Things to say, while I think of them
* Choral rehearsal last night - the piece learned was You Are The New Day, something I've never heard before, but apparently written specifically as a choral piece. Either the arranger wasn't thinking straight or the musical director Lyndsay (more on her later) didn't realise what she was letting people in for (I'm calling 'both'); the bass part was divided to allow one section to sing particularly low notes (down to F2), but there was no such division for the highest note in that line (a mercifully-brief E4, albeit repeated a few times). I plain don't understand how you can write a choral line spanning a compound seventh...
* That, amongst other things (including the sopranos complaining about the A3 they had to sing in The Song We Never Sung), got me thinking about the whole vocal classification thing again. I would presume we could consider the distribution of vocal ranges to be continuous, although the nature of Western music hardly allows for that distinction. Choral music is a valid place for division of this distribution into discrete sections (as my piano teacher - an Engineering student - put it, 'it would be hard to divide parts up continuously'). Treating individual voices, singing on their own, in the same way seems illogical to me.
* As, indeed, does not quite knowing the exact nature of the division in the first place. As I've mentioned in a comment box, it is pretty much arbitrary, with no standardisation. Which seems just wrong, and creates situations like the one above.
* Doing some overthinking about this, I briefly wondered about the validity of finding the range of everyone in the choir, and from there dividing into sections and asserting given ranges for those sections. But of course most choral pieces are written in the arbitrary manner described. Doesn't mean I have to do the same...
* Speaking of my own composition; ran through the melody line that I've written already while everyone was waiting to go into the room, and people seemed to like it. Who will get to sing it (for it is a solo) I've no idea, but the piece only covers a compound second (c.f. that mentioned earlier) so it'll be easily transposable for just about anyone.
* Oh, irony - Chris is our permanent pianist. Which means he'll be playing the piano accompaniment to one of my own compositions. Note that I didn't say 'my' piano accompaniment, for at present I doubt it will be mine, but I'm learning, and Lyndsay may well help me.
* I've also spoken to Lyndsay about the sensory issues, and I think she understands.