Sabine Hasicka and Jon Sass

An amazing duet with tap dancer Sabine Hasicka and jazz tuba player Jon Sass! I’ve tried to figure this tune out by ear many times but never got past the first couple of bars, same thing happened when I tried to learn “Warrior, Come Out To Play” too.

The song is titled “Well You Needn’t”

The Fight for Mr Beatty! Part Zwei

Ben has sent and received an email:

Quoting Benjamin Barker:

I am a member of the Scarlet Knights Marching Band, and yesterday we were informed that our music teacher, Mr. Beatty, was asked to not return for next year. I have never seen so many of my friends that sad in my entire life. He was such an inspirational person, and I just want to know why you let him go. Thank you for your time.
Ben Barker
Class of 2010

Quoting Dr Scuzzarella:

Hi Ben,
Thank you for your email. I know you have had a good experience in our music program and that it means a great deal to you. I appreciate you taking the time to send me an email. I care very much about our music program, and I am confident we will continue to have an extremely high quality program.
Dr. Scuzzarella

Notice the similarity between her response to me and her response to Ben!

Origami Shelf

My brother and I are competing for who has the best origami shelf, but first some background.

When I was 6 there was an origami studio in Haverhill called Origamido. It had the coolest origami lining its walls! I loved the place, and took a origami lesson with the guy who ran it. I was obsessed for, like, a year and bought at least 15 origami books. That’s why I’m good at folding paper.

I would say that I’m in the lead at the moment, here is a picture of one of my pieces.

I’ll upload more later, when Flickr decides to cooperate…

The Fight For Mr Beatty! Part Ein

Well, our school has pretty much decided to “let Mr Beatty go”. But they will not tell us why! I emailed Dr Scuzzarella and got back the typical administrative response. Here’s what I posted on Facebook:

I emailed Dr. Scuzzarella.

“Mr. Beatty announced to us after the concert that you were “letting him go”.

I would just like to know why!

I thought he was a great teacher who really knew his stuff when it came to marching and concert band. We came so close to five gold stars this year, and he had plans for a show that would get us that rating this year! 

What happened? Did someone complain? Because that could be massively balanced out by the number of people (the entire band) who LOVE him! If you had come in to class and told us yourself you would have seen just how many people do not want to see him leave!

John Baylies

Class of 2010″

Here’s what I got back:

“Hi John,
Thank you for your email. I know you have had a good experience in our music program and that it means a great deal to you. I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with me. I care very much about our music and I am confident we will continue to have an extremely high quality program
Dr. Scuzzarella”

She didn’t even answer my question! What’s up with that? So I emailed her again:

Thanks you for your email but I would still like to know why, even if the only information you can give us is that you can not tell us because of privacy issues.

Thank you!

John Baylies

Class of 2010

There are already two facebook groups up:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=18587941926&ref=nf

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19881851825&ref=nf

So we’ll see what happens!

UPDATE: I got an email back!

Hi John,
There are confidentiality issues involved, so no, I can not share any other information with you.

So I guess someone did complain. Therefor we should be able to complement Mr Beatty back!

Car Crash!

Two days ago my mom and I participated in a car crash and I must say it was quite thrilling! Here is the email I sent to Mr. Milnarik depicting the accident.

Yes we’re all fine. My mom’s hand and knee are a little bruised up, but that’s it. The horn is OK too, no dents. We were driving down Mass AVE about to get onto the highway when another person either didn’t see us or thought they could beat us. They were going in the opposite direction, and pulled out in front of us to get on the entrance ramp. We hit them at 25 – 30 mph.

Here’s a map: http://tinyurl.com/5vz7kj

Our car was totaled, the engine block was crunched on one side. The other driver was 19, I didn’t see much damage done to her car.

So yes we’re OK and everything is fine.

It was surreal because after the impact the sun was just setting over the top of the overpass, the windshield was cracked, defracting the light, and the dust from the airbag gave everything a foggy, whitish hue. Surprisingly, I did not get scared until I stepped out of the car. They cleaned up everything so quick! In the space of 30 minutes three off duty public service workers, an ambulance, fire truck, three police cars, and two tow trucks all came and went. My dad has already found a new car, and we are getting the insurance all worked out. Very thrilling indeed!

Ah, yes, I forgot to mention this is musically relevant because my tuba was not dented at all!

Why Can’t You Just Sing?

Link to the comic, in handy TinyURL form!

http://tiny.cc/8ThnA

Sqts! (You should all know what that means by now)

Guilty Mr. Robinson – Global Thought

For my To Kill a Mockingbird portfolio I made a piece entitled Guilty Mr. Robinson and decided to play it for the class. The performance itself was not the best part, watching my friends expressions as I played the first note was. They all went quiet, so I stopped and said “You’re all so quiet…” and they laughed. So I played the piece, they applauded, and so I played another piece, and they applauded again. While I put the tuba away someone said “Your first breath scared me.” Mrs. Tracy responded “Yeah, how do you condition yourself to breath that way?” I answered “I guess I teach myself how to breath by setting the metronome to 60, breathing 8 in 4 out, and doing variations on those exercises.” All I got was a bunch of blank stares. Sqts! (Snickers quietly to self!)

Lars Andreas Haug

This guy is amazing! Watch how he rotary breaths for the first 1:30 and how well he handles the multiphonics. That’s HARD! The part at 3:11 is awesome, too. Reminds me of throat singing.

Memorial Day Parade 2008

Simply for the sake of posting I’d like to say that I’ve marched in the Memorial day parade this year. It was mildly hot out, not enough to make anyone faint, though. We played the same songs we play every year, and I had fun watching the little kids jump when the guard fired their rifles. I then wished that they would let me play Taps instead of the trumpets. After that came the ice ream social, and I went home, nothing eventful or memorable, but as I said this was simply for the sake of posting.

BYSO Audition Receding!

It went very well! I was more nervous after the audition than during it. I think 3 other tuba players auditioned along with me. I warmed up using Mike’s Daily Routine for 30 minutes, and ran through all the pieces and excerpts. Throughout this process there was a trombone player buzzing his mouthpiece quietly in the corner staring at me, it was weird. After this I walked around and stared at the artwork. This helped relieve some of the stress. Though there was one awkward moment when I entered a room and three people were standing in the middle. They were as still as statues. I took a step forwards and they all looked up and stared at me. I just backed out of the room. No one said a word. Weird.

After that I went and waited next to the audition auditorium. This would be my first time auditioning in an auditorium rather than a standard classroom. So I sat, blew some air through the tuba, made sure it didn’t get cold, and after a couple of minutes one of the auditioners came out and told me to come in. All three of them introduced themselves, but I was too out of it to remember their names. This would also be the first time I had auditioned for three people instead of one. I was asked to play my favorite two octave scale, I chose Bb. Then they asked for F, and then E. he E scale I had never learned two octaves, so I figured it out on the fly. Then I played Kopprasch #33, which was fine, and got their attention, and then Bordogni #4, in which they stopped me halfway through because of time constraints. Then I played the excerpts, the duet with one of the auditioners (which ended up being played around 140 instead of 200), and the sight reading. They seemed satisfied, and so I left. That’s it. And the best part was that I didn’t get nervous!