Let's stay together, shall we?

Recently, RoF has been working on the song "Yesterday," originally by the Beatles, and remade by the Boyz II Men. If you listen to this song, you'll notice that while it's an extremely impressive piece when done well, it has the potential to be an extremely unpleasant disaster when done... not so well. Throughout the song, the 4 parts, Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass, are blended together in a pleasant dissonance. The leaders of RoF predicted that the song would bring us several long and gruesome practices, and their prediction was on point.
The first problem, as previously mentioned, was intonation. Because the parts were so radically different from each other, we could not rely on the other sections' parts to sing along. This piece really pushed our group to grow and mature musically. The alto line was particularly difficult, and our usually musically strong alto section had a tricky time perfecting our part.
While intonation was our first problem, our biggest obstacle was tempo. The song's tempo was marked at 60, which equates each beat to be a second. As a group, we just simply could not keep a steady tempo. Because the song was originally marked at such a slow tempo, our tendency was to speed up. The problem intensified as each section sang at its own tempo. This problem was so severe that sometimes after a mere 30 seconds into the song, our music director would bring the painful song to a halt.
The only way to solve these problems was to practice, and practice, and practice. We practiced separately as sections, came back together as a group, split back into our sections, and then came back together once more. This process went on repetitively until it was time to wait for the next rehearsal to repeat this cycle. This went on, until last practice, our music director finally declared that the song was finished!
This song taught our group a lot about team work. Initially, the song gave us so many problems because the sections, and perhaps even the individuals, of the group were so disconnected. Not everyone was singing the right part, at the right tempo, in the right key. We learned how to pay attention to each other in order to stay together in regards to tempo.
Thank you Boyz II Men for helping RoF become more unified! ^^