4. Ensemble Pieces - The Book of Mormon and Matilda the Musical

 Along with our assignment of choosing two solo songs we had to partake in two group pieces. This started at the beginning of the unit, we took part in vocal warm ups and we listened to the songs that were chosen together. 

The first song is 'Hello' from The Book of Mormon, this song looks at themes of religion in a very comedic way, it was chosen due these themes that it holds and because of my class being very light-hearted and a comedic bunch! 

The second song that was chosen was 'You will be found' from Dear Evan Hansen, this song like all Dear Evan Hansen songs holds themes of loneliness, feeling hopelessness for people who are struggling, it is a big contrast to our first song as it brings a strong message with it however, we eventually changed this song for something more fitting as a class. We chose 'Revolting Children' from Matilda The Musical, this song has a lot of choreography which we thought would be better to sing with as well. The song is about starting a revolt within the school against the evil Miss Trunchbull, its a very childish and upbeat song which challenges us physically and vocally. 

Hello from The Book of Mormon

In both songs we were allocated parts to sing, in Hello I was given the character Elder Young, all elder characters are seemingly the same in energy apart from Elder Cunningham who is a new recruit who is clueless about how things operate as a missionary Mormon. The whole point of the song is that they knock on people's doors and try and inform them about the book of Mormon, the comedy comes from the techniques that is used on the voice for example there is a lot of twang used to over emphasise their accents to make it more stereotypical and funny. When it came to character we took it from the actual live show of this song, the characters are very bright, smiley, nerdy people who just want to meet everyone which is something we tried to communicate with the audience. With this song we also had elements of choreography which made this song even more enjoyable to be apart of, the choreography was just made up of simple gestures but they were hilarious to do all the same.

For the ensemble parts we were given three separate harmonies to do, low harmony, melody and a high harmony; for me I was part of the lower harmony due to my natural singing voice being one of the lowest female voices in the class, I found this the easier one of the three. We also had the HND year 1 class be part of the harmonies for the final performance. 

Revolting Children from Matilda the Musical

This song has to be one of my favourites because of my solo parts that I did. The song starts off with a high note following into lyrics, this was ironically sung by me, I say ironically because I have a naturally deep female singing voice so trying to sound like an 11 year old boy proved a challenge. This song proved even more difficult due to the dancing we had to do, this tested our stamina and overall ability to hold a note whilst basically jumping up and down, one exercise we did was a good test of our stamina, we started jogging on the spot whilst singing the song, this is a famous trick used by many musical theatre performers worldwide and it actually really helped. 

The vocalisation of this song proved very difficult because in my class we are obviously not children so some of us have deeper voices which was challenging against the original key of the song which is E minor, the vocal range used in the original song is D#4-E5 so it was hard to follow however we did it. My challenge came with me hitting that high note at the beginning of the song and also during the final chorus of the song. I practiced a lot on my own and also with my lecturer; in my opinion the only thing effecting my ability to hit the note was my confidence - I was psyching myself out a lot due to nerves however I eventually got it. Even if I knew I couldn't hit it I knew that pushing character would help mask the fact I was struggling. The character for this song was very fun to do, my character was Bruce who is obviously a picked on character by the headteacher so this song pushed his power and confidence a lot, overall the aim of the character regardless of the person was to act childish and energetic. You can hear this in the song as well because of the lyrics and also the vocal techniques used with things such as using spoken word, it just emphasises the childishness and the fact they are starting a revolt - it is very classic battle cry! There are a lot of adlibs in the end of the song from my character, to me this just made it more of a sassy, diva character which relates back to that childish state of mind.

Overall the songs are very enjoyable to sing and are a big contrast from my solo songs which talk about strong issues in a soft way whereas these songs are very upbeat and bouncy which I can have fun with and it also communicates well with the audience if they have something amusing to listen to.


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