I was listening again just now to the Raffles Concert Singers' recording of its debut (and only) concert and marveling at how collectively Singaporean the choir sounds. For instance, as a nation, we don't seem to have the concept that 's' at the end of some words is actually phonetically /z/. Thus: "He's got the whole world in his handsssssss". Very unprofessional. Also, in retrospect, the American way of pronouncing words like "pass" and "class" sounds so much more natural when singing than the very classical, Anglicised, /pahss/. Maybe it's just the song, or several intervening years of being surrounded by a different kind of speech, but it really does rankle now.

The only section that sounds markedly different from the others (and you can hear this in our first verse solo in "He's Got the Whole World", as well as in the Latvian song), is the tenor section. Jiahao, Jonathan, Chester and I provide pretty much all the volume for those bits, and with the exception of one singer (who shall remain unnamed), the rest of us all pronounce words...um...correctly. The difference in quality shows. Yeah, yeah, blowing my own trumpet and all that, but it's true. And that's another thing Mr. Toh has to work furiously on if he ever wants to assemble a world-class choir.