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Great little piece! First a couple of silly, inconsequential things:
1) Appetite, not appitite
2) In general, the sffz marking is not good to use in choral singing. It doesn't tell singers anything that a ff marking doesn't. (More on this moment later.)
Now to the more important stuff.
1) Text declamation. There are some moments in this piece where unimportant words receive undue emphasis. A couple of examples are of the word "the" in the tenor part in bar 40 and the word "and" in bar 45. Also in bar 45, you put the strong syllable of the word "giving" on an upbeat, which is the weakest part of the bar. These are little things, but very important in choral ensemble writing, where words are half the battle. Certainly in some genres of choral music word emphasis is not important at all, but since your text declamation is so natural elsewhere, these moments stuck out to me.
2) The moment at bar 18. You want a strong, full chord here; the sopranos are singing in a nice strong range, but you have split up the bass part between a G and a C. C is at the lowish end of the bass range, and only half the basses are singing it, so the chord may not have as strong a fundamental as you would wish.
3) In my opinion, the "a" of "appetite" in bar 12 is too long, and then in bar 13 the rhythm is a little out of character with the rest of the piece. A choir will generally sing a bouncy rhythm like this rather bouncily (go figure) and I'm not sure that's the character you want at this moment.
4) You have a sort-of V-I thing going on at bars 7-8 and 26-27. Is there any reason these V chords are incomplete? My ears wanted to hear the harmony filled out a bit more.
These are, of course, little things. Overall the piece is very solid. Good job!
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Michael Alfera
Pianist, Composer, Musician (and eventually, Conductor)
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Dec 11 2006, 9:16 PM
Linear Mode
