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November 10, 2017 #33

Admin Issue

GHC, HNC, SOUNDINGS & CCLT

Choir Community Newsletter <><><><><><><><> Quick Reminders! <><><><><><><><>

GHC Potlucks Last Chance! Mon. Nov. 13

Details in the Community Networking section

Gorgeous Guatemalan Scarves And Shawls For Sale At GHC & HNC Practices - Nov 20, 21 & 23

rd

Details in the Choir Gift Market section

Kenyan Crafts Fundraising Sale At GHC Nov 13, 14 & 16

Details in the Choir Gift Market section

Instruments4africa GHC Shortbread Cookie Sale Pre-order Nov. 13, 14 & 16 & Pick-up Dec. 11, 12 & 14

Details in the Choir Gift Market section

Coco Love Alcorn ~ GHC Spring 2017 Guest Artist Nov. 19 @ Oak Bay High’s Dave Dunnet Community Theatre

Details in the Opportunities To Sing & Community Events sections

GHC Choir Sectionals Altos/Basses Nov. 27, 28 & 30 + Sopranos/Tenors Dec. 4, 5 & 7

Details in the GHC News & Business section

Soundings Concerts December 9th (Oak Bay) & 10th (Saanichton)

Details in the Soundings News & Business section

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> For access to all current and archived issues please go to: http://www.gettinhigherchoir.ca/choir_life/newsletters.php

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Special Notes!!!!

Lest We Forget The Christmas Truce a web article followed by a video of John McCutcheon singing his song “Christmas In The Trenches” Submitted editorially (source www.upworthy.com)

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The Hometown Battlefield By JP Cormier Submitted by Susan Bates GHC Monday Tenor

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A pittance of time By Newfoundland’s Terry Kelly Submitted by Patricia Houston former GHC Alto

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Admin Team Notes

Cathy & Dick

SWAT Thank-You!

A big thank-you to the two dozen of you who came out for the

SWAT event on Wednesday! That's an impressive turnout. We

have received very good feedback and thanks from many sides for

our contribution, and the two of us were really happy with the

sound, right from the get-go. Cathy notes how well you handled

our little misleading pitch on the last song, singing and smiling and

harmonizing in a key that was unreachable for some. Our lesson: in

a run-through, always rehearse how we'll use the tuning pitch!

An extra thank-you is due to Denis for deftly directing Da Pacem

Domine. And our thanks to our Mary-Wynne and to Dr.

Jonathan Down for their important talk on a difficult subject,

working to destroy indifference!

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Gloria I’m missing singing with you all. Hoping to get my balance back and come to choir soon.

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APPRECIATIONS

Appreciating Wednesday’s SWAT On Thursday Morning What a fantastic SWAT last night! Thanks so much to all of you and to the choir that came. The music was truly transformative for the whole evening. Everything was so well organized - the stage, the AV, the sound, the food

and the crowd. Many thanks for all your work to make this happen. Hugs to everyone Submitted by Mary-Wynne Ashford GHC Bass Mon/Tue/Thu Alto

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GHC News & Business

GHC Choir Potlucks

(An early heads up ~ add these dates to your calendar) There will be one more potluck gatherings from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. on: Monday Nov. 13 *

* Note: For Monday night we must all bring our own

dishes, cutlery and cups since we can’t use the dishwasher at the First Unitarian Church

These potlucks, held every season, are a tradition in the choir that allows us to get to know each other a little better. Please bring a tasty dish to share and your own plate, cup and cutlery. An ingredients sign would be helpful for those with dietary considerations and perhaps a name label in case someone wants to get your recipe from you. All choir members are welcome at all potlucks. Come and enjoy!

Editor’s Note: For an advance look at lyrics for the graces we tend to sing at potlucks (plus those for the choirs birthday song) please click here.

