Ryan Youens

Well, last Sunday my new piece “Heedless Conclusions” was premiered by The Souls, who are a chamber choir here in Auckland. It was quite a week actually.

I turned up to the first rehearsal, all set to relax and listen to all the wonderful work they had been doing, when they dragged me in to sing. Very happy to, especially to make everything well balanced, but gee, I haven’t sung in a choir in years. lol Anyway it was absolutely wonderful. Of course I made it to the rest of their rehearsals for the week, and because of that I learnt so much about my piece that I never would have known otherwise. Partly by simply singing a part by myself, but also just going through the choir on that final journey. It was marvelous.

The acoustic where the concert was held was very wet!! Anything said, just bounces around for seconds after … wonderfully exciting. I wrote the piece with this in mind, so there were some magic moments to make the most of it. So anyway, dress rehearsal was fantastic and I couldn’t wait for the concert.

Concert came, and … just amazing. It’s a piece that flows very nicely in some ways, but has a few twists and turns that can easily catch you. But they caught no one and the audience loved it, the players seemed to enjoy putting it together and said it was well worth the effort. I think I was spoilt coming in right at the end, after all the hard work was put in, just to experience the choir finally understand it as a piece and start to really enjoy singing it.

Well the score is now available at SOUNZ, go check out … you’ll love it. When I have the recording back I’ll put a sample up also.