The Top Ten

Top Ten Reasons for being a Soprano

1. The rest of the choir exists just to make you look good.
2. You can entertain your friends by breaking their wine glasses.
3. Can you name an opera where an alto got the man?
4. When sopranos want to sing in the shower, they know the tune.
5. It's not like you're ever going to sing the alto part by accident.
6. Great costumes - like the hat with the horns on it.
7. How many world famous altos can you name?
8. When the fat lady sings, she's usually singing soprano.
9. When you get tired of singing the tune, you can sing the descant.
10. You can sing along with Michael Jackson.

Top Ten Reasons for being an Alto

1. You get really good at singing an E flat.
2. You get to sing the same note for 12 consecutive bars.
3. You don't really need to warm up to sing 12 consecutive bars of E flat.
4. If the choir is rough, it's unlikely the altos will be blamed
5. You have lots of time to chat during soprano solos.
6. You get to pretend that you are better than the sopranos, because everybody knows that women only sing soprano so they don't have to learn to read music.
7. You can sometimes find part-time work singing tenor.
8. Altos get all the great intervals.
9. When the sopranos are holding some outrageously high note at the end of a piece, the altos always get the last words.
10. When the altos miss a note, nobody gets hurt.

Top Ten Reasons for being a Tenor

1. Tenors get high without drugs.
2. Name a musical where the tenor got the girl.
3. You can show sopranos how it SHOULD be sung.
4. Did you ever hear of anyone paying $1000 a ticket to hear the Three Basses?
5. Who needs brains when you've got resonance?
6. Tenors never have to waste time looking through self-improvement books.
7. You can sing along with John Denver's 'High Calypso'.
8. When you get really good at falsetto you can make lots of money doing voice overs for cartoons.
9. Gregorian chant was practically invented for the tenor. Nobody invented a genre for basses.
10. You can entertain your friends doing impersonations.

Top Ten Reasons for being a Bass

1. You don't have to tighten your pants to reach your note.
2. You don't have to worry about a woman stealing your job.
3. Or a pre-adolescent boy.
4. Action heroes are always basses. That is if they ever sang they would be a bass.
5. You get great memorable lyrics like bop, bop, bop, bop.
6. If the singing job doesn't work out, there's always broadcasting.
7. You never have to learn to read the treble clef.
8. If you get a cold, so what.
9. For fun you can sing at the bottom of your range and fool people into thinking there's an earthquake.
10. If you belch while you're singing, the audience just thinks it's part of the score.

English or Latin?

There is an interesting discussion on whether choirs should sing in Latin or English here.

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