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Maximizing joy! Getting ourselves “off book” by getting our songs memorized in this second half of season will enable us to get into the heart of the songs and maximize our joy in singing them at our performances as well as maximizing the joy of our audiences on hearing them! (More on this)

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GHC Choir Sectional Schedule There will be Alto and Bass sectionals all three nights the week (Nov 27, 28 & 30) from 6:45 to 7:30. Please be there a bit early so we can warm up and be singing repertoire starting right at 6:45.

The following week (Dec. 4, 5 & 7) will be the Soprano and Tenor sections' turn. Home sectionals & Cross Sectionals can, of course, happen anytime you want to host one. If so start thinking about appropriate dates over the holiday break or in January. There will be more on that in the December 1st Community Issue or you can find it now on our site’s Choir Life: Home Page in the What Are Sectionals? section.

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GHC Practice CDs

With apologies re: the broken link in the special announcement that went

out to all the current singers on Wednesday

Last chance to order your practice CD in time for distribution week Nov. 13, 14 & 16 If you need it more info check out the special announcement email by clicking here. (link corrected) ~ Bill

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GHC News & Business (cont.)

Some Mid-Season Reminders! Please Be Scents-itive!

Please be aware that a number of people in the choir are very sensitive to scents. As we are all breathing deeply in close quarters even those who aren’t “scents-itive” may find various scents hard to take. This includes all perfumes, deodorants, after shave, hair spray, garlic, tobacco, etc.. If you regularly use any of these products a non-scent set of clothing for choir would be a very considerate act. (a shower before choir is also recommended!)

~ No scents makes sense! ~ No Nuts Tuesdays!!!

Our Tuesday Tenor who is seriously allergic to nuts (all kinds) is with us again this season. As in past seasons she strongly requests no one (in any section) bring anything to choir that contains any type or amount of nuts including peanuts. Even the slightest contact can trigger an anaphylactic reaction with drastic negative results. Please keep this request firmly in mind & make our GHC Tuesday practices nut free time zones!

Quiet Mindfulness

Beyond the support that your quiet attention can give to the director and to other singers it can really deepen the effect that this practice of singing in harmony has on your whole being. With mindfullness you can stay focused on the inner vibration that the song has set up. In this way, the whole time can be experienced as a very deep sound healing treatment. Try it! Give each other, whoever is directing and yourself the gift of quiet mindfulness. ~ Siobhan, Denis, Dick, Cathy, Gloria & Bill

We Welcome Your Feedback Throughout The Season

If you have any “more of this,” “less of that,” “try this” or any other form of feedback for any of us on the Admin team that can help us make the GHC experience better for you, and for us all, please pass it on us. If you think of something later and you don’t have our contact information with you, it can always be found on our site’s “Choir Life: Contact Us” page. . ~ Siobhan, Denis, Cathy, Dick, Gloria & Bill

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My Schedule Now that the registration period is over I may not be at choir every night. My schedule will be varied but in general I will be at each session at least once every two weeks. My schedule for the next two weeks is:

Monday Nov. 13 Tuesday Nov. 14 Thursday Nov. 16 Tuesday Nov. 21

If you have fees to hand in, and I am not at choir, please hold them until you see me. If that is not practical for any reason you can give them to Dick or Cathy. If you have information to pass on to me, or questions to pose, you can contact me at bill@gettinhigherchoir.ca or 250-920-4160 (9 to 9 weekdays). ~ Bill

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Other Info About Our

Community Of Choirs

News & Business

High Noon Choir…. A daytime community choir The HIGH NOON CHOIR is fired up again and runs through Dec. 5. We sing from 12 noon to 1:30 pm on Tuesdays All voices are welcome at any time during the season. Whenever Siobhan is in town, she will be leading the High Noon Choir. Dick and Cathy will continue on when Siobhan is away, for example during her time in India right now. She will return in time for HNC November 7! Siobhan Robinsong, Cathy Baker & Dick Jackson

