Researching Songs | Lesson 1

In today's lesson we had to pick a variety of different songs that we could sing as our ensemble pieces. Before we could do that, we needed to choose an individual to be in charge of the ensemble pieces. This person needs to be in charge of taking the meetings and deciding what to do each lesson. The other group members agreed that I should be the person in charge because for the other ensemble songs we have done previously I have helped with finding the harmonies in a song. This meant I would choose what song we would start with once we had chosen three songs.

As a group we looked into different songs and discussed what we felt would be suitable for us to sing. We started off with 5 song choices. These choices were Blank Space by Taylor Swift, Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye, Rude by Magic, Wings by Little Mix and Ho Hey by The Lumineers. We decided that these songs would all be suitable for an ensemble song as we they all have clear harmonies and different parts that we could equally and fairly give members in the group. We all agreed that we didn't want to sing 5 ensemble songs in our final performance so we needed to pick 3 songs out of the 5 we had picked previously.

We chose Blank Space by Taylor Swift because it had an equal amount of solo parts for everyone and also it had a good amount of harmonies that we could distribute out to everyone in the group. 

We chose Ho Hey by The Lumineers because it had clear harmonies and we could easily distribute solo parts to people fairly. 

We chose Rude by Magic because it's an upbeat song and has a reggae genre to it which contrast to the other song. Also it has some harmonies and clear solo parts in the song.