On Saturday night, I went to Sofia for Karaoke night with the British kids, Gabe and 2 other Peace Corps volunteers, and Nani and Saoli from church choir. It was pretty hilarious. Instead of having a book to look through, you just ask the guy with a computer to show you what songs by a certain artist are available. Some people were quite good, harmonizing with each other and everything. Some people were quite bad. The combination of music was funny – lots of American stuff in English (I sang The Sign by Ace of Base), American stuff translated into French, French stuff, and Malagasy stuff. There was a fairly even amount of all of it.
Also, I take a picture of the sunset from my balcony a few times a week – I’ve got about 50 that are more or less like the one below, taken every 20 seconds or so.
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In a previous post, I described the system of music notation that the church choir uses. I’ve now taken photos of a very interesting manuscript: Handel’s Messiah, in its entirety, transcribed in solfege (what they call solfa). I paged through it a bit, and all of the recitatives at the beginnings of movements are just long strings of letters. I took a photo of a fugue-like section where each vocal part enters a few measures after the last.
Without already knowing the piece a bit, I think it’d be a bit difficult to get all of the rhythms right, especially during melismatic coloratura type sections…
(the line of letters without words underneath it would be a melisma)
Of course, it isn’t really a full score, as it’s only vocal. Instruments would read from a normal score. In general the choir has a good sense of pitch, and can read well. I can’t help but wonder if it’s due in part to the fact that they’ve been using movable do solfege as their sole way of reading music. Although, I really think that the combination of solfege and our normal notation is the best – it provides a visual as well as words for each note.
Categories: Malagasy Culture · Music
So, how many hurricanes are happening right now anyway? It seems that whenever I head to cnn.com (which I’ve thought of for quite some time as a fairly worthless source of news, yet for some reason still visit), there’s another hurricane or tropical storm hitting someone.
I’ve definately been feeling out of the news loop in general lately. Thanks to Joseph’s blog, I remembered that Newsweek exists (and has tons of stuff online), and was introduced to Anna Quindlen’s blog – concise, interesting, and right up my alley.
Despite many things that I miss back home, including the entire season of Autumn, I reacently realized something I’m glad to be missing: most of the American Football Season. (Now, if only something could be done about that pesky sport of baseball…although it never seems to end, so at least I’m missing part of it…)
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