My ankle is better thank goodness. I bought this special ankle brace from CVS yesterday and it is working wonders. I got to the 8 AM warm-ups and just got back to my hotel at 9:30 PM. It’s been a busy day.
At the warm-ups I learned that deep breathing exercises at 8 AM are not the best idea. I got pretty dizzy which is not normal for me. I also learned that I don’t know my scales as well as I thought I did. We had a handout that included the C major and C# major keys for all the warm-ups and then we had to do the rest of each sequence without written music. I can play a straight scale in all of the keys but my brain just couldn’t compute thirds and fourths in many of the keys.
At 10 I went to the adult amateur ensemble. That was lots of fun. I didn’t have any problem sight reading the 7th horn part. I remember back in March going to the Northeast Horn Workshop and being totally intimidated. I didn’t even try to play in the horn choir. I can really tell that I am improving and that’s a really nice feeling.
I attended a lecture by Gregory Hustis next and that was very interesting. His talk was geared to students and how to get ahead in a career playing the horn. He is a really good speaker and he made his points effectively with an appropriate amount of humor tossed in. Later in the day he held a master class on orchestral excerpts and he did a great job providing constructive criticism without terrifying the young students playing for him.
The rest of my day was comprised of checking out the exhibits and going to the afternoon and evening performances. Most of the performances were outstanding though there were a few hiccups along the way. One of the hornists who played in the afternoon was having a bad day and one of the horn choirs that played in the evening struggled through a few of their selections.
I found the exhibits a bit disappointing. Unless you wanted to buy a horn or sheet music, there wasn’t much else to see. There were some mutes, mouthpieces, cases and cds. Surely there is more stuff for horns than that. I’ll take another look tomorrow. Maybe I’ve missed something.
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