Music stuff
Apr. 24th, 2006 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabSo, the concert Sunday afternoon went pretty well. No major screw-ups. If at one particular point in one particular piece, half the flutes remembered to play an accidental and half of them didn't, well, it was a very short note and went by pretty fast. Gordon's negative microphone juju held itself in abeyance pretty well; sometimes he can make microphones short out or otherwise stop working just by looking at them, let alone by actually holding them, but this one was sturdy enough. The audience in the room itself wasn't that large, but the facility was also broadcasting it over the closed-circuit TV system, so that the patients in the nursing home building could watch it, and other residents who just didn't feel like getting out of their easy chairs to come over to a different building could tune in in their own residences. It's one of those huge places that has a retirement village with houses and apartments, plus assisted living apartments, plus an actual nursing home, spread out over acres.
As usual with these sort of gigs, the seating for the band was just weird; fitting 50 people (not to mention a whole bunch of percussion equipment) at the front of a room varies wildly depending on the proportions of the room. In this case, they had a small "stage" that held most of the brass, and then all the woodwinds, plus the tubas, were on the floor in front of the stage. Since this put the trumpets and trombones above the heads of the woodwinds, they could certain be heard clearly!! It's always a little peculiar playing a concert in a different formation that what we rehearse in; I'm used to having the trombones and euphoniums in back of me, and being next to the trumpets, but there I was with the euphoniums sort of looming over my head and the tubas directly in back of me. Well, luckily there was nothing so bizarre that I lost track of what I was playing.
One of the downsides of a volunteer community group is that you don't always know who's going to show up for concerts and who isn't. Oh, people are SUPPOSED to tell their section leaders/the conductor, if they know ahead of time that they can't play on date X, and they're SUPPOSED to call/email their section leader if they are sick and can't make it at the last minute. But that's not always what happens. So we played this concert with no first alto saxes showing up, and so one of the second altos had to sight-read the 1st parts there in performance. Luckily he was good at not playing when he absolutely wasn't going to be able to do it approximately right, right away. (He's one of our relatively new people, too!)
The audience that did actually come to hear us live rather than broadcast were very appreciative. Many people made a point of coming up to the musicians afterward to thank as many players individually as they could. That's always nice.
Before the concert, S & I ate lunch at a place we found on the GPS unit's listings. Although called Shalimar and listed as Indian, it was actually Pakistani (halal meat and all that) and it was pretty awful, but we didn't have time to walk out and start all over on finding lunch. If the term greasy spoon can be applied to a Pakistani place, then this was a Pakistani greasy spoon. All the food was floating in grease, even the chick-peas; the chicken in the chicken biryani had bones in it, and for that matter, some bits of bones without any chicken were scattered in the rice; they didn't have iced tea... Oh well, live and learn.
***
This evening was Bel Air band rehearsal. We are getting down to the wire for the ACB concert on May 5th. One of the pieces we're playing is by Patrick Burns, and he'll be conducting us in it at the convention; he came to rehearsal this evening (from where he lives in New Jersey, the town where "The Sopranos" is filmed) to rehearse with us. Interesting, but spending an hour on one piece is pretty tiring. He had some funny stories, though. That band hall keeps getting more crowded. Today there were 5 (five) bassoons; as far as I know, the laws of physics say that there is no way that 5 bassoons can play both in tune with each other and in tempo with each other for more than 2 bars. Usually we're quite heavy on all the lower instruments - 4 bassoons most of the time, plenty of brass - today was a weirder balance than usual. Six euphoniums (euphonia?), but only 2 tubas out of the 5 that theoretically belong to the band. One of the euphoniums is actually a bass trumpet, for those of you interested in trivia. The bari sax player wasn't there, and one of the tenor saxes were missing (which, to be honest, didn't hurt the other two of us playing, at all).
***
I have GOT to get to work on actually writing down and recording those arrangements of Christmas carols, not to mention the march I have in mind. I had a couple of other ideas that have disappeared again because I didn't get around to reinforcing them soon enough; I don't want to lose these pieces. Get to work, BunRab!!
As usual with these sort of gigs, the seating for the band was just weird; fitting 50 people (not to mention a whole bunch of percussion equipment) at the front of a room varies wildly depending on the proportions of the room. In this case, they had a small "stage" that held most of the brass, and then all the woodwinds, plus the tubas, were on the floor in front of the stage. Since this put the trumpets and trombones above the heads of the woodwinds, they could certain be heard clearly!! It's always a little peculiar playing a concert in a different formation that what we rehearse in; I'm used to having the trombones and euphoniums in back of me, and being next to the trumpets, but there I was with the euphoniums sort of looming over my head and the tubas directly in back of me. Well, luckily there was nothing so bizarre that I lost track of what I was playing.
One of the downsides of a volunteer community group is that you don't always know who's going to show up for concerts and who isn't. Oh, people are SUPPOSED to tell their section leaders/the conductor, if they know ahead of time that they can't play on date X, and they're SUPPOSED to call/email their section leader if they are sick and can't make it at the last minute. But that's not always what happens. So we played this concert with no first alto saxes showing up, and so one of the second altos had to sight-read the 1st parts there in performance. Luckily he was good at not playing when he absolutely wasn't going to be able to do it approximately right, right away. (He's one of our relatively new people, too!)
The audience that did actually come to hear us live rather than broadcast were very appreciative. Many people made a point of coming up to the musicians afterward to thank as many players individually as they could. That's always nice.
Before the concert, S & I ate lunch at a place we found on the GPS unit's listings. Although called Shalimar and listed as Indian, it was actually Pakistani (halal meat and all that) and it was pretty awful, but we didn't have time to walk out and start all over on finding lunch. If the term greasy spoon can be applied to a Pakistani place, then this was a Pakistani greasy spoon. All the food was floating in grease, even the chick-peas; the chicken in the chicken biryani had bones in it, and for that matter, some bits of bones without any chicken were scattered in the rice; they didn't have iced tea... Oh well, live and learn.
***
This evening was Bel Air band rehearsal. We are getting down to the wire for the ACB concert on May 5th. One of the pieces we're playing is by Patrick Burns, and he'll be conducting us in it at the convention; he came to rehearsal this evening (from where he lives in New Jersey, the town where "The Sopranos" is filmed) to rehearse with us. Interesting, but spending an hour on one piece is pretty tiring. He had some funny stories, though. That band hall keeps getting more crowded. Today there were 5 (five) bassoons; as far as I know, the laws of physics say that there is no way that 5 bassoons can play both in tune with each other and in tempo with each other for more than 2 bars. Usually we're quite heavy on all the lower instruments - 4 bassoons most of the time, plenty of brass - today was a weirder balance than usual. Six euphoniums (euphonia?), but only 2 tubas out of the 5 that theoretically belong to the band. One of the euphoniums is actually a bass trumpet, for those of you interested in trivia. The bari sax player wasn't there, and one of the tenor saxes were missing (which, to be honest, didn't hurt the other two of us playing, at all).
***
I have GOT to get to work on actually writing down and recording those arrangements of Christmas carols, not to mention the march I have in mind. I had a couple of other ideas that have disappeared again because I didn't get around to reinforcing them soon enough; I don't want to lose these pieces. Get to work, BunRab!!
