wildeabandon | Singing

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Eee! I started having singing lessons again this week. I gained so much confidence from the first lot, and now that I'm back in both London and employment I'm really excited to be starting them again.

I'm not really sure what sort of repertoire I want to work on. I'm going to start working towards an exam soonish, (Grade 4, at CN's suggestion, which strikes me as a bit scarily high to be starting at, but I'm sure they know best) so to some extent it'll be guided by the syllabus, but I probably want to do other things as well. People who sing - any suggestions of fun not-too-hard baritone/bass stuff I might want to have a look at?

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Ooh, yes, loads, but I've no idea what standard any of it might be :-/

I spent a lot of time working on the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel; if you wanted a Shakespearean bent, then Finzi's Let Us Garlands Bring is 5 Shakespeare songs (they're not easy, though!). Next time you're up here, feel free to poke through my small vocal music selection for ideas...

Also, I gather Rocky from RHPS is singable by a bass voice :p

I suspect that anything that counts as not easy for a singer of your calibre is going to be far far too hard for me ;) I'll have a look out for the Vaughan Williams though.

Oh, if you pick the right bits of the Songs of Travel, I can almost play the piano part ;)

Oh, hurray!
Can you narrow down to classical or "popular"? In your position I'd likely be going for jazz-standards sorts of things, but I don't know whether that's to your taste.

Both :) I don't know much jazz, but I suspect it might actually suit my voice fairly well.

As a very introductory "what does a basic version of some of these songs sound like", you can do worse than Robbie Williams' "Swing When You're Winning" album or Rod Stewart's "Great American Songbook".

Oh, *squee*! This is so super. :-)

Starting at Grade 4 makes total sense to me, actually - it's what my singing teacher at the time got me to do. I think it's a not-unusual entry level for people who've already got a good instrument and a good level of musicianship. :-) And that you already have excellent performing skills as an actor won't hurt...

I shall ponder pieces. As mentioned I did Grade 4 (Associated Board), but obviously not as a baritone or bass. ;-)

Does G&S appeal to you at all? If so I have many scores and a good camera, so I could probably get you .jpegs. :-) I could also comb through my collection of Random Bits of Classical, and indeed of some other stuff too.

emperor mentioned the Songs of Travel: I only know one, which is "The Vagabond", and it's *gorgeous*. I obviously sing it in the wrong octave, so how easy I find it's probably irrelevant (will lie in a different part of the voice, etc.), but I would recommend giving it a go, if not at this point then later on, as I suspect you'd enjoy it.

Edited Date: 2014-10-09 11:12 am (UTC)

We've got a G&S best of which I was planning to have a look at. "When a Felon's Not Engaged in his Employment" is one of the syllabus pieces which I was thinking of doing.

The Vagabond is on the current Grade 8 syllabus for the Associated Board (none of the rest of Songs of Travel appears).

I was going to suggest G&S too! They're both interesting musically and actually fun to do, which is a surprisingly hard combination to find.

And how exciting! :D

Without wanting to sound like a creep, the music exam syllabi are surprisingly broad, and quite a good source of inspiration. And most of them are on youtube somewhere. So sitting down with the syllabi for grade 4 and the earlier grades and playing things on youtube and seeing if anything stands out as fun and interesting might be a nice way to find some things.

For me, I want to learn to sing the sort of things I occassionally end up singing badly better :-) So I'd be tempted to work on some of the common folk songs from the Ardgour song book, and also some church stuff (bits from our usual mass setting, or how to do the bit in psalms that one person does on their own well). Also shakespeare songs ;-)

G&S is a good place to start (probably not the patter songs, though!).

Do you know about http://imslp.org ? It's like Project Gutenberg for music, with lots of free out-of-copyright stuff. You can search by instrumentation, genre, work type, composer, period, language...