Saturday, December 15, 2007

JC Band Fest 2007

After these 4 days it's finally time for the concert! JC band fest has been so fun, meeting new people and trying out challenging new songs. I'm glad I got the opportunity to play for honour band, it's really been a great experience. At first I though the songs were boring, but the scores were very misleading! El Camino Real and His Honour especially. Dr Mazzaferro has been a very good conductor, and a nice guy, always entertaining us with his stories of things like 600 bar rests and so on. I really learned much from him, and I hope everyone else did too. Been nice playing with new people, especially my section.

Tomorrow's the concert, the day we've been working so hard for, and it's at the Esplanade! Let's all do our best and make good music. It's no point if tuning and intonation are perfect. You'll just sound like a midi. What counts is your expression, your feeling and your ability to bring a message across to the audience. Our songs tomorrow are all so expressive, if we can do it right. I want to feel the songs, imagine the glory of Austria in Festmusik, indulge in the beautiful melodies in Holst's First Suite. I want that imagery of the dream Oenghus went through to come out. I want to feel the wild Spanish flavour of El Camino Real, and get that image of whooping cowboys into my head, and I want to enjoy the rich American flavour of His Honour March. More importantly, I want to give these messages to the audience, and let them feel what we do. Even more so that I now have the chance to play out in some beautiful phrases in some of the songs, I want to be able to do them nicely. Let's not play notes, let's play music out there, and we'll have a great time.

Even though this concert is not likely to deliver the satisfaction Prometheum XI and Coda II gave me, it still has, to quote Dr Mazzaferro "some serious goosebump potential". Let's do this thing!

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