Final Forms Magnificat: Fill & Download for Free

If you don't record yourself and listen to playback to self-critique, I suggest starting the practice. There are some small Sony recorders that do a nice job recording rehearsals. Zoom has more expensive and complicated music recording devices, but if you look on Amazon or eBay you might find an older model for a reasonable price because people who like tech will upgrade as new models come out. You can also get free voice recorder apps that work on android or iPhones. The Samsung S8 phone has a pretty decent microphone that works well enough to use for recording yourself or a choir rehearsal to practice with later.Listen for time, tone and taste.Are you maintaining the tempo? Are you able to receive time from someone else like a conductor or pianist or are you projecting your own internal sense of time at others? Some people sound fine singing alone but put them in a band or a choir and they struggle to stay with the other people and will push to speed up a song or drag behind. You may not think about it consciously as a passive listener, but when you hear a group that is so good together on their timing that they are all “sitting in the pocket" you will notice that something is incredibly right about it.You can check yourself on this by recording while you sing along to either a recorded accompaniment track or to the radio. Don't assume that you can receive time because you sound okay when playing guitar or piano while you sing. You must be able to stay precisely with other people in a choir.Are you articulating consonants clearly to be understood? I still work on this regularly after more than 40 years of performing. Certain terminal sounds are just difficult to master, and having a bit of a lisp that is not particularly noticeable when I speak but more problematic when I sing has been a challenge that I continue to work. Are you hissing the letter “S" like you are a snake? Are your hard consonants like “C” crisp and articulated with “the tip of the tongue and the teeth?”? Are your vowel sounds round especially the letter “E” as pronounced in the word “easy” or “East?” There are vocal exercises that you can practice to improve articulation.Are you thinking tall or is your mouth more horizontal and flat as you sing? Look in the mirror asnd make adjustments while modifying your singing.Is your voice sounding thin and nasal? What is the color like, bright or dark or somewhere between?michaeltrimbleHow to Sing, While Only Slightly Overthinking ItIs your pitch good? This is essential because in a group, you should be many people producing one note if you are singing the same part. Are you right on the note or sagging a little below? Are you able to sing the correct notes immediately or are you sometimes sliding up or down to get there? It can be particularly noticeable for some people when they must make the leap to a note in the upper part of their range from one much lower.The link below is to a recording of an arrangement of the “Magnificat" by Guy Forbes that my church choir sang for Christmas 2017. It's not us on the recording, just the same arrangement. Note how close many of the notes are when the choir is singing not merely 4 parts but 8 or more. There is no room for someone to be slightly above or below their note because another vocal part is so close with the notes that they must sing. Note that the vowels could definitely be rounder in this performance. We were given reminders about our vowels right up to the final rehearsal week because it can be challenging to be mindful of so many different things to make the voice sound its best. It helps to develop good habits that one uses regularly until they become second nature and one can move on to tweaking other things.Magnificat

Well, if you’re talking about Western pop music, I’d say it is almost entirely based on classical. Though the influence is not always obvious.There’s obvious uses of classical music, like “Whiter Shade of Pale”, which uses the chord progression from Bach’s Air on a G String:Whiter Shade of PaleAnd of course, Coolio’s Canon in D is also used very often in modern music:There’s also Beyonce’s “Ave Maria”:Which is heavily inspired by Schubert’s sublime original:But let’s take a moment to explore a particular harmonic device in the Schubert song above. Schubert’s “Ave Maria” is a master class in a cadence called the deceptive cadence. That’s when you pretend you’re going to resolve to a major chord, but you play the relative minor instead! Listen the end of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”:Simon and/or Garfunkel use repeated deceptive cadences at the end! And here we have a beautiful cover of an Elvis classic! It’s Twenty-one Pilots version of “I can’t help falling in love with you”. They use the deceptive cadence to lead back into the chorus the final time:But deceptive cadences are from well before Twenty-One Pilots, and indeed Schubert too! Here it is in a Mozart piano sonata from 1774:And this cadence wasn’t new in