I had lovely times this weekend with
et_blackbird (Friday drinks/dinner); Sean and Dave from Portland (Saturday drinks/dinner);
eigenvector,
dailybinx, and James (Saturday-later drinks);
littlepinch (Sunday brunch); and Jay and a gazillion people he knew (Sunday drinks). More people should get LJ handles, if only so that I can refer to them in the third person in a more meaningful way.
The rest of my weekend was spent transcribing Holst's "Saturn" (from The Planets) for concert band and I'm quite pleased with how it seems to have turned out. (I'm giving up on quotation marks now.) I've now finished Mercury, Saturn, and Neptune, and I'm about a third of the way through Venus. Canonic published concert band versions exist for Mars, Jupiter, and Uranus.
While I know of concert bands that have performed either six or all seven movements, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get one's grubby hands on these transcriptions, so I decided to try my hand at transcribing the four "missing" movements myself over the summer, as a sort of fun project to while away the idle hours. It has been a rewarding process that I will be glad to see finish. :)
I have to say that knowing that I'll have two amazing mallet players has made some of the transcription challenges significantly easier. I don't exactly know how Neptune would be accomplished without (really good) mallet instruments; one or more keyboard instruments; or one or more harps. This might explain the occasions when you hear of bands performing only six movements. (For those of you not familiar with The Planets, Holst didn't write a movement for Earth and Pluto had not yet been discovered (and has since had its status as a planet rescinded).)
Assuming all continues to go well, I'll have my band read through my transcriptions this fall so that I can fix any surprises and errors, and we will hopefully perform them in the spring.