HNC Directors

Soundings News

& Business Soundings Concerts I'm very pleased to be able to announce that my 26-voice a cappella vocal group SOUNDINGS will be presenting our annual Winter Concert on Dec.9 and 10. In what has become an annual tradition for many, Soundings celebrates the coming turn of the year with a wide range of seasonal a cappella music. You will hear traditional and contemporary songs from Yorkshire, Wales, 16th C. Belgium, Catalonia, and even Powell River BC, from musicians such as Tobin Stokes, Ola Gjeilo, John Lennon, Pentatonix, and director Denis Donnelly. Saturday Dec.9, at 7:30pm, Oak Bay United Church, and Sunday 10, 2:30pm, St. Mary's Anglican Church, Saanichton. Tickets $20, Seniors/students $15, will be available at choir or on-line here: http://soundingsmusic.ca/concerts/upcoming/ And check out our new web site! www.soundingsmusic.com Submitted by Denis Donnelly

Soundings & GHC Director

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Choir Gift Market Every Fall season in the weeks prior to our holiday break we have a series of worthy causes hold fundraising sales during the break at HNC & GHC Practices. All the money raised goes to the causes so you get to pick-up some unique gifts and support great community action at the same time. Double Duty Dollars!

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Gorgeous Guatemalan Scarves And Shawls For Sale…

…plus some NEW handwoven items, or please CONSIDER MAKING A DONATION AS A CHRISTMAS GIFT, instead of exchanging gifts with family, work or friends, and make a huge difference in a Mayan family's life. Last winter, with input from parents, teachers and community leaders,we established a much needed Learning Centre and Library for San Antonio's children, who were falling behind and dropping out of school, as early as Grade 6. The learning center/library has been a huge success with almost 600 visits for learning assistance in September and a steady increase in children who come to read from our small library. We are also continuing with our lunch program for the very poor elderly widows. We will be selling our beautiful scarves at GHC and HNC again in the week of:

Nov 20, 21* & 23rd

(All GHC + * HNC)

Pls refer to our blog for more details and photos. www.icoatitlan.blogspot.com Also choir members have asked us where their family and friends can find our scarves. Check out this “Three Sale Flyer” and pass the information on to them with our appreciation. Submitted by:

Mary Lynch, HNC Soprano, Linda Stanton, HNC Alto, and Kathy Coster, Former GHC Soprano.

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A positivelyAfrica fundraiser

Win A Gourmet Dinner For 8! We’re launching our fundraising efforts to build a new primary school in Kenya by offering a raffle to win a dinner for up to 8 people in your home. We’ll bring all 5 courses to your home. You just relax with your friends and know you’re helping a great cause! For more information or to buy tickets, please contact sabine@positivelyafrica.org or 250-598-0708. ~ Bill (thanks to positivelyAfrica member & former GHC Tues Alto, Sabine Laubental for passing this info on)

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Kenyan Crafts At Choir positivelyAFRICA will be bringing unique jewelry and carvings to all HNC and GHC practices during the week of November 13

th. All the proceeds will go to Soweto

Junior School in the second largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa. The money will be used to feed the 150 young children attending the school; for some, it’s their only meal of the day. Beautiful, one-of –a-kind jewelry made from cow horn will be 20%off and wooden carvings are very reasonably priced. A perfect opportunity to do some holiday shopping. For more info about positively AFRICA, visit www.positivelyafrica.org. Submitted by Sabine Laubental,

lapsed GHC Alto

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Great news: Instruments4africa

Shortbread Cookie Sale Is back! Many members raved about our cookies last year. They are super delicious and come in 2 sizes, $10 for a baker's dozen and $20 for 2 baker's dozen - hey, what a deal! The shortbread is not only delicious but also famous. It is made at the home of our two great friends and supporters of Instruments4africa, Sandy and Dennis Jaques. The Jaques family makes the shortbread from a deceased Auntie’s Scottish recipe, no less!

Pre-order forms will be available on: Monday, November 13; Tuesday, November 14 and

Thursday, November 16. These most precious cookies have to be pre-ordered.

