Use it or lose it
I was listening to my chorus CDs tonight by way of teaching myself next week’s music (bloody polyrhythms! I even prefer Holst and his trademark headache-inducing 5/4 drumbeat to losing the beat entirely every two bars), and not only did I nail that low F I’d thought forever lost, I sang along with the next tenor solo line and took it all the way down to a low D. Soprano, hah! Alto I am and alto I stay.
Though maybe not. I hit a high B-flat by mistake, looking for the G underneath it. It wasn’t a good high B-flat by any means, but even so—since when did I even have a high B-flat? You couldn’t have goosed that note out of me in high school or college.
If anyone’s curious, you can read the concert schedule yourself; I’ll be in the Ravel (ugh) and Cathedral Echoes (yay! Pange Lingua is an old friend of mine) concerts.
Y’all come. Even if you don’t like Holst or Duruflé (and anybody who doesn’t like Duruflé is certifiable), the Chilcott set is lovely and unusual, and our encore piece (Martin, “The Awakening”) is a bit of purest ham-and-cheeseball faux uplift that I guarandamntee you will bring the house down.