First rehearsal of the season

Carl H.

Carl H.

Distinguished Member
Distinguished Member
Monday night is the opening night for the local concert band after 2 months off. It will be interesting to see who returns and to see what new faces we will find.
 
I hope everyone returns and brings along a friend or two.

Next Thursday starts my community band/choirs' rehersals for Christmas. I hope we get a lot more good players and maybe a few who can actually sing too.

This may be Megens' last season with the group and she wants to end on clarinet. I may give up my position in the clarinet section and switch to alto or tenor sax. This will be interesting to say the least.
 
The Woodinville Community Band (two jazz, one concert) met yesterday. We have 60+ players in the concert band and all positions are filled except for a trombone in the second jazz band. We sight read about six Christmas charts for the Winterfest gig in December.

We get a pretty good return rate for our players. I attribute that to the quality of our directors, two high school band teachers and a music major type. The two jazz band meet for 1.5 hours in adjoining rooms and then the concert band meets for another 1.5 hours.

Since we are so popular right now, I got the band to institute an audition process that includes the section leader and then ratification by the director. The director lets us know how many instruments we can have in a section.

To demonstrate how popular the band is, we had a sax player in her third trimester of her pregnancy bow out last week, auditioned and filled her position this week with the lead alto player from a local high school. Since he is a senior and going to college next year, the original player can join back up after a maternity leave. :cool:
 
While technically not a band, the local symphony had its first rehearsal on tuesday night. Looks like the first concert will be a chop burner. We have a suite from South Pacific which lingers for extended exposed passages in horrible keys. A resetting of Rossini something or other with a healthy number of solo clarinet passages. The Air Force march. A Gershwin overture to a movie or musical of which only the overture exists and a Sibelius symphony for a closer - an extended Étude in awkward keys for all the woodwinds while everybody else has great melodic things happening.

In a 2 hour rehearsal, not counting the break, I sat out only 3 minutes worth of rests. I'm glad I was playing over the summer, this would be a nightmare without any pre-established chops.
 
This season after the hardest season ever last year with Festive Overture, Poets and Pheasants, and Korean Folk Songs we have:
  • Wicked, arr. Bocook (J. W. Pepper has the best MP3)
  • Polar Express
  • Eighth Candle
  • Pirates of the Carribean, Dead Man's Chest
  • Russian Christmas Music
  • You're a Mean On, Mr Grinch
Are we having fun yet?
 
Nothing like playing orchestral transcriptions on clarinet to point out all your weaknesses! It's fun to do those, but man those violin parts were not written for clarinet. The Festive Overture and Poet and Peasant are a couple charts we did last year too, that I have also played the violin parts. I don't even blink doing them on violin, but on clarinet they are a whole fist full of notes.

I enjoy the challenge. This past summer I did the Grundeman (sp?) Copland suite. The 1st clarinet part was straight violin (other than the famous clarinet solo parts), but man did it work well on clarinet! Great piece and very tasteful with very few liberties from the original work. I've got to persuade the local band to buy this piece.
 
Our community band did Polar Express a couple of years ago. It really wasn't bad. I rather liked the arrangement we had.
The Grinch on the other hand is getting to be a pain in Kid #3s' behind.
The guy on Trumpet 2 is a retired jazz man. He keeps getting on her about not growling. She tries, but it's just not 'there' yet.

I wish we would get a few more challenging pieces, but we have to keep the level do-able for the younger players. We range in age from 12 on up.
The oldest we've had has been an 83 year old guy on alto sax.
 
I was asked to play in another local college band - Rochester (Christian) College. They need an alto sax (only have 1).

this is their plan .. looks pretty good .. no Rossini nor Mozart but not bad

Concert dates for 2008-2009 are Tuesday, October 21, Tuesday, December
2, Friday, February 20, and Tuesday, April 21. We will share the
October and February concerts with the RC A Cappella Chorus.

Our October program will feature Frank Ticheli's Cajun Folk Songs II,
and a brand new medley, A Leroy Anderson Portrait (arranged by James
Barnes of the University of Kansas). December's program will
include the Holst Second Suite, and the just-completed "Holst Winter
Suite", arranged by Robert Smith, which is actually three Holst
Christmas Carols in exquisite settings. In February, we will honor
the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln with Aaron
Copland's Lincoln Portrait. Our narrator will be Robert Martin,
Director of the Madrigal Chorale of Southfield and a member of the
Rochester College Board of Trustees. Tentative programming for the
April program includes a selection from de Meij's Symphony No. 1el
(Lord of the Rings).
 
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