whew, a busy week ALMOST over. Lots o' music

Let's see. Halloween - nonexistent; we had a Bel Air band rehearsal that night, and have no idea whether there were any trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood. I doubt it; I don't think there are many kids on this street; at least, I haven't seen any playing in yards, don't see any bicycles in driveways, or basketball hoops, or other giveaways of school-age kids. And we're a dead-end street branching off a non-residential street, so we're not on the "around the block" route of trick-or-treating families from the other side of the block (there is an Other Side; it just doesn't easily connect to this side, except through one neighbor's yard which extends all the way through, so although his house is half an acre away and facing a different street, his driveway comes out next to ours.)

Tuesday night, we went down to Fort Myer, in VA, for a free Army Band concert. For those of my readers in Texas, to give you an idea of scale here, you should realize that Baltimore and Washington DC are closer together than Dallas is to Fort Worth, and Baltimore to most of the cities in northern VA is still closer than Austin is to San Antonio. So it takes about an hour's drive to get to Fort Myer, which is in the same general area as the Pentagon. In getting lost on the way home, we wound up circling the Pentagon a couple of times, in fact. We heard the Army Band Brass Dectet which has 11 people at a time playing, out of a pool of 12, but let's face it, the word for 11-tet would be what?). They did some really cool stuff, including pieces with 3 piccolo trumpets, and several pieces where the trumpet section at times included piccolo trumpet, trumpet, some size in between those two that I don't know whether has a special name, and pflugelhorn. Speaking of exotic trumpets, the Bel Air Community Band has a bass trumpet playing in the baritone/euphonium section!

Wednesday night - Montgomery Village band rehearsal, dress rehearsal for a concert we're playing on Sunday the 6th (that would be later today, at least right now in this time zone).

Thursday: got a bunch of unpacking and a bit more shoving around of boxes and stuff to organize things. Enough of the kitchen counters are now cleared of stuff that we finally figured out where to put, that we can actually cook supper at home.

Friday we went to a Baltimore Symphony concert, an all-Grieg program. Very nice work; S liked the guest conductor better than I did. I thought he was a little too expressive - fat middle aged men should not wiggle their butts like belly dancers while conducting "Anitra's Dance" from Peer Gynt.

Today was a crafts show in Columbia, where I had a booth to sell hats. Only sold a dozen, due to the fact that while LAST weekend it was 50 degrees and rainy, THIS weekend it was 75 degrees and brilliantly sunny, so (A) very few people were thinking about coming to an indoor crafts fair, and (B) almost no one was thinking of hats. We told the fair organizers that next year, we want 45 degrees and a light drizzle, please! So I covered the cost of the booth space and the materials for constructing my hat racks, but not quite the costs of all the yarn I bought. Oh well, a learning experience. Main thing I learned: I might just as well have made only kitty-ear hats; that's really what everyone wants. Met some very nice people, both customers and other crafters. I may have lined up a few students for crochet lessons. Came home and slept for 4 hours after that.

So, tomorrow/later today we (the Montgomery Village Community Band) are playing a concert at the National Lutheran Home nursing home. One of the pieces we're doing is "Concord" which has several bassoon solos; since we have no bassoons, they are default bari sax solos, which is to say, me. And "Concord" is a piece I know really well, athough the first eleven concerts I played it, back when it was published in 1989, I was playing tenor. Nonetheless, I can do the 7/8 version of "Yankee Doodle" without thinking hard, so it's fun.

foliage, concert, and lecturing total strangers

The concert went OK, although I made an error in one piece, and in another piece I didn't make an error but the trombones who were supposed to be playing with me got totally lost. However, both things got pulled back together, and the conductor feels that the audience didn't notice anything wrong.

I blame part of it on the set-up: for some weird reason, after rehearsing with a set-up that has our row as alto sax-tenor sax-bari sax-euphoniums-french horns-bass clarinets-second clarinets, today's seating got rearranged to: saxophones-cornets-trumpets-euphoniums-bass clarinets-2nd clar. So I had the first cornet, a part I don't normally pay much attention to, right next to me - and the french horns right in front of me. Now, granted, mostly one follows the conductor and one's own part, but I think we all get other cues from glancing at the parts of the players next to us, to note that they come in two bars before letter A, for example, as a guide to our own counting, and we also see the people next to us lifting their instruments back up after rests and inhaling before the start of a phrase, and all of those are cues that we do the same or that we come in one bar later or whatever. So, when those things change radically, although we still have the conductor and our parts, other cues sound "off" and we wonder whether we're in the right place - and that wondering causes split-second late entrances or needing a full bar before the tempo becomes stable.

We drove back coming north on Rt 29 rather than getting on the interstate, so that we went through some new scenery. The foliage is absolutely beautiful this weekend. It was a great drive. Would have made a terrific bike ride, if a tuba and a baritone sax would fit on bikes. As it happens, though, it was just as well we didn't use bikes, because it started raining when we got close to home, after stopping for a snack. We ate at Panera, and as we were finding a table, I spotted someone writing in a notebook, with his table stacked with books on critical thinking and analyzing arguments. So of course I asked... he turned out to be a sociology major at UMB, and we chatted; I gave him the URL for the Bureau of Labor Standards website. He's working on a paper on poverty, and while many people would think to hit up the Census Bureau website for statistics, and some would also think of the IRS website, I don't think that most non-accountants have ever heard of the BLS, let alone know what sort of data they have on there about income and employment rates in various professions, unemployment, demographics, etc. So he'll have source material other people don't. I also told him how to export their data files to Excel and make some cool graphs to spiff up the paper. And finally as a tangent, told him about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel which he had not heard of, and which I would think every sociology major MUST read! Yes, BunRab cannot resist lecturing college students. It's in my blood. Sigh.