UB Choir

I know I only posted just a couple days ago, but I had to write a quick post on my experience tonight. After a long and full day of classes I wound my way through the maze of the western UB campus to find the "old student center committee room". The building has nothing on the new Student Center, but I do appreciate the open courtyards filled with trees. But I digress.

We found the committee room, and we found the UB choir. It is a club, sponsored by the Student Representative Committee (SRC). It is free to join, and probably contains about 30 singers by rough estimate. We sat around for a minute or two when a young man with impeccable posture in a wife beater and English cap led us all in stretches. Were we in the right place? Yes. This choir stretches, arms, legs, and back, before singing. After our stretching we did some vocal warmups. Everyone started singing a song that they all knew that I couldn't make out the foreign words to. But no matter, I picked out the alto part and sang along anyway, even if my consonants were all wrong.

Our director switched to a small man dressed very well who handed out sheet music and began to teach us a song in four parts with do-re-mi instead of the words that were given. I suppose that it was alright, since I would be trying to pronounce unknown words and sing notes I was unsure of at the same time. After we got through the first two pages, an hour had passed, and after some announcements we called it a day. It was an hour of listening to the strongest basses I've ever heard, to the untouchable beauty of African chorus, and to the simple language of solfege. Rehearsals are Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. The concert is the Sunday beginning Spring Break. Will I be able to be there? I don't know. But we'll see. For now, I enjoyed the singing and the song.