Another one?!

At least the first part of this post is not quite directly about "women in music" - but that's okay.

While I was looking through Carmina Burana (which Symphonic Choir is singing presently), I found that the second section (In Taberna - "in the tavern) features tenor and baritone solos and only the tenors and basses of the chorus. While this arrangement didn't particularly surprise me, I was both mildly offended and confused: I spend as much time in a tavern/bar/pub as much as the next person (but I suppose I'm not your ordinary female, either). I don't know whether Orff just assumed that it would fit the text more not to use higher voices or what, but it was just...well, sort of strange.

In other (more women in music-related) news, the past two Symphonic rehearsals have been graduate choral conducting auditions. There was a pretty equal balance of men and women auditioning (seven and six respectively). Every candidate had strengths and weaknesses (as would be expected), and I'm certain each one was pretty nervous (auditioning by conducting 200 people simply can't NOT be scary). On the whole, the women tended to talk about and conduct in such a way that suggested we literally embrace the music. The men tended to request that we be more aggressive with what we were singing; one suggested we sing a passage "like Russians, as though [we had] just drunk a fifth of vodka."

This seems to come out between the conducting styles of the two directors of symphonic: in my experience, Dr. Miller has done all in his power to have us learn notes with no leniency towards slacking therein; when we do know our notes, he hammers them out to make we know them. While Dr. Quist doesn't exactly let people not know notes, she tends to help the sections go over passages where people may not have looked on their own time in order to get the notes. Both of them focus pretty equally on ideas, but the way they express them are very different. Dr. Miller is far more interactive (though this could be because it's Dr. Quist's first year at Westminster and she's not quite sure how to interact with us yet) physically: he will grab a soprano from the front row to demonstrate an idea, while Dr. Quist will often stick with an analogy and sometimes a story.

It is also worth mentioning that last year in the search for a new director for Chapel (freshman) Choir (for which Dr. Quist was hired), only female candidates were looked at apparently because of a "motherly" quality that was desired. Interestingly enough, Schola (sophomore choir) was the audition choir for these candidates, and we chose Dr. Quist largely because she was the most aggressive and her rehearsals were very efficient. Huh.