PBA in Argentina

This morning I was to give a lecture at the music university for professors, students, and choir directors about teaching boys to sing. I brought six varied voices with me to demonstrate, and the boys were good sports. The rest of the choir had some more shopping time and wrote postcards and got their laundry. The people at the lecture had all sorts of questions, mostly about boys' voices changing. I guess in the grand scheme of thingss, we know as much as anyone about it, and lots of places (like just about every choir with boys in England) just have the boys stop singing when they can no longer sing soprano. People here are also very curious about the idea of a choir with just boys. There is a heavy Spanish nd Italian influence here, yet the tradition of boys choirs seems to be largely unknown. A lot of the children's choirs here tend to me mostly girls it would seem, just as in the USA.

After the univeristy presentation, we met up with the rest of the choir at the buffet lunch place, which was only about a block away. As I write this, we've been to this place to eat maybe four times, but I still either don't remember or never knew the name. The boys have all sorts of choices and can eat as much as they want. Argentina, being known for its meat, it's not surprising there is a whole grill area with chicken, pork, steak, chorizo, blood sausage, etc. I highly recommend the chorizo, which was recommended to me by Mr. Tarango. There is a pasta counter where they cook it in front of you, and the boys ahve gotten very good at ordering the pasta they want. For dessert the ice cream is excellent, though many of the boys prefer the crepes, which take a while to prepare, but the woman doing it is quite skilled. I think a couple of the boys may have taken photos.

After lunch, we had a school visit at a local school that is housed in an old train station, which was kind of cool. The school, like the school in Cordoba, is a music school from K-12. It's a public school and they all sing. They sang a couple numbers for us, the first directed by one of the students. After the performance we had some refreshments (most boys were full of pasta and crepes), with many boys and girls (mostly girls) from the school at the reception. Walking to the room where the reception was help, we walked past all sorts of classrooms where younger students were working on music or math or whatever. Seemed so matter-of-fact, it made me shake my head at how difficult it is for us to explain to people in California what a choir school is about. At the reception, the boys were mobbed by the girls as usual, and I'm thinking we should set up a separate webpage of photos of the boys getting mobbed by girls, so we can direct people there when we get the concerned question about whether boys in a boys choir/school interact with girls ever. There seem to be mobs of girls everywhere we go; the girls school in Buenos Aires should be interesting.

After the school visit, we headed to the smallish town of Rivadavia for our evening concert. Mendoza has about 1.5 million people, and Rivadavia has about 30,000. Our concert was in a large barn of a concert hall, with a stage and two lighting towers on either side. Our coming in on the bus, it's hard to know how big a town in, but they had a big concert hall. The acoustics weren't really conducive to choral singing, though they did have a great stage crew that helped with everything. Before we sang, a local children's folk dance group performed before us, and they were very impressive. For their last number, four young gauchos (maybe nine or so?) did a traditional dance with boots and stomping on the stage in rhythm to the music. Hard to describe, but they were amazing. Just four kids, but very focused and synchronized and very dynamic. They were truly a tough act to follow.

We did our best with the acoustics, we had the solos miked, and we had a decent concert. It was hard to keep the energy up, and we had some lapses in focus and some sloppiness. The audience wasn't huge, but tehre were a couple hundred people in this giant barn that could probably hold 1000, and they seemed enthusiastic. People like to take pictures with me or the boys after the concert. It helps that Fletcher is on Tower (CD sales) since he speaks some Spanish.

After the concert we had a light dinner (lots of empanadas!) upstairs where our dressing room was. The local wine festival (I think that's right) beauty queens were there, and this time it was the boys swarming the girls. We were presented with a gift bottle of wine and a Rivadavia plate by the Minister of Culture there.

It was pretty late when we hopped on the bus to head back to Mendoza. Tomorrow is our last day here.

At the music school	Continuum sing Happy Together


Setting up at the concert hall, with Alejandro's help	Evan is in charge of the music stand and does a little dance, including some conducting, when he sets it up

	We work on a new twist to I Know I've Been Changed
The view from stage	The children's folk dance group
The four gauchos

	We exchange gifts with the Minister of Culture in Rivadavia

June 25, 2008— in Mendoza