Photos

Well, the internet situation here has gotten better, and I'm currently uploading all of the photos I've taken thus far. I'll post a few highlights in this post:

The Barn where we had our first performance
The Bethesda Haus, our residence
Shane Nickels, one of our percussionists
One of the many gardens in Eutin
The Eutin Marktplatz

We've had a number of successful performances of both Don Giovanni and Hänsel und Gretel now, and have gotten mostly positive reviews in the papers, which is fairly encouraging. Tonight is the large chamber ensemble concert--a program I'm not involved in, but will include works such as Mozart Symphony No. 21, Barber's Adagio for Strings, and Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. I'll post more pictures soon--anyone who is connected to me on Facebook or Google+ will be able to see all of the photos I've taken, but I will only post a select few here!

Germany Post!

Well, so much for keeping everyone informed! Yes, I'm here in Deutschland, but like most rural towns in the beautiful countryside, Eutin is perhaps not the most equipped location for internet access. Therefore, my posts will be sparse (and unfortunately, without pictures), but I'll try to cover as much as I can!

Things in Eutin got busy from the very beginning. We all stumbled through the airport and to our residence extremely jet-lagged. Us musicians are being housed at two different locations (located next to one-another), the Bethesdahaus and the See Schloss hotel. A few of us (including myself) had a brief jazz concert to play that evening, at a party celebrating our arrival. Everyone was in a tired daze, but we were all excited to be there.

The Fourth of July had it's own excitement as well--the town of Eutin decided to throw an American Independence Day party in the town square for us, where the jazz sextet I was in also played. It was around this point I learned that the folks here really know how to throw a party.

Our first concert was a week ago Friday. The orchestra played a number of works, including Cappricio Espagnol by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, American in Paris by George Gershwin, multiple works by Carl Maria von Weber (who lived in Eutin), and other works by composers such as von Suppe, and Mozart. This concert brought to light the integral role of the barn in the life of a musician in Eutin; all of our rehearsals were conducted in a barn that had been converted into a rehearsal space, while the concert was performed in a separate, completely unconverted barn. I will be sure to post pictures in a separate post and link them to the appropriate articles once I have a faster connection.

From there we went straight into rehearsal for Don Giovanni in the stage itself. I'm aware my description couldn't do this location justice, but it will suffice to say that it is the first time I've ever played in an outdoor amphitheater from an open-air pit. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see that much of the staging and costumes from the pit, but what I have seen thus far is certainly remarkable. Our first performance was last night, and a massive cast party ensued. Like I said, these folks really know how to have a party.

I've been in love with the German life since coming here. The food and drink (especially the drink) is absolutely delicious. The town of Eutin is beautiful; in this place, gardens transform into streets which lead you to forests and meadows. Nature has imposed itself on this town, and the people have responded by completely embracing it.

I was able to make a day trip to Lübeck, which should be a separate posting in itself. It's a beautiful city, and not terribly hard to get to from Eutin. The highlight of my trip was visiting the Marienkirche. Knowing I was in a room where Buxtehuda performed regularly, and where composers such as J.S. Bach and Handel had visited left me with this chilling feeling of legacy. I believe visiting places like the Marienkirche is essential to any young, learning musician. Music history can feel like a myth when all you know about it comes from what you learn sitting in a classroom hundreds of miles away. But when you're breathing the very air in which that myth was written, those stories become very real.

As I mentioned earlier, I will make a separate posting just for pictures of the places here once I'm on a more reasonable internet connection. I'll do my best to keep this updated. Until then, bis bald!

Germany

Well, its been a while since I've updated this blog.  A lot has happened since my last post, of course, but I would like to start fresh with this one because:

I am on my way to Germany with the Kansas University Symphony Orchestra!

This year marks the first year of the Kansas University German-American Music Institute (or KUGAMI for short).  We've teamed up with Lawrence's sister city, Eutin, to perform in the Neue Eutiner Festspiele, an annual opera festival held in Eutin to honor Carl Maria von Weber, who is an Eutiner himself.  I'll be posting more as the festival continues, and hopefully from my computer (and not my phone, which I'm posting from now).  Auf wiedersehen!

YouTube Symphony Orchestra results

Well, I'm down in Baltimore now, practicing and getting ready for my trip to MAGFest. While I was down here, I received the results to the YouTube Symphony Orchestra auditions.

Unfortunately, I wasn't selected.

A full list of winners is available at the YouTube Symphony Orchestra's YouTube page.

As for me? Well, I cooked up a little video of my own to, well, cope with the results. I had a lot of fun with it, hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it :)

Final YouTube Spamwich

Well, today and tomorrow are the last days you can vote. If you spare a second, please vote! You can vote once a day. Thanks to all who have supported me! I hope I make it!

Link to vote: http://goo.gl/w8c0f

:)

Sitting in a chair, in the sky

Well, the semester has finally come to a close. Concerts are all played, projects all turned in, finals taken, and jury performed. And now I'm on a plane: sitting in a chair, in the sky, on the internet. Technology is awesome. I'll be landing in Baltimore at around 9 PM tonight, and immediately start rehearsing with Medicine Lake for our CD release show tomorrow! Don't forget: 7:00, Recher Theater, Towson, Maryland. Tickets are $10, and we'll have CDs, T-shirts, and other merchandise at the show!