Mozart’s day either! Here is another of my favourite deceptive cadences, written perhaps 50 years before Wolfy was even born! Telemann Trumpet Concerto in D:So this cadence has been used for hundreds of years. The knowledge of what it sounds like and how to use it has been known and passed down from the Baroque era, and probably long before!Let’s look at another idea: A falling chromatic bass line! Led Zeppelin fell under scrutiny in a copyright infringement lawsuit over their song “Stairway to Heaven”. When asked about the chord progression, their defence pointed out that the idea of harmonising a falling chromatic baseline is an old cliché! Here is Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven from 1970 (the falling chromatic bass line is in the first few bars):And here’s the same idea from 1964! Bless ya’ cotton socks, it’s “Chim Chim Cheree” from Mary Poppins:But the trick goes back much further than that! Here’s a Sonata by Ludwig Van from 1800, which uses the same trick:Of course, Beethoven is Beethoven, so he plays it at presto and switches rather jarringly from soft to !!LOUD!! for no apparent reason, but there is definitely a falling chromatic baseline! And the idea is much older yet!! Here’s Vivaldi with the same idea 300 years ago!In fact, so common is this bass line, that it has a name! It is called the “Lament Bass”. Here’s a Wikipedia article with many examples: Lament bass - WikipediaGreat, so we know how to use a deceptive cadence, and the lament bass from the classics. But let’s talk about counterpoint!Counterpoint is when you have multiple melodies at once, rather than a melody with chords. It is very effective, because it creates interesting textures, gives a listener something to come back to when they listen again!An example of counterpoint in pop music is when they sing The “I get knocked down” melody at the same time as the “pissing the night away” melody at the end of Tubthumping:Here is an example of counterpoint by the Beatles. This is “She’s Leaving Home”:Ok, great, so they knew how to counterpoint in the 90’s and 60’s, but let’s not beat around in the bushes! There’s only one Godfather of Counterpoint the undisputed Maestro of Multiple Melodies himself, J.S. Bach!!! :)You could listen to any of Papa Bach’s amazing output and you will most likely hear an unending stream of magnificent counterpoint! But let’s Bachy-Bach it up good-and-proper! Let’s brace ourselves for a counterpoint onslaught!! In Bach’s Magnificat, the first movement ends on a somewhat dulcet tone, and then “Omnes Generationes” happens:Right... that was… err… concentrated. Thank you Bach.A second, slightly more accessible offering from Bach, his “Little” fugue in G minor!Ok, so folks have been composing multiple melodic lines in counterpoint for a million years, and the falling chromatic bass line, and the deceptive cadence. Let’s talk about melody – or the lack of it in modern music!Sometimes people note that modern music seems to lack melody. But this idea is not new either! Beethoven was doing that hundreds of years ago! Instead of using a melodic idea, he would sometimes strip his expression back to almost nothing but a rhythm. Like the famous fifth Symphony motif, which is meant to be Dot-Dot-Dot-Dash, or “V” for Victory in Morse code.(Actually, I think it was meant to be fate knocking on the door? I don’t know. So much of Beethoven is mythology nowadays, it’s hard to separate the man from the myth. At any rate, his ability to write a rhythmic motif rather than a melody was marvellous!)Beethoven’s fifth Symphony:“Mars” from Holst’s Planets, “The Hut on Chicken’s Legs” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures, or Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance”; there’s a large number of pieces which rely very heavily on rhythmic rather than melodic ideas.But let’s look at how modern music uses rhythmic motifs. Maybe the greatest examples of rhythm in place of melody can be found in hip-hop. One of my favourite examples has got the be the song “The Message”. It was groundbreaking! One of the first rap songs to achieve widespread popularity, it paved the way for the hip hop industry as we know it today! The main idea in the chorus of this song is almost 100% rhythmic:Grandmaster Flash & Furious Five “The Message”:Ok, so I will admit it would be a stretch to say that Grandmaster Flash & Furious Five were lifting from Beethoven there, but the abandonment of melody for rhythm is not new. Composers were doing that hundreds of years ago!And that’s not all the classical composers were good at writing! Let’s talk about power ballads! A staple in modern pop music! I would say that we know how to write a massive power ballad today from some of the powerful arias in opera. Papa Puccini showed us how! Maybe my favourite example is “One Fine Day” from Madame Butterfly? Madam Butterfly is in love, she’s waiting for Pinkerton to come back, she’s imagining one fine day when he will return. And she sings this amazingly beautiful melody!!One Fine Day from Madam Butterfly:Oh, how sweet!! <3 <3 Just don’t listen to the ending of the opera, ok?