Category: Music

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Making Music Together

There is nothing in the world quite like performing with a great orchestra. Not just a pretty good one, but a great one. I’ve just come from my second GAMAC orchestra rehearsal for the week. I’m starting to feel like a real musician again and not just someone who hacks away with middle schoolers all day.

To combine your talents with those of many others, to collectively think, and and feel, this is what is required to recreate a musical composition. Tonight, we recreated Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances. Wow. They played this one at the last artist series of the year in my first year at BJU. I thought it was cool then, it’s ten times more amazing not only to play it, but now to see and hear it through much more mature eyes and ears.

This has been a difficult two days so far because of the time restraints, and likely the next three will prove even more difficult. Already, I can tell you that being able to express the artistry that has been bottled up inside for some time is well worth most every inconvenience I suffer as a result. I can’t wait to go back for more.

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A truly insignificant title

I?ve never been one to keep a journal. I’ve tried it several times and failed (though it has been many years since the last attempt). Just as with my quest to find a name for this blog, with each post, I seem to struggle to find a topic. The one that came easily was the one that came in a moment of caffeine induced clarity at 6:30 in the morning (these moments are rare, you see). The next day I was ready to report back on my experiment (which did not go well) and my new blog service was in the midst of a 24+ hour systems upgrade. After that, things just sort of went downhill.

Next week I’m performing with the GAMAC orchestra. We’ll have rehearsals all week and then a performance on Friday. I’m also doing a separate concert on Saturday as well. I know its going to be a hectic schedule, but I really can’t wait. After you leave school as a music major, your opportunities to perform in a top notch group is limited, at best. I know full well how difficult the week will be in general. I know how incredibly difficult it will be for my wife since she will be taking care of the kids all day and all night with very little help from me. Even knowing all of this, I am greatly anticipating those rehearsals and performances. I am especially looking forward to my second shot at Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. The whole concert is a Russian extravaganza, so almost everything has pretty cool horn parts (though not all are terribly challenging). I’ll definitely have to do something as a thank you to my wife. The cool thing is that even though it is going to be difficult and she is not looking forward to the experience, she realizes how important it is to me and doesn’t begrudge me the opportunity. That’s a wonderful thing there.

Now once I got going, this wasn’t too bad. Perhaps from now on I’ll write my title once I’m done writing instead of before. Just start writing and then look back and see what its about. Sounds like something they taught us in one of my research classes, hmm. Maybe grad school really is paying off . . .