Personally I think I sang both of them pretty well. However a couple of the choristers around me were making more mistakes last night than on Friday. One person admitted he thought he knew the music so well he could watch the director more. Perhaps I need to let these people in on some secrets: Unless you have the time and, ah, memory, you must be selective about what you memorize and what you continue to “sight read.” It is a good idea to memorize page turns and repeats in case you flip the wrong number of pages, memorize entrances and ends of phrases—especially where the director changes the tempo and, say in Bach or Handel, learn the complicated runs. There’s not enough time “at speed” to sight read a bunch of sixteenth notes. Don’t be afraid to mark beats with pencil strokes. For example, the last few bars of Hubert Parry’s, I was Glad, has a combination of dotted eighths and sixteenths and dotted quarters and eighth notes. This is quite impossible to count “by eye” when the director is pulling back the tempo, too.

It was a small but happy crew that gathered at the bar after the concert. I got to know a couple of the female choristers including one who had joined on my wife’s urging when they had been talking at the gym.