Sam Meredith Partner Practice 10/23

For Caitlin's half of our partner practice we had her accompanist there. She has recently had memory checks, so we just wanted to work on solidifying a couple of things in her repertoire. So we went through all of her songs and I followed along with a copy of all her music. It was mostly good, but there were some times when she had trouble remembering some words, rhythms, or pitches. We took a break after each song just to evaluate a little. Whenever we did this Caitlin usually knew exactly where the mistakes were and how to fix them. So, I think all of the problems were just a result of not being completely solid with the memorization. For my portion of the practice we ran through 'si tra i ceppi'. Caitlin noticed some tension in my neck and had me do a few things to try to get rid of it. First we tried having me bend over and let my neck relax to sing. There were some benefits to doing it like that, but I didn't really like the feeling of the blood rushing to my head and the position of my head wasn't really helping me maintain the purity of my vowels. So instead of that Caitlin pretended to ignore me while I sang and I had to walk around and also move my neck around more to try to get her to 'pay attention' to me again. I feel like this worked very well on two levels. First, it relieved some of the tension in my neck. Secondly, it helped me add more life and more expression into the piece.