The shortbread orders will be delivered at the 3 choir

practices: Monday, December 11, Tuesday, December 12 and

Thursday, December 14. All proceeds (100%!) go to our Instruments4africa project based in Bamako, Mali in West Africa and go a long way to help a group of children with their education. For more info about the project, please click here. Thank you so much for your support! Submitted by Yves Parizeau,

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NOTEWORTHY WORDS

A periodic column in which GHC Tuesday/Thursday Bass Lee McLeod

offers his thoughts on GHC song lyrics

Trees Grow Slow It’s not surprising that “Trees Grow Slow” is such a popular song with the choir. It’s both extremely well crafted and deeply meaningful. Today I want to celebrate Laurence Cole’s craftsmanship in the chorus. But let’s begin by remembering that the first verse of the song expresses the despair that eco-psychologist Joanna Macy says many of us feel as we experience the ongoing loss of our natural environment despite our best efforts to heal it. When such feelings come, Laurence says, the “simple words” of the chorus may ease our minds. Simple words indeed! Only two are longer than one syllable; both of these are in the last line and have just two. And most convey natural objects—trees, wind, ground, sky—or processes—growth, reach, feed, die. Moreover, every single one of them (and thanks to Dick for reminding me of this) is Anglo-Saxon—that is, derived from the language spoken in England before William the Conqueror’s Norman French imported the influence of Latin into English. As a rough guide, Anglo Saxon English is concrete and Latin abstract.

So notice that in summarizing the ‘message’ of the chorus, I need lots of abstract, Latinate words: great things grow slowly and they survive by being flexible—going with, not against the wind. They survive also by rooting high aspiration in the ground of reality, and by understanding that the processes involved are not only gradual but larger than any one individual’s success or seeming failure. Even in dying we sow the seeds of future growth.

It’s Laurence’s gift to so arrange the order and sound of simple, natural, Anglo-Saxon words that they convey a meaning we can only otherwise express in abstract prose. I’m just giving you the words of chorus here, but I’m thinking really of how they appear with the notes on our sheet music:

Trees grow slow and trees grow strong

and trees sway with the wind their whole lives long

The four ‘o’ sounds in the first line (all half notes) slow down our reading/singing so that the sense of the words is matched by their sound. “Sway” in the second line is a shorter and higher sound, suggestive of movement rather than stillness (and the quarter and eighth notes of bar 22 mimic the wind’s movement). But the ‘o’ sounds of “whole lives long” (as well as a return to half notes) slow us down again, as we ponder the (very) long life a tree may have.

And trees hold the ground as they reach for the sky

Here, the ‘o’ sounds are accompanied by the much shorter and higher ‘e’ and ‘y’ sounds, all mimicking the line’s sense of reaching as necessarily involving grounding: for up we need down. (Think of how Siobhan always begins choir.) And whereas the chorus began with a preponderance of held sounds using half-notes, this line has a mixture of held words—the important ones, mostly half notes—and the ‘little words’ (“And . . . as they . . . for the”) using quarter notes. So we move from the stillness of slow-growing trees to their inner action (holding and reaching), and in the final line to their part in the great, enduring cycle of nature:

And fallen trees still feed the seeds they cast before they die.

To convey this, until the final word Laurence uses only quarter and eighth notes. To me, these briefer notes—combined with the internal rhyme of “trees . . . feed . . . seeds,” and a repeated up and down movement of the melody—give a sense of intricacy. Each individual, tree or person, has her, or his, or its part in an incredibly complex natural cycle, one that—missing the woods for the trees—we may not recognize in our natural discouragement. But it’s there nevertheless for us to sense and draw strength from. How Laurence even further deepens and expands this meaning in verses 2 and 3 will be the subject of my next offering in two weeks.

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Admin Team

Special Announcements From time to time Siobhan, Denis, Dick, Cathy, Gloria, or Bill will use this section to announce activities and events that they are involved in, or support, outside of their normal work for the choirs and the CCLT.

