Lots of little and big things have happened…

1) Well, to start, I MADE ALL-STATE! First chair in orchestra in fact! And I won only by 2 points. Talk about a close call!

2) I going to be playing a solo with band (hopefully) if Steven Shoop ever gets back to me…

3) We played Mahler last week in BYSO,  and I had to play all by myself, all the rest of the low brass were playing in a REP concert. It was not very fun.

’tis all.

Sr. District 2008

It was easy, and went well! We went early, I had just enough time to warm up, I didn’t get nervous in the audition room, and I played everything to the best of my ability. I got a 95! Woo!

NETEW!

EDIT: NETEW has been renamed CTEW, the Cosmopolitan Tuba Euphonium Workshop.

NETEW was amazing! For those of you who do not know what NETEW is, it stands for Northeast Tuba Euphonium Workshop, you can find more info at netew.com.

Where to start… Well, when I got to Endicott College I discovered that all the dorms had their own kitchen and living space, sweet! I made friends (some crazy, some cool, some geeky), took the faculty tour (amazing campus), ate dinner (ok food, great ice cream), had my placement audition (thought I did pretty well), and went to bed (at midnight).

Here is my typical day: My alarm wakes me up at 7:30, I take a shower, and wake my roommates up. Around 8:30 we head to breakfast, which usually consists of pancakes, bagels, french toast, or coco puffs. Then at 9:00 we go to warm up and do our Daily Routine. The euphoniums go with Roland Froscher, and the tubas go with Mike Milnarik.

After the Daily Routine (By the way, the daily routine itself will make you improve so fast!) Mike does a masterclass, in which he will help a student on their solo piece, and the rest of us get to watch that student improve in front of our very eyes! It’s really quite amazing.

After that there is a clinic in which the guest/performing/emerging artist will talk about anything they think we should know. For example, Adam Frey talked about the business side of music, Jamie Lipton told us seven things she wish she knew when she was studying music, and Roland Forescher talked about the differences between music performance Switzerland and here in the United States (Even though I was staying up until one every night and was very tired I did not fall asleep during any of them! They were all very interesting).

At 12:00 we have lunch, which usually included salad and a pizza of some sort (they would take yesterday’s leftovers and put it on pizza. We even had corn pizza at one point, it wasn’t bad!).

After lunch we either rehearse with the pianist, have lessons with Mike or Roland, or practice individually (I did not get to have a lesson with Mike because I am a private student of his, but I did rehearse my solo, Down in the Deep Cellar, with the pianist Bonnie Anderson, a very good accompanist).

Then there is chamber music practice, my group played The Tubameisters and Virga Jesse. The Tubameisters was a very fun piece to play, but Virga Jesse was hard! Even though the notes were easy, making it sound musical was so hard. For our performance we played The Tubameisters, then Virga Jesse, then The Tubameisters again in double time! Everything was going great until the crowd started clapping, and we all know what happens when a crowd of musically challenged parents start to clap, they accelerando! But we stayed together with only a couple minor mistakes, like the on beats (me!) overlapped with the off beats. It was great!

At 5:00 there’s dinner, which usually includes a burger and fries, with ice cream for dessert.

Then comes my favorite part of the day, the faculty recital! We listened to Innovata Brass, Cosmopolitan Tuba Quartet, Dr. Fidgety Dixieland Band, and Brass Planet. They are all amazing and inspirational. To learn more go here: Guest Artists

Then we party (played pool) in the Lodge, head to our dorms at midnight, and go to bed at one. That is my typical day at NETEW, and boy was it great!

Mike Milnarik - Director of NETEW

BYSO Tuba Smackdown! Part Drei

I GOT IN!

And the repertoire we’re playing is insane!

1. Stravinsky The Rite of Spring; Beethoven Symphony No. 3 “Eroica“
2. Mozart The Marriage of Figaro
3. Mahler Symphony No. 5
4. Ligeti Concert Romanesc; Strauss Ein Heldenleiben

I have my work cut out for me! :-)

BYSO Tuba Smackdown! Part Zwei

The BYSO call-back audition is today and I am psyched! I have everything prepared. The excerpts are great, Kopprasch is great, Bordogni is great, scales are great. Every thing is great! All thanks to 4 and 1/2 hour practice sessions from tuesday to now! So we’ll se how it goes…

 

PS, the Global Thought project went very well! We got a score of 9.5/10, the best in the class I think!

Anyways, here’s a link to the video, if it plays choppy just wait until it’s done loading.

http://www.vimeo.com/1205178

BYSO Tuba Smackdown! Part Ein

I got a call from BYSO today. They called while I was at my lesson and so they left their number. When my dad told me to call them back I thought “ohmygodohmygod, I might get in!” So I called, with my hopes high, and discovered that I did not get in . . . yet. It seems that another tuba player auditioned late, and the auditioners were having trouble deciding who to pick, me or him/her. So now I have to play for the conductor and the three auditioners. That’s four people at the same time, all judging every note!

To make matters worse the audition is on friday or saturday! So it’s right in the middle of my final exams! I’ll be working my butt off during the next couple of days, considering that they’ll actually ask me some minor scales this time, and I have to make sure I still know the pieces and excerpts.

NYSO Audition

Today I had an audition for NYSO in which the brass players warmed up in a preschool classroom. After I finished the audition I walked back to the room to put my tuba away and noticed that the room was filled with sax players, and they were all staring at me. Not one made a sound, and as I put the tuba in its case I could feel their eyes on me. I carried my tuba out of the room, and left in silence. It was so awkward! *shudder*

BTW I played Kopprasch #33 and Bordogni #4

I even made a topic on TubeNet about it: http://forums.chisham.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=28290

Lots of Little Things Happened Today…

Let’s see…

 

1. I edited our Global Thought project. It’s fantastic! You could almost say it looks professional! I hope we can get some more scenes filmed on monday. We’re moving so slowly right now. It seems like every day there’s at least one person missing from our group.
2. I did not get a CAT scan, I got an x-ray, except this time I was standing up with my feet flat and my legs locked instead of laying down. From what I can tell my legs look pretty even! But we’ll see what the radiologist says.
3. I’m ordering another, much more complex origami book entitled Floral Globes by Tokomo Fuse. So you’ll be sing a lot more origami soon!
4. I was just told to say “Your mother was a pheasant plucker” ten times fast. I refused.
5. I just found out that I have NYSO auditions tomorrow morning! That was unexpected. I’m just going to use the pieces I prepared for BYSO.

 

That’s my day, how was yours?

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!

BYSO Audition Approaching!

I’ve been practicing my scales like crazy after that fiasco with my teacher. So now I can play them all if on the harder ones I’m given 10 seconds to sort it out. All of my pieces are as good as they can be, with the exception of Kopprasch #33 which can always be faster, and the duet which I need to crank up to 200 bpm.

Let’s just hope I don’t get nervous.