When life gives you lemons, drill holes into them and make them musical instruments.

I've been playing in a local classical music festival (cue: whaaaaaa?) for the past week or so, and I can tell you, it has NOT been a good week for me.  I've only just started recovering recently to the level that I know I can play, but it sometimes feels like I've already made a bad first impression on the people I've been playing with.  Thankfully, no-one seems to be making that big a deal over the rough start to our rehearsals.  I'm glad to see that, as you get further and further into music, people do grow up after all.  It's not all about the behind-the-back gossip, over-criticism, and inflated egos that plague the university music department.  I'm sure it still happens to some degree, but when ensembles are self-directed and not graded, it seems us young artists just meld better.  Our quintet has been playing together for just over a week, and we already blend better and work as a team more than the university quintet did after an entire year.  It's sad, but refreshing at the same time, to see people who care working together to create something like this.

(That video is not us)

Tomorrow, we're doing an outreach concert at an elementary school near where I live.  We'll be playing the second movement of Victor Ewald's first brass quintet.  It's a drop-dead gorgeous piece of music, and I'm so thrilled that we'll get to share it with the kids.  The short lick the trumpets have at 2:52, as well as the 1st trumpet line at 2:58 (me!) are my favourite parts to play, by far.  We're going to be teaching the kids about the two types of classical music: love songs, and pirate songs (credit for this concept goes to the tuba professor in our area, who teaches at... three different universities, I believe?).  Except "love" is apparently an uncomfortable word for elementary school kids, so we'll be talking instead about cupcake music and pirate music.  I really think they'll go for the idea, as anything involving pirates is awesome.  As a bonus, when we introduce ourselves, the other trumpet and I are going to play the opening lick from the Vivaldi duet, to show the kids what trumpets sound like.

(Again, that is CLEARLY not us)

I played in a masterclass with our city's symphonies' principal trumpet last week.  I was on the fence between Arutunian and the third movement of Hindemith, and ended up choosing Arty because I was only able to give the accompanist music two days in advance, and we only had half an hour to rehearse.  It ended up being a mistake, sadly.  Yes, I'm a freak that finds Hindemith easier than Arutunian, but I ended up getting tongue-tied and generally not sounding good.  I didn't really learn to tongue properly until the end of my first, and into second, year at university, and even then, I sometimes wonder if I actually do the "K" syllable right, as every day it's seemingly random as to whether I'll be good at it or not.  Luckily, I have a lesson with him this Saturday, so I'll break out something that I'm better at, in hopes of getting more musical, detail- and refinement-oriented advice, as opposed to "you need to fix this."  Don't worry, I'll fix it, but there's no point in making someone tell me the same thing twice if I can help it.  There's my project for the summer, I guess.  Make myself sound as good as physically possible... but hey, what else is new?