… gioca, gioca… Butterfly!? Butterfly?? Butterfly!!!!!!!!!Haha, oh snap… :’(Anywho, this style of aria shares something obvious with the modern songs we call Power Ballads: A slow, quiet love song that builds to a huge finale! There’s many examples of power ballads, but let’s not be silly, Whitney Houston’s version of “I will Always Love you” is a true gem!!Anyway, a huge number of ideas, both subtle and not-so-subtle have been passed down through history, from western classical music to modern pop music. We could talk about how binary form turned into fugues, then into sonata form, and then into the Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus/Bridge/Chorus/Chorus form of a modern pop song. Or we could talk about modern orchestration techniques used in the backing tracks to pop songs, the keys pop songs are written in, or the time signatures. All of these things come the western tradition, they come from classical music.But actually this “borrowing” of ideas is not one way!Classical composers were surrounded by street musicians, folk songs and “pop” music of their own time and place! They stole the ideas, the melodies, rhythms and created some really marvellous pieces!!Here is Bela Bartok himself playing the Romanian Folk Dances. The time stamp is set to the final one, which is a very fast fun and sweet little folk dance :) I can just imagine some festival, with all the beautiful people dancing around by a bonfire in their colourful gypsy clothes!Many, many classical musicians “borrowed” folk tunes, from Bartok and Brahms to Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov! All wrote fantastic versions of folk music!And of course, the blues has had a gigantic influence on music all over the world!! It wasn’t a classical musician that thought of singing blue notes over major chords, after all!George Gershwin was one of those composers who really pushed to have early jazz or blues music recognised as art music! Here is an amazing rendition by Ella Fitzgerald of Gershwin’s very beautiful “Summertime”:This is the original from Gershwin’s opera Porgy & Bess!Yep, it’s a blues/jazz/classical fusion!!Anyway, there’s perhaps no better melody on this sweet Earth than Gershwin's “Summertime”, so I might as well leave it at that! All the styles borrow from and exist because of the other styles! Almost everything about modern music can be traced back to the music before it. Classical music is the history of western music, and so it would be fairly safe to say that the influence of classical music on the current western tradition is enormous.I hope this was interesting. Fun question, have a good one :)

Toddlers discover one important lesson (as soon as they are able to walk) while exploring their world: parents put limits on their exploration. Why? Omnipotence. Parents have long since learned that there are dangers in the world of their children they would just as soon have the children take their word on than find out for themselves. Redirection and ‘no’ become a staple for parents helping their children navigate their surroundings. Meanwhile the toddlers are trying to separate reality from perception. God (usually referred to as Father) is the ultimate parent.God has spent millennia trying to persuade His Chosen People (through redirection and ‘no’) how to navigate His creation, and how to return to heaven and Him. The Bible is filled with His loving but often futile attempts at building faith in Him; while we toddlers insist on floundering our way through the life He gave us. Just because God knows (and understands) the consequences of our choices, He also knows that if we refuse to listen to Him we suffer the consequences. And that then becomes an issue of free will. Toddlers have to be constantly watched because they are free to pursue whatever they are capable of – and so are we. And this supervision, regarding God, falls under omnipotence.It is sad that omnipotence connotes power in the sense of domination; because God’s ‘power’ is centered on mercy and forgiveness – not control. It is true that His creation has rather strict rules that science is forever exploring, but a part of His creation, us, is free to explore it to our heart’s content. But once a toddler violates His laws, s/he starts crying and seeks the solace of the parent to comfort him/her and make things right. We learn this with God as soon as we yield, in faith, to His loving embrace. And like the parent, He willing embraces us and shows us how to make things right.With this in mind I have included two articles on the topic {1 & 2}. And links to more philosophical discussions on His potency {3}.{1} * God’s Omnipotence *Of all the divine attributes, only God's omnipotence is named in the Creed: to confess this power has great bearing on our lives. We believe that his might is universal, for God who created everything also rules everything and can do everything. God's power is loving, for he is our Father, and mysterious, for only faith can discern it when it "is made perfect in weakness".