School Choir

This morning, a letter was minuted to me. It was an invitation to participate in a choir competition, organised by a government department. The date of the competition is 25 - 26 July.

Hmn. Do people really think it is that easy to organise a choir? It's about two and a half weeks to the competition date. I have no scores, no pianists, no conductor, no singers. What am I to do?

Besides, it is the 2nd semester. I need to concentrate on my SPM students. I can't be supervising practices every afternoon.

Well, I am perpetually frustrated with organising the school choir. There are so many obstacles :

1) Lack of musical talents
Many of my students are tone deaf. They cannot discriminate the musical notes, and thus cannot sing the notes at the correct pitch. I was told that tone deafness can be overcome. But I do not have the time, the inclination, the energy, nor the know-how to train the students.

As it is, I have a difficult time training the students to sing in parts. The second voices always sing out of tune as they are always influenced by the first voices. Sigh.

We are also lacking in pianists. So far, for the past four years, I am so thankful for the 1 or 2 pianists among the students every year.

Conductors are hard to come by too. All the conductors I've had cannot read music notes. They were conductors, only because they were willing.

2) Lack of time for training
Well, training is really very time consuming, especially if I were to teach the students to sing from scratch. Teach them the melody, the rhythm and timing, the dyanmics.

3) No access to music scores
Competitions always requrie schools to sing lagu patriotik, and scores for these songs are so very difficult to obtain.

Usually, we arrange the song ourselves. But we are not trained in music, and can only come up with very amateurish arrangements.

Therefore, taking charge of the school choir really gives me a lot of stress. Now, I love choral singing, and I really wish to bring the school choir to greater heights, but there are just too many hindrances.