While I'm indulging in such shameless self promotion, I might as well also mention that I was recently selected as a finalist for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra! The audition this year included an improvisation portion--two improvised solo sections were built into the piece (Mothership by Mason Bates), and YouTube offered an audition for these sections open to all instrumentalists. I auditioned for the rhythmic improvisation section on vibraphone, and was selected as one of seventeen finalists! If you can spare the time, I would greatly appreciate your vote: you can cast your vote by clicking here.

I learned a whole lot this semester, but probably the most important thing I learned was that no matter how busy you get, it's possible. This semester was unlike anything I've ever dealt with before, and you better believe that I complained about it all the time. I'm sure Ji Hye (my teacher at KU) was sick of hearing about how busy I was by the end of the semester. Sorry for whining so much.

I had to make some choices in order to make it work, and perhaps the most frustrating of them was the balance between homework and practicing. Now, at this point, understand that doing things for fun was out of the question. I gave myself Friday and Saturday evenings (pretty late) as time to not do homework or practice so that I wouldn't lose my mind. Other than that, I felt bad for my blossoming video game collection, and the nice TV and sound system that my old roommate gave me. I barely touched any of them.

In a normal day, I could generally find time to practice at least 2 hours a day minimum--which would always happen from the hours of 8am to 10am , before my first classes. After this, I was generally able to find another hour or two throughout the day to practice, but my constantly shifting rehearsal, teaching, and concert schedule proved to make finding consistent hours difficult. I had to do the best I could.

However, my classes had a great deal of work attached to them as well. Each meeting had some sort of reading assignment attached to it, I had frequent writing assignments, and the final projects were quite large and involved a great deal of preparation. Thankfully I didn't have very many tests to worry about in either class, but when I did there was a fair amount of studying involved.

It was the midterm for my renaissance music history class that made me begin thinking about this a lot. I began studying for that midterm about, say, a week before the test. The day or two immediately preceding the exam, I spent almost all of my "free" time (which included practice hours) to studying for this midterm. I even cancelled my lesson for the week in order to prepare.

I got a perfect score on the midterm. 100%. All of that studying paid off. Except... I could have practiced and probably pulled off a B.

Don't get me wrong, I was ecstatic to see my score. Being at Peabody taught me how hard I need to work in order to make it in this industry, and I've certainly learned how to apply that to my academic studies. Learning about the history of music is hugely important to a music student. But, at the same time, I'm a percussionist. While it's great to know where the orchestra repertoire I study evolved from, I will rarely ever have to deal with renaissance music in my percussive career. Maybe if I transcribed a motet for marimba, sure... but since when was I going to be playing solo marimba renaissance transcriptions? Doesn't seem very likely.

So was it worth it to cancel my lesson and stop practicing so that I could get an A+ on my renaissance midterm? You tell me, I'd certainly be interested to open this question for discussion. The solution that I came up with was this:

I drove halfway across the country to study percussion with Ji Hye Jung. Not to be a musicologist.

I always thought the quote "don't let school get in the way of your education" was funny, but now it's hitting pretty close to home. I will still strive to get the best grades I can get in my academic coursework--but for now on, never again at the expense of my instrumental studies.

Shifty

Well, I've been long overdue to make a post in this thing. A lot has happened, so I apologize. Here we go:

Summer

I spent the summer living in Baltimore, working at RadioShack, practicing, and getting ready for my grad school adventure in Kansas. I spent most of July working at a rock day camp called "DayJams", where I taught keyboards and coached bands comprised of 8-15 year olds. It was certainly exhausting, but still a wonderful experience. In addition to these things, I spent a great deal of time performing with my band, Medicine Lake. We're currently in the process of finishing an EP, which will be released at the Recher Theater in Towson, MD on December 11! Go see us!

The day I moved out of Baltimore, my car was broken into and my laptop, sound card, external hard drive, wireless keyboard/mouse, Wacom tablet, Seinheisser headphones, laptop mount/usb hub, and 8gb microSD card were stolen. Silly me for putting them all in the same backpack. My dad's backpack was also stolen, he lost a pair of prescription glasses and some books. Who was I to think I could live in Baltimore without sustaining some sort of loss!

Kansas

Anyway, I live in Lawrence, Kansas now. I'm a grad student at Kansas University, studying percussion with Ji Hye Jung and working for both her and Dan Gailey (head of the jazz department) as a graduate teaching assistant. In addition to my own homework and practicing, my responsibilities include teaching private students, a percussion methods class, coaching a few jazz combos, and general clerical work. It is also exhausting--much more so than teaching 8-15 year olds how to play rock music. However, I do believe the rewards of this experience will far exceed the rewards of teaching at DayJams.

