Why You Should Never Practice!

Hello, readers. Today, for once, I actually have something to talk about! And I will talk a LOT.

I was recently in a Gala. You know, the old get up and sing in a Chorus to support a theater company and raise money deal. (Fine, maybe you did not know that, but now you do.)
A lot of Galas can be pretty sorry things. Nine or so kids with almost no boys, no rehearsal, and one pianist. Then there is us. Over twenty kids, with at least four voices in each part.
Oh, you may not know about vocal parts either. Let me explain.

There are two main labels you can apply to your voice. One is range. Range is the literal range of notes you can hit, wether you sound good or not. Your Vocal Part is where your voice resonates, and usually lines up pretty neatly with range. There are three vocal parts for each gender, going up from Base, the lowest, to Soprano, the highest. The full list is: Base, Baritone, Tenor, Alto, Mezzo, Soprano. (Mezzo is pronounced "MET-so"). I'm a Baritone, the middle male voice, tinging on the lower side.
Vocal parts are extremely important when singing harmonies. You can have up to maybe an eight part harmony, and down to a two part. A two part harmony would be either boys and girls, or Tenors, Sopranos, and high middle voices singing one part while the lower middle voices, Altos, and Bases sing the other.

Now that I've ranted about the size of the group, and about vocal parts, etc, let me move on the the orchestra.

Our orchestra is a rag tag group of better than decent musicians of all ages who are willing to play a show for 25 bucks, and usually sound great. Our music director is a "purist", meaning he wants the orchestra to sound as close to the original broadway one as possible. This means he hires every instrument. Harp, Timpani, Violins, Violas, Cellos and stand up Bases, French Horns, Trumpets and Trombones, and even two little whistles that make bird calls.
Unfortunately, the night before the Gala, they lost their lead Trombonist. And they really needed someone to come in and play that part. After calling no less than 8 different plausible replacements, the music director turned to my dad.
My dad is a musician. He plays Trombone and Piano, as well as drums and base guitar to some extent, and teaches music at two colleges. One thing he loves is jumping in at the last minute and sight reading. This means that, with no practice, he sat down in the pit on the day of the Gala and played his rather complicated part merely by looking at the sheet music. He made very few mistakes.

Then, there were the rehearsals.

They didn't vary from the typical thrown together Gala that much.

Every kid in the Gala, from thirteen to eighteen, was apparently hand picked for being able to learn music fast. They sent us PDFs of the music a couple weeks before the first rehearsal. I, being me, had everything memorized by the time I was in the car on the way to the first rehearsal.
I was gloating a bit. Just to myself, but apparently all but one of the three other Baritones had completely neglected to practice.
A kid a year older than me, and a foot shorter than me, who I must say annoys me to death, petulantly said that "Actually it isn't good to practice before the first rehearsal."
He has a point. When you're in a show, with months of rehearsal coming up, learning your part before you even start can be problematic because 1: It gets stale in your head and you mess up, and 2: You might learn the wrong part accidentally.
The Gala is a different story. We had three rehearsals (Tuesday, Thursday, Friday), with only two extra ones for soloists, and the performance that Saturday.

Needless to say, afore said kid ended up singing the melody (slightly off tune) by the time we reached the performance, while everyone else sang their harmonies. (Except the Tenors...they usually have the melody to sing anyway.)
Unfortunately, I was over-prepared. For two songs, I had learned the wrong part. In my defense, they were both written extremely strangely, but I did have to relearn the two longest, most difficult songs, in about two days. And I did. Barely. But when I muttered under my breath "Oh, crud, I learned the wrong part" the kid took it upon himself to inform me that "that's why you shouldn't ever practice!". I wanted to take a tip from Fayah and bang his head in a door. But I just gritted my teeth, and ignored him.

So, that was the Gala. A post is coming tomorrow about the songs in it, if you're interested!