(CCC 268)The Holy Scriptures repeatedly confess the universal power of God. He is called the "Mighty One of Jacob", the "Lord of hosts", the "strong and mighty" one. If God is almighty "in heaven and on earth", it is because he made them. Nothing is impossible with God, who disposes his works according to his will. He is the Lord of the universe, whose order he established and which remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal. He is master of history, governing hearts and events in keeping with his will: "It is always in your power to show great strength, and who can withstand the strength of your arm? (CCC 269)God is the Father Almighty, whose fatherhood and power shed light on one another: God reveals his fatherly omnipotence by the way he takes care of our needs; by the filial adoption that he gives us ("I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty"): finally by his infinite mercy, for he displays his power at its height by freely forgiving sins. (CCC 270)God's almighty power is in no way arbitrary: "In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing therefore can be in God's power which could not be in his just will or his wise intellect." (CCC 271)Faith in God the Father Almighty can be put to the test by the experience of evil and suffering. God can sometimes seem to be absent and incapable of stopping evil. But in the most mysterious way God the Father has revealed his almighty power in the voluntary humiliation and Resurrection of his Son, by which he conquered evil. Christ crucified is thus "the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men." It is in Christ's Resurrection and exaltation that the Father has shown forth "the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe".(CCC 272)Only faith can embrace the mysterious ways of God's almighty power. This faith glories in its weaknesses in order to draw to itself Christ's power. The Virgin Mary is the supreme model of this faith, for she believed that "nothing will be impossible with God", and was able to magnify the Lord: "For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name." (CCC 273)Catechism of the Catholic Church{2} * God’s Omnipotence and Sin*The collect includes this opening invocation: “O God, who manifest your almighty power above all by pardoning and showing mercy, bestow, we pray, your grace abundantly upon us.” These words are meant to comfort us. At the same time, they also require some explanation. Think about it! Were the highest expression of the divine omnipotence to appear in God’s pardoning and his showing mercy, then would not the maximum expression of God’s power somehow remain tied to human failure? Paradoxically, God would become more powerful the more humans sinned. When we profess the Creed, however, we affirm that God’s power begins with his own initiatives: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” The almighty God can do whatever does not entail contradiction. Some things though cannot be done. For example, God cannot make a square circle. He can, however, make another world.The Collect speaks the truth. God’s omnipotence does manifest itself in a unique way when he pardons and shows mercy. In fact, when we receive mercy for our transgressions, God reveals himself as the Highest Truth. He alone can forgive the creature’s rebellion against the supreme norm for human life. What is better, God not only pardons, he also perfects. By the absolution that the priest pronounces, the forgiven sinner finds not only mercy but also new life. That God raises sinful humanity to share in his own life reveals an essential dimension of the divine omnipotence. Mercy, like everything else God accomplishes, comes to us as an unmerited gift of the divine bounty. This leads some people to wonder why God does not forgive everybody for everything wrong they have done.Some things not even God can do. For example, God cannot show mercy to the person who resolutely refuses the invitation to live a new life of virtue. God may overcome our indispositions to repent. He cannot, however, bestow mercy on the unrepentant sinner. The reason for this apparent limitation is not a weakness in God. Mercy no more becomes impenitence than does squareness a circle. No one should court the dangerous state of rebellious isolation. Pope Francis has announced a Jubilee of Mercy to persuade the world that, even when we feel trapped in sin, God still manifests above all his almighty power by pardoning and showing mercy. The sheer gift that comes from the divine omnipotence helps the human creature approach, confidently, the very good God. Put otherwise, mercy appears as the crowning effect of God’s power.By Father Romzmus Cessario, 0.P., Magnificat Year of Mercy Companion, 2015, Page 364 – 365.{3} * Limitations on God’s Omnipotence*OmnipotenceIf God is omniscient and knows everything then why pray about our problems now or in the future? - Catholic Straight Answers