The Color Blorange

For the past 5 days I've spent the majority of my spare time highlighting the SATB parts for Handel's chorus of "For Unto Us a Child is Born" in yellow, pink, blue, and orange respectively. I'll be conducting a sing-a-long of this very piece at our ward Christmas party. This makes me nervous for a number of reasons, the top reason being our Relief Society's recent performance at our Stake Choirside.

We sang "Luther's Cradle Hymn," more widely known as "Away in a Manger." I won't say it was disastrous because these things tend to work themselves out and we ended up sounding alright...even though our numbers were few, we hardly got any practice in, and we sang it a capella.

The good graces of the stake director saved us from utter embarrassment. She got up after we we were done singing and said a few words into the microphone before the piano started playing the next song. I think we did alright...but only because there were angels around us helping us sing praise to our Lord. Had that not happened we would have sounded absolutely dreadful. Unexperienced choirs shouldn't sing a cappella. We were an unexperienced choir.

I enjoyed the Choirside--I love singing Christmas songs and I especially liked how the congregation got to sing a song in between each ward or branch musical number. Christmas programs always make me a little sad when I'm seated in the audience because then I only get to participate in a minimal amount of singing when I'd prefer to sing the majority of the time.

Anyway, highlighting all that music took me forever. I really didn't think it would take that long when I volunteered, but it took hours and hours and hours to do. Interestingly enough, I kept mixing up blue and orange. Since blue and orange are not at all similar and because the tenor part was written in treble clef while bass was in bass clef, you might have though that I would have been able to keep them straight, but no.

I even did a whole half a page of the bass in blue before I realized what I was doing and had to go over the blue marker with orange. Blorange is not a very pretty color. It's more of a blueish-orangey grey--not at all appealing. I thought I would get better as I went along, but instead I got worse.

I kept trying to think of ways to help me remember that bass was orange and tenor was blue. Nothing helped though because I had already convinced myself that orange was much more logical for tenor. TenOR, ORange. And of course Bass should be Blue, bbbbb. It was a lost cause.

If I'm conducting this tomorrow and all of the men stop singing, it's probably because my highlighting skills have the tenors singing an octave lower than they should be and the basses attempting falsetto tones.

Don't worry. I've begun reviewing my colors with Rachel daily, for my sake, not hers...