Another Brass Weekend
I guess it is time for another update here. Sorry it has been so long. It has been a crazy couple of weeks. First the Youth Band Tour, then this past weekend doing the Triangle Brass Band mini-Tour. Well, it wasn’t really a tour, rather a run out concert to North Lincoln High School near Charlotte, NC. It was a long drive, but it was a really good experience for the band. Thanks to Neil Underwood for allowing us to play for his band family and a few others. Despite the smallish audience size, it was really fun to perform out there. I enjoyed the travel time with Kristin, a former student of mine, who subs with us from time to time. The band sounded pretty good on a really challenging program.
Sunday we played a half concert at Meymandi for a special event with composer Pepper Choplin and a pick up choir of several local church choirs. I programmed mostly sacred repertoire for this, catering to the audience that was mostly interested in this at this particular event. Fanfare of Praise and the Last Amen, along with suitable secular works, Hine e Hine and the outer movements of Suite Gothique. This ended up being a great program and the band was out of this world on stage. I have been around the Triangle Brass band for eleven years now, and this was the best the band has ever sounded. Which is a good thing, because Meymandi was darn near full capacity, maybe 1,500 in the audience. It is amazing how much energy the band can play with when their is a big audience around to hear them. This was such a good experience for the band, and topped off a great weekend of music making for the band.
The rest of this week was spent getting things in order for the next concert which we sort of started rehearsing last night. We are taking next week off for spring break, which we kind of need, so we read through the music for the next two concerts and will start to dig into it on the 27th. This is only a half concert, so we should have enough time to make it sound really good.
I am also in the process of putting next season together. Sometimes it feels like it never ends. There are always irons in the fire, and very little time to enjoy a project once completed because it is right on to the next thing. I sometimes wish we could work up a program and play it several times, then wonder what the point of that is when people barely come hear us do it the first time. This is the single most frustrating thing about brass banding to me. The lack of audiences. No one ever leaves one of our concerts disappointed. I wish more would come to experience that.
I am not a great communicator. I inherited that disability. I wish I was better at that, although I do try sometimes.
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