Music Video Series – 004

Choral Works are beautiful when done well.

I love to hear voices blending and moving through chord progressions, but there is so much preparation and rehearsal needed to fine tune such performances. This video series will be combining some notation (courtesy of Noteflight) and some PDF score downloads as I have not posted for a while now.

To begin, I have been teaching my Year 9 class to perform ColdPlay’s Fix You first as a choir in 4-part harmony, then to bring in their instruments and build up the piece from the voice ‘up.’  I notated the introduction into Noteflight and sent them home to rehearse their parts while they listened to it play back – success! They sounded superb (some of them found they could sing the parts higher or lower than written which made it really interesting). Finally, if they clicked on each individual note they could test the pitch they had to sing because it plays it back for them!

So that inspired me to find some other vocal music for my students to be inspired by. So scroll down and watch these amazing vocal performances, starting with the Nintendo Choir from a few years back.  This work inspired my Guitar Ensemble Arrangement of the Mario Brothers themes:





This video is a fantastic example of what happens when boys get together and sing well! A wonderful performance of You Can Go The Distance from Disney’s Hercules. Watch for the final phrases and one long note from the singer on the left:





This is a jazz vocal example by the Australian Vocal Quartet The Idea of North. Watch for how they use their voices to imitate instrumental parts:





Lastly, a student of mine introduced me to this humorous (and bizarre) 4-part vocal parody on all things John Williams & Wookie? Best of all there is a PDF of the arrangement in his YouTube Video here. That means you can sing along, or better yet, put on a performance of your own!