Dear Reader,
‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ or ‘Till the Boys Come Home’ (as is was originally know) is the first song we learnt as a company and was the starting point for me to realise the potential of the girls. This potential grew as we did vocal warm ups. It also gave me a good indication of who was potential for a solo.
I led lots of excercises whilst learning this song because some of the birds use lots of emotion and some of the girls connected less initially to the song.
One of the exercises was to put themselves in the position of some of the women who were left behind. The emotions they portrayed were sad and heart broken which was really good but I think the song is surrounded by hope, which is one of the emotions I want the girls to convey to the audience. So I sent them out of the room and had them all come back in, sit down again, faked a phone call that the war had been won and they were retreating and the whole mood of the song changed. It was incredible to see.
I showed them the difference in facial expression by using a mirror and making them sing infront of a big pannel of glass in the studio. This was so they could not just see what they were doing but gadge how other people were using and expressing themselves in the song. At this initial point I was not to concerened with the ability of singing I was more focused on them conveying emotion.
I stressed to them the importance of emotion over sound, to the extent I made them do it in silence to just focus on their faces
I hope you can tell how hard the girls have worked on feeling the emotion of the song.
Sincerely Yours
Charlotte
xxx
Works Cited
Harrison. J (1915) Till the Boys Come Home (Edison Blue Amderol 2773) Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.
McCormack and Kirkby (1916) Vintage Audio: Keep The Home Fires Burning—[online] Available from: www.firstworldwar.com [Accessed on May 01 2014)
Fuld,J. (2000).Keep the home fires burning ; The book of world-famous music: classical, popular, and folk. (Courier Dover Publications)pp.316.