First Movement of My New Choral Work on Trees: Feltleaf Willow

I'm posting this for markfromireland, whose Saturday chorales at firedoglake are always a favorite there.  Mark's new web site, Saturday Chorale posts many videos of choral works - old and new.

I'm composing a set of four very short a capella wordless settings for eight-part chorus in response for a request for a work from the Anchorage Concert Chorus.  Each will be about a tree that grows at our place in Wasilla, Alaska:  Feltleaf Willow, Sitka Spruce, Paper Birch and Diamond Willow.

This chorale, Feltleaf Willow, is to be vocalized with "Ahs."  Some of the others are using harder sounding vocables, with biting consonants, like "K" and "D" and "Teh."

This is the first time I have used Quicktime's capability to capture video shots on my computer screen.

The result isn't very spectacular.  Actually, it sucks.  I'm not sure how to get better overall results for a project like this.  Maybe someone has a suggestion or two.

What you see is a Finale file of my chorale, scrolling on by, with the green vertical line indicating where you are in the notation.  What you hear is a very poor audio rendition of the sampled sounds of female and male voices, using the samples of a software program called Garritan Personal Orchestra.

Hopefuly, humans will start singing the completed set this Fall.