Up Your Game Male Voice Workshop What have you done for your choir director lately? Yes, you are a sought after commodity … after all, isn’t every choir scrambling for tenors and baritones and basses. BUT what if you could do it better. Nope, not talking about voice lessons. We’re talking about being a better choralist. We’re talking about being all the things your conductor would wish you to be when you are in rehearsal. Are you ready to up your game? Willi Zwozdesky is offering a three hour practical workshop for men who are looking for skills and techniques to be better contributors to their section. Note that Willi says that this is for "experienced" choral singers. ~ Denis GHC Monday Bass Tom Ovanin was curious about “how experienced” and checked. Read the organizer’s reply

Saturday, November 18th — 10 am to 1 pm For full details check out this Flyer ~ Denis

Additional Notes from Tom I understand that pre-registration would be appreciated (even though not stated in the attached poster). BTW, Willi's choir, the Vancouver Men's Chorus will be performing in Victoria the evening of the workshop, Saturday, Nov 18th, 7:30. (At First Metropolitan United Church, 932 Balmoral at Quadra). Their last performance in 2104 was sold out, so if you plan to attend...More info & Tickets

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CCLT Updates Mary Denison, CCLT5 - 2008/09 For eight years Mary Dennison, who leads Sing For Pure Joy! Community Choirs on Quadra Island, Campbell River and Ladysmith, has been dreaming of starting a Threshold Choir in Campbell River. A choir which offers singers the opportunity to share the gifts of their voices in compassion and truth at life’s thresholds – to people who are struggling, some with living, some with dying On Sunday, November 12th, Mary will be holding a Threshold Choir Introductory Workshop, facilitated by Jan Alexander and open to anyone who is curious about this concept. (read her full invitation with more details) Pre-registration is required. Please contact Mary Dennison to register. The workshop will run from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Sunday November 12th at The Lions Den, 1441 Ironwood Street (across from Thrifty Foods). There will be a fee of $20 to offset expenses. Mary’s email address is singforpurejoy@gmail.com CBC News: Saskatoon Threshold Choir

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GHC Guest Artist Updates

Coco Love Alcorn GHC Guest Artist ~ June 2017

An Invitation To Sing Tour Coco sent us this invitation:

Hi Gettin' Higher Choir friends! I'm so excited that I'm coming back to Victoria this fall. Wait, let me rephrase that... I'm soooooo excited! My band and I will be performing two full sets and as the tour name suggests, we'll be inviting the audience to sing along at many points throughout the night. So feel free to invite lots of friends who like to sing but also, don't be shy to invite your friends who don't like to sing along. I always sing for everyone. <3 Coco Love

Here are the details: Sun, Nov 19 @ 7:30 PM Dave Dunnet Community Theatre, (map) 2121 Cadboro Bay Road Doors: 7PM Show: 730PM Tickets: $20/adv and $25/door Advanced tickets available on-line on-line and at: Munro’s Books – 1108 Government St or At choir from:

Monday ~ Jo Volek, Tenor Tuesday ~ Robyn Whitbread, Tenor Thursday ~ Rhianna Barr, Soprano

Poster JPG Image Poster PDF Share On Social Media

Submitted by Jo Volek GHC Monday Tenor & Concert Organizer

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RAFFI is coming to Victoria GHC Guest Artist in our January 2004 Concerts

Two Family Concerts, at 1 and 4 pm on Saturday November 19 There are still tickets available online from the Royal Theatrfor for the 4pm show, and Raffi asked that we let you all know about it. I saw his family show the last time he was here, and it is wonderful for all ages, especially young children. ~ Siobhan

================== THATS NOT ALL FOLKS ================ Our Choir Community Issue (Part 2) follows next Friday with lots of

interesting submissions from other choir community members plus some Quote Breaks and the Just For Fun section!

Please submit any items you have for it by midnight next Wednesday to bill@gettinhigherchoir.ca

===================================================== You can always find links to both current and past newsletter issues at:

http://www.gettinhigherchoir.ca/choir_life/newsletters.php =====================================================