Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Hello, bandwagon!

After reading through the blog of my good friend and extraordinary artist Doug B. Horak, I decided it was time for me to jump on the blogging bandwagon. Who knows, maybe having a real, true to life "Blog" will encourage me to actually write intelligently about intelligent things, as opposed to the constant stream of non-sequitur blurbs that Livejournal, Twitter and Facebook have encouraged me to spew over the past couple of years. Those jerks.

I guess you can expect to hear all sorts of stuff about my life as a classical percussionist, jazz percussionist, video game remixer/composer/enthusiast, college student, runner, cook, nerd, and general human being. For example, I just got done with a long day of working with the percussion chamber group So Percussion, who came to Peabody today to work with us on a lot of stuff. I played Village Burial with Fire by James Wood for them today with the rest of my group. We had been needing a coaching with somebody for a while, and So had a lot of great things to say. The piece opens up with a lot of chanting and screaming, as we're trying to portray somebody pretty much being burned alive. It was at points more of a voice lesson than a percussion lesson, as they talked to us about how we should be placing the notes in our respective ranges. They also gave us some ideas about the unison instrumental section we played for them (I'm playing the xylophone part... which is really hard!), but for the most part it seemed we really had our stuff together and they were pretty please with what we had so far! Guess I don't need to be so worried about it. Now to just learn the xylophone solo.

After that, we learned all about the Steve Reich piece "Drumming", which I have decidedly named this blog after. Learning that was pretty much centered around playing the core motif over and over and over again. I got to play both some marimba stuff and some bongo stuff with them. My left arm is super tired. I hope I didn't overdo it... but on a positive note, my right arm feels great! What a trooper.

Tomorrow I have to teach the jazz ear training class (the first of five weeks), as well as play in orchestra and do more stuff with So. I'm a bit worried about this year... I have a lot of music to learn, and I'm still not sure how to balance it all out without blowing my arms out again. I think I'll be okay... but I can't have too many days like this one.

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