Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticCat
I can understand that. The first performance at RAH last night was of Ombra mai fù, and it was also a bit hard to listen to. I'd agree that if I was looking for marvelous music performance-wise, this wouldn't be where I would look.
Perhaps it's the influence of my particular GLO affiliation (  ), but it was the training and the focus on the kids that grabbed me. (And I'll admit that I'm a bit of a sucker and the kid with Hodgkins who can't play sports and who finally found a group at school where he fit in and felt pride particularly grabbed me.)
For me the focus was less on making fantastic music and more on opening the kids to new possibilities and encouraging them to make music together, which results in its own kind of "fantastic" music. I enjoyed (mostly) seeing/hearing them make music, but I really enjoyed watching the music have an effect on them. That's the story to me. |
Oh, see, i only saw the first several episodes (between 4-6) that focused on that first school. I totally agree with the belief that there should be music in schools - I have been all about music and theater since I was in first grade. I just didn't think that in the first group, there was enough focus on the learning to sing. I'd love to hear/see the ranges of a bunch of the kids, how big their natural octaves were, then again, to hear the improvement after the x number of months. I'd love to have seen them learning to read music, not just "remembering" the notes and lyrics. I don't expect "marvelous" music out of first timers, but again, I'm not sure if all they learned was "the performance" versus learning the art and developing tools.
I believe, that if there was focus (perhaps we didn't get to see that part), it might make more sense to them as a whole, and perhaps give them the tools to continue to sing, whether in a church, a community choir, in musical theater, etc. Again, the first episodes focused so much on Gareth.
Perhaps that's a programming/editing issue. Did you see the first group/school's episodes? A lot of time was spent going over the same thing; the recaps were 5-10 minutes of each of the previous episodes. The parts where the kids (and parents) were proud were lovely. I guess I just wanted more. At the outset, I thought that the entire season (the BBC calls "seasons" - "series") was going to be the same school from Nov-June, so I guess that's why I felt like I was left hanging.
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