Choir lols

You end up with some rather humorous mistakes, when you’re in a choir. Singers will know exactly what I mean, but people without much singing experience are often quite surprised how you have to change things to make it sound good when sung versus when you’re talking. If you don’t do it right, that’s when you end up with the unintentional hilarity.

The best example of this is when you get so caught up in singing a final pretty note on a vowel (as you’re supposed to) that you don’t finish with the word’s final consonant. In my parents’ choir, they treasure the time they had the lyric “Do not stand by my grave and weep”. Sing that wrong, and no matter what you thought you were singing, the audience hears:

“Do not stand by my grave and wee!”

In the community choir I sing with, our favorite one comes from a song with the lyrics “It’s an uphill slope/but I won’t lose hope”

Which becomes (say it with me) It’s an uphill slo…But I won’t lose ho…

Betcha didn’t think community choirs had anything to do with hos.

Last night at practice we were working on vowel shaping, to avoid ugly, flat American vowels for the music where that style didn’t fit. We wanted “mahr” with almost no “r” for merry, instead of “mehR”. One of the words was grass, because we wanted more ah than ay. But there was nothing like the director demonstrating “Don’t do *hums the line*-AYSS”