So yeah, not much has been going on. And yet, at the same time, a lot of stuff has happened.
Last Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights was the Madrigal
Dinner/Chorus concert. I was a minstrel in it, playing the recorder.
Everytime a course of food was served, minstrels and merchants went out
in the audience. I pranced around and played the recorder, looking
really cool. Everyone kept coming up to me and asking me how long I had
been playing the recorder, and I'd be all like, "Oh, only about a week
and a half." It was pretty cool.
Monday was the band Christmas Concert. I performed with the jazz band
and the symphonic band. Jazz band was pretty good, although I
mistakenly only took one chorus (eight bars) of a two chorus (16 bars)
solo. It worked out well, though. My solo wasn't off to a good start,
so I kept people from being bored. In symphonic band I played both my
bari and my soprano. Our oboist is a new player, and she's really shy.
There's an exposed (read: no one else playing) oboe solo in one of the
songs we played, and she would just sit there with her horn out of her
mouth, not playing. So, Mr. Eckman (the band director) asked me to
bring my soprano to school and read the oboe solo. It worked out really
well. I didn't tell anyone that didn't see me practicing the solo that
I was playing it, so when I played in class, everyone was turning
around and looking at me. It was pretty cool.
At the concert, though, I had two mouthpieces for my bari that I had to
change between (my jazz mouthpiece and my concert mouthpiece), plus a
soprano to double on. After the jazz band played, the symphonic band
was up, so I had to run backstage, grab my concert mouthpiece, shove my
soprano neck and mouthpiece together, grab the reed and ligature for
the soprano, and get to my seat in a hurry. I actually had to put my
concert mouthpiece and my soprano together while the curtain was open
and while the band started playing, so I didn't have time to warm it up
or get it in tune. You see, the soprano sax is a very hard instrument
to keep in tune, so I was quite worried. I put the mouthpiece on about
where I thought was right, and prayed to God that it would be in tune.
One shouldn't play exposed solos and be out of tune, you know.
Thankfully, it was close enough that I could just lip it and get it in
tune. My heart was pounding all the way through the solo, though, as I
had only looked at it about 3 times. I was so nervous that I could feel
my veins throbbing in my neck. I got through the solo well, though, and
accomplished my goal. My own parents couldn't tell that I was playing,
because I sounded so much like an oboe. I had sat there the first day I
got the solo and just tried different setups to get an oboe sound. I
ended up going with my Claude Lakey 6* jazz piece, a Vandoren 3.5
classic reed (shaved), my custom string ligature, my straight neck (my
curved one is screwing up, otherwise I would've used that), and a mute
in my bell. A friend of mine came up to me after the show and told me
how beautiful the soprano sounded. I was pretty psyched about that one.
It was a pretty good week overall. What's even better is the fact that
I only have 5 days until the end of the most stressful 5 months of my
life. I can't wait until second semester.
Are any of you musically-inclined people doing anything next Thursday
night? If not, want to jam? Let me know, because I'm free then and I want to
jam sometime. I have some stuff I've written that's pretty cool that I want to try out.
cyotfs
Cory
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