just another morning here

Sunday afternoon and evening can’t go by without a blog post in their honour, and as I’ve been woken up by Prince Caspian (the children put it on as they go to sleep and then fall asleep leaving it to blast through the floor for hours on end!), here we go.

We were at the Cathedral early, having allowed ourselves time to drive round hunting for parking spaces, of course we found one immediately in exactly the right place. As it turned out, being there early was fab, as Aunty Mimi whipped her camera out while the boys were practising and snapped a few pics which otherwise I wouldn’t have got!

The installation itself was a simple little ceremony with the Dean in which Josiah and Alex (the other Y4 chorister) made a promise about being choristers, then the Dean gave them their surplices. The senior choristers then led them to the choir stalls and sat them down, with some words that I can’t remember now! That was basically it – oh, and they were prayed for during the service too.

After the service, we were invited over to the cathedral music director’s house for afternoon tea, along with the other new chorister’s family, plus the dean and his wife. Mr Millington lives in one of the houses around the cathedral green, houses that we’ve walked past a hundred times before, so it was really interesting to see inside. We were also treated to a bit of a history lesson about the house as he showed us how it had all been bombed during the war – most of the area surrounding the Cathedral was totally flattened and was rebuilt afterwards.

From there we dashed over to the evening concert venue (well, some of us did, while other family members ended up in Pizza Express!) to get ready. All went smoothly with loads of help from parents which was fantastic.

As committee chair I get the grand job of introducing this concert, and then following tradition, we award certificates to leavers with over 3 years’ service to the orchestra.
As well as this we had the obligatory Christmas presents for section tutors and other important people like our friendly tuck shop man, the van drivers, and of course Richard the musical director himself. Daft, I know, but I’d been a bit nervous about all this speaking, and sure enough I did forget to actually introduce Richard and Mark (the leader) properly at the beginning, but the rest of it went ok I think.

Most importantly, the music was great, as usual! Abbie did really well in her new found section – percussion. She had been due to join the flutes but decided not to as there are too many of them already, so she’s ended up in percussion, which she’s really enjoyed. Josiah plays in percussion too, although because of chorister rehearsals he misses the beginning of orchestra practices, so he’s not quite as involved. At one point in the concert Anna had a percussion part as well so all three of them were there on the back row! We laughed a lot at that point; Anna was sight reading the part and we could see her counting bars on her fingers to get the chimes in the right place!

Anyway. Having both events on the same day was a bit busy, but it did mean that family could be around for both things which was lovely

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 1:52 and is filed under music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.