batten canticles today, in A flat. five-voice choir (the altos divide toward the end of the gloria, possibly just in the nunc dimittis), an alto soloist, and me! yay!
the alto soloist was, like so many altos, actually a lowish mezzo-soprano, and the lowest of her solo stuff was hard for her to project. so i said to the director, a week or so ago (we were supposed to do these canticles last week, actually, but the director was down with the killer flu and that made me feel less guilty about staying home with the debilitating head cold), listen, this soprano part isn't that high, why don't you just shove the whole thing up like a third and not tell anyone? please, like this soprano section is going to know the difference. and then i looked at it and realized that would have them looking at an F and singing a high A flat, and i said okay, so maybe not a third. (please take careful note of the fact that even had constable fraser been in the room, i would not have said 'ease the tempo and release the vocal'. how transposition can have a damn thing to do with tempo i still have no idea. the transposition had to do only with making the thing more comfortable for the alto.)
they only moved it up a half-step, on the grounds that it would really suck to ask the organist to do anything more than that on sight, which i suppose is true. and totally didn't tell the choir; i wonder how many of them noticed. (what i said to the director was, honestly, i'm the one suggesting it and even i won't know the difference -- my musicality extends to relative pitch, but not absolute pitch, not when you're not at the boundaries of my range. in fact today? i had to ask if they'd stayed with the new key or gone back to playing it as written.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