Lawrence is a really beautiful place. It's this weird isolated sort of oasis in the middle of Kansas... it seems to have everything. You get a street like Mass St. where the night life happens--bars, clubs, restaurants... people are always out. Then, you head to the opposite side of town and find yourself in complete suburban paradise--the type of place I would want to raise a kid. Head south and you're immersed in absolute commercial overload--Best Buy, WalMart, Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, car dealers... pretty much everything. Of course, in the middle of all of this is Kansas University itself. Thanks to all the variety, Lawrence seems to be a really interesting cultural mix. You get plenty of liberal wierdos akin to what I lived with in Baltimore... but at the same time, plenty of the more grounded, conservative middle class that I'm so used to from living in West Hartford.

I really do enjoy studying at KU, despite how busy things are. Ji Hye is basically two people to me. During the day, she's 100% my teacher (and boss)--I get nervous for lessons, she kicks my ass and I really feel like I have to work hard for her if I want to be successful. Yet, we'll all go out somewhere and suddenly she's the same Ji Hye I was friends with at Peabody. It's really nice to have both Ji Hyes here, especially considering I basically up and left everything I had become familiar with to move out here to Kansas. If nothing else, it's one thread of consistency I have to hold on to. In fact, considering the theft of pretty much my entire electronic identity, it's one of the only.

Classwork is pretty demanding. They take musicology pretty seriously here, and it's really hard to keep up. I came to the frustrating realization here that I really don't have time enough to do as well in everything I'm responsible for as I am possibly capable of. If I want to excel in one discipline, something else is going to have to give. In other words: if I have to chose between necessary homework or necessary practicing, I have to chose practicing. Earlier in the semester, I didn't practice for about two days just to study for a midterm--which I aced. But I could've practiced and gotten a B+ on it. Hmm.

Medicine Lake

Yet, through all of the changes, one thing I'm still trying to hold on to is my participation with my band, Medicine Lake. Looking back at my previous entries, I don't think I've written much about them. Here's what's up:

Medicine Lake basically started over the summer for me, even though I had been rehearsing with them sporadicly throughout the school year. It wasn't until the summer we had our first big show, which was opening for another band at the Recher Theater in Towson.

I play keyboards and percussion for these guys--namely vibes, marimba, and malletkat (which for our live engagements generally plays the role of marimba), and sing back-up vocals. I've always wanted to be a rock star to some degree, and it's nice to really make that dream become a reality (to some degree). I also feel like it's a step closer to bridging the gap between the stigmas of classical music and rock music. It's not every day you hear vibes and marimba in a rock band, and the only reason I can do that is because I went to school for classical music. I just hope it's an idea that catches on to more people. As much as I love playing with them, it does make me realize how much music there is out there that I want to make. Playing jazz, playing in an orchestra, playing chamber music... I just hope I have opportunities in these worlds like I do with Medicine Lake.

We spent most of the summer recording an EP, and are going to be releasing it at a show on December 11 (also at the Recher Theater in Towson!). I've sacrificed both my fall and Thanksgiving breaks (as well as a great deal of money) to fly back to Baltimore just to rehearse with these guys. If you're in the Baltimore area then, come see us perform! The show starts at 7, tickets are $10 each (+3 at the door if you're under 21). If you can't make it, it's okay--that's why we're releasing the EP! I don't know how much we're charging for it yet, but it won't be that much. Let me know if you want to purchase either thing! I will hook you up!

PASIC

A few weeks ago, a bunch of us drove through the night from Lawrence to Indianapolis to go to the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, aka PASIC. It was an overwhelmingly positive experience. Ji Hye was playing there, along with a doctoral percussion student at KU named Cory Hills. However, Peabody won the chamber music competition last year, so they were playing as well! Peabody ended up playing Threads, and (you guessed it,) Village Burial. It was great getting to support all my friends who were playing.

In addition to catching up with old friends (as well as making some new ones), I had the opportunity to play in a snare drum clinic with Joe Petrasek, one of the percussionists in the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra. Miguel, the other teaching assistant for Ji Hye, played too, as did two other people I hadn't met before. I ended up playing Scheherazade (third movement) and Shostakovitch 10 (second movement), while Miguel played the fourth movement of Scheherazade. There were many more people than I originally anticipated, which was a little unnerving, but it was a great experience overall. I hope that next time I go, I can play in more workshops like this one!

Thanksgiving

And here I am, back in Baltimore, spending Thanksgiving break getting ready for a show with Medicine Lake on Saturday. My family actually came here to celebrate Thanksgiving! We all ended up at my aunt's house, and by some fantastic coincidence, all of my mom's side of the family ended up there. It was great to be with everyone again, we very seldom have gatherings like that. This was also the first time I've seen my mom or sister since June, so getting to see them again is really nice. I have a lot of work left to do before this semester is done, and ended up spending a lot of my time here frantically trying to finish a 15-page research paper for my bibliography class that's due on Wednesday. Thankfully it's about video game music, so at least I get to enjoy working on it. Once that's done, I have a writing assignment and a transcription project to turn in for my renaissance music history class, a jury to play, and then a plane to catch back to Baltimore!

I don't know about you all, but I'm full of food. Hope you all have had a happy Thanksgiving (those of you who celebrate it)! Hopefully my next update will be quite a bit shorter--and sooner--than this one!