea of rendering haiku in English as rhymed iambic couplets from two wonderful books by Harold Stewart: A Net of Fireflies, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan, 1960, ISBN 0-8048-0421-4, and A Chime of Windbells, 1969, ISBN 0-8048-0092-8. But, my High Koo is in very many ways not really haiku. If you make it to the end, you'll see even some Low Koo, descending someday to Bottom Koo, no doubt.
Gregory K. cooked up a cool way for us linearly rationalist Americans to count syllables, following the Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. He calls each such poem a Fib. I like 'em. I don't feel so embarrassed puzzling out words and counting syllables in this form. While explanation seems to invalidate haiku, it seems perfectly OK to write a Fib and explain its meaning. Anyway, I do so.
Galileo said, "Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe." My uncle Bill Hynds, a math teacher, turned this quote into a nifty sampler, with natural examples of Fibonacci series and golden ratio embroidered all over it. Hence:
God
spoke:
"I am."
Then, he wrote
His cosmos in the
alphabet of mathematics.
I already explained this one:
Sneeze
out
haiku.
Carefully
digest each line of
serially lengthening Fib.
WeMostly Genesis 1, with a bit of Exodus 3:14 (informed by John 1:1):
start
with 1
or 0
or is it 2 1s?
No matter the start of it all,
the series accumulates onward, summing itself,
approaching in evermore loquacious lines the golden irrational asymptote.
I
am
"I am."
Let light be
"day" distinct from "night;"
let "sky" divide heaven from earth.
Gather water in "the sea" and discover "the land."
Seed the land, let the water fall as rain, let them grow and multiply and bear good fruit.
Let the stars, and the sun, and the moon mark the days, the seasons, the years, in series distinct and rational each, to golden eternity.
Sound
sounds,
resounds,
surrounded
within silent bounds.
WhatFib meta:
is
silence,
surrounded
by silence also?
Oh,And meta-Fib:
no!
That's not
at all what
I wanted to say.
You
fib,
when you
call it a
"Fib," if you don't
count the syllables right in each line.
E-
ven
if you count
right it's no good if
the rhythm is clumsy like this.
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