LaurenandLloyd.com

where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

choir

Singing Saints Home Concert

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I do’t know what Lauren was doing last weekend, but I was back in Concordia Missouri on Sunday and I got to hear the Singing Saint’s home concert. It was just great. After the first song, which was my favorite, I got out my phone and recorded a few of the pieces. Sorry about the poor quality. What do you expect from a phone sitting on a church bench?

There are just a passel(sp?) of students who are sons or daughters of people I sang in the Singing Saints with 30 years ago. I didn’t get an exact count. More than a dozen and less than 2 dozen.

Fun fact: One of the soloists on Ain’t Got time to Die is Brad Roepe’s son.

A party for Christian Utpatel

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We met Christian in 1990. He drove the bus for us on choir tour in Germany. After that he helped put together some of the next few Germany tours. He was in the States on a business trip and spent the day with Dad Martens. Dad threw a party for him and a few of his closest friends from 20 some odd years ago came to say, “Hi.”

It was great seeing him again and great to see everyone else as well. We need more excuses to get together, so we’ll have to invite Christian back again. See how many people you can name.

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There and back again

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We had a whirl wind trip down to Concordia Missouri last weekend and Lauren only let me go if I promised to make a post about it.

My high school choir director is retiring at the end of the school year and the last home concert of the Singing Saints under the direction of Bill Gasau was on Sunday. I drove the Prius down along with Beth, Sam and Ben (who shall not be mentioned in the remainder of the post).  We left at 1:00pm drove down to Concordia and had dinner at the Smoke House Formerly Known As Biffle’s. We ran into a number of former classmates there, so dinner was interesting.

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Then we headed over to the church for the concert. There were a fair number of other former classmates at the church, so a good time was had by all before the concert as well. I would estimate that there were 600 people there. It’s a really big church.

Mr. Gasau had been directing the choir for 47 years, and they had people who sang in the choir stand up by decade. Lots of alumni. The oldest alumni would have been 65 years old. They also recognized former accompanists (always students), former choir presidents, bus drivers, people related to Mr. Gasau. It was swell.

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I’m not sure who that guy is.

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There are Muellers, Wisenborns and Mannings in that photo.

The choir sounded good, and all of the choir alumni went up to sing a couple of songs. I think it took longer for everyone to find a place than it did to sing the songs. I’m 95% sure that Mr. Gasau looked up during the first song, noticed me smiling at him and pointed to me and smiled. I knew I was his favorite.

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Here’s what the whole big group sounded like. Sorry about the sound quality. No, wait. I take that back. I think it sounds pretty good for just sitting my phone down on the pew and letting it record. click on the little play icon at the front of the link…

[wpaudio url=”http://laurenandlloyd.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/20150315-195951.mp4″]

Afterwards there was a nice reception where I saw even more people that I knew. Following that we went to Kent’s house and then spent the night in Biltz.

A Little History

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I was looking through some old photos last week and, because Brad needed it for other things, I happened to have the scanner setup. Since Lauren went to bed early tonight, let me share with you the results of the Concordia Teacher’s College A Cappella Choir 1990 Choir 1 vs. Choir 2 drink off:

Unfortunately, choir 1 lost. But I bet if we had a rematch now (23 years later), we would lose again.

Now in 3D

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I saw this at the church where the Lutheran Choir of Lincoln practices (note that this is not its name; it is actually called the Lincoln Lutheran Choir, but people get that confused with the Lincoln Lutheran High School Choir, which is not the name of the high school choir; it is actually the Lincoln Lutheran Chorale).

It's construction should be exceedingly simple.

Anyway, I wanted to show it to Lauren, but she is in a meeting tonight, so I’ll just put it here so that she can see it in the morning. It looks like it would be (a) something that she could do in 30 minutes if she wanted to and (b) something that would take me 4 hours and then it would look like total vine puke.

She won't need to see this detail, but if I want to do it, I will.

Variation on a Theme

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Keeping with our -oh so recent- music theme, I went to Lincoln Lutheran’s Fall Sampler concert earlier this week. This is a fun concert to go to, because all of the bands and choirs just do a couple of numbers, so you hear everyone in about an hour. An hour is about my attention span these day.

Middle School choirs sounded good. This is a relief, because we have a new middle school choir director this year, and she is a Spanish teacher (I know, that’s what I thought too). But not to worry, she’s as good as a normal teacher when it comes to directing a middle school choir (recorded on my phone, so the quality isn’t very good):

Next up was the Middle School band. Mr. Wilhelm is the best middle school band director that I have ever heard. I base my opinion on the fact that I have never winced or cringed while his middle school bands were playing:

Okay, let me be completely honest. I’ve never winced or cringed until they played this:

But then I thought of this, and everything was okay again:

The high school choir sang a bit too:

Then the high school band played, but I don’t really appreciate high school band, so I mostly tuned them out. Sorry band. I just don’t get you.