Busy Saturday I: Solo Contest (solos only)
My Saturday was pretty epic.
Did I mention I was away from my house for more hours than I'm normally awake on a typical Saturday? It was a very, very long day. I got up before 4:30 and left at 5:44, this after scraping my car for a few minutes. Even though I figured it would take me 1:15 to get there, the weathermen had predicted frozen fog, meaning road conditions could be slick. Yikes. That's just what I want when I have to drive to Indiana, especially since I started out in the dark. I have never, ever before taken the tollway in the dark. Luckily at that time it's not like there were a bunch of cars, so that part was okay, and traffic moved really well, so even though I was going a little on the slow side for me (in case I did hit a slick patch), I made it to the school by exactly 7 AM. I had to be there by 7:30. I nearly stopped--the route takes me past a UPS hub, and it was around there that I kinda had to, you know, go. And the closer I got, the more I thought about pulling over. We have oases over the tollway in places and I thought about pulling over, but it turned out the Southland Oasis is east of the quarry, and when you hit the quarry you know you're within maybe 5 miles of the border, and just past the oasis is the last exit in Illinois--the one I used to take when construction was so bad in the area. Well, if I'm that close, I might as well just keep going. I'd also estimated mileage correctly. I thought it was 70 miles from my house; the mileage was 69.9 when I parked. Nice.
This contest is a little different than Mr. C's. At his contests, our packets include his judging standards and what scales the kids should know, sorted by ages. If there are any score sheets, they're blank. Mr. M includes a list of names plus all their score sheets. I liked having the list of names because I could read off who was supposed to be there and set aside any no-show sheets. It was also cool to see names I recognized from camp. The bad thing was that, if you got behind (and I did), people would stack up outside the room and Mr. M would have to come in and pull sheets. At Mr. C's, because the kids all had their own judge's forms, it was easy to move them from room to room depending on who was open. Finally, the big difference was that spectators were allowed here. I guess that's nice that you can see your kid's hard work pay off, or be there if there are problems (and there were some), but it could be slightly awkward in some ways, like when someone's brother, I think, recorded a solo. Really...that wasn't worth recording. Trust me.
Some of the kids did more than one solo. In my very first group, I had six kids...but seven solos. And the girl who did both a flute and a piccolo solo really wasn't very good, so right there I had a lot of comments to write. (Later, Mr. C described a judge he knew who had a set of stamps he'd bring with him that hit upon common issues, like kids not holding notes for their full length. Holy cow, I should look into that. It would save me a lot of time.) I took so long with my first batch that I ended up a full half-hour behind. This is bad because I was supposed to have a fresh batch every half hour. Yikes. But after that it wasn't as bad, but what a way to start off.
This is a contest with an interesting mix of players. You have Mr. M's students from several area schools. We'll say they're 48% of the players. Then you have another area director's students, who are another 48% of the players. This director's standards are not quite the same as Mr. M's, and you can tell--older kids don't know scales that, in my opinion, they should have learned years earlier, or else the (younger) kids don't know the names of their scales ("I play the one in my book"--yes, but what do you call it? Does it have a name?). Or the drummers would be told to perform a certain rudiment and they'd play another instead (my example was the 5-stroke roll that got played as a 9-stroke roll). And that director happens to arrange most of the solos his kids play, so that it seems like all the 4th graders play the exact same song. You hear it a LOT. Like, Mr. C joked that he was keeping a tally sheet of how many times it got played amongst his soloists. Then, there are two more groups of performers who take up the final 4%--some are 4th graders from a director who teaches in parochial schools of a different denomination, where those students are too young to perform in Indiana's general grade school solo contest. This gets them experience. And the rest are from a local community band, where their students can go up into high school. I did not get any of those, I don't believe, judging by the playing ages I saw on my judge's sheets, but the two community band kids I saw played at a higher level than many of the kids I saw, which was nice to see. I think this is also the group that has some unusual instrumentation--Mrs. S got a bass guitar player. She was like, how do I judge tone on this? Yeah, I think you skip that part. My oddest instruments? I had one French horn player and one bells player. Everything else was pretty standard, and really, those are common horns but there's just not a lot of them.
So many of the kids blended together that I can't recall all of them, but there are a fair amount who were memorable.
--There was a set of twins at camp last year whom we all struggled to tell apart for the first few days. They walked into my room and were excited to see me--Did you go to camp? they asked. They were easier to tell apart now because their hair is different, not just in style but color (one is blonder). At the end, one of them wanted to give me a hug. Sweet, but inappropriate--especially with an audience. I told her I appreciated the sentiment, but no. The sax player went second and outplayed her trumpeter sister.
--My last group also made me think of camp, as I was supposed to have a bari sax player who's been to camp for a number of years; looks like he graduates this year. I thought, aw, I'll have to let his counselor know he was one of my soloists. Except he was a no-show. Out of my last six kids, half weren't there, so I finished way earlier than everyone. The thing was that there was still a bari sax player in that group. Wow, you were not who I was expecting. And the thing about this kid was that he refused to use a neck strap. With the smaller woodwinds, they're fine to play by themselves; the right thumb is the balance point to help hold the horn. Saxes, however, are heavy enough that you use the strap to support it and keep it in the right playing position. What this guy was doing was putting the the sax on his foot and contorting himself to play, essentially kinking his neck in the process. By doing that, he was restricting his airflow and the low notes weren't coming out. Hello, it's a bari sax. The low notes are the point. I'd asked him before he started if he had a strap and he said he didn't need one. Once finished, I again asked, do you have a neck strap? He said, oh, I don't like using it. I told him, flat out, use it. I don't think this was one of Mr. M's players, because he's a sax man, and I cannot imagine he'd encourage such poor playing posture. It was incredible. I've never known a sax player to flat-out refuse the use of a strap. Really, it's not for decoration.
--Also late in the day was a little clarinet player who was also having trouble with her notes. She may have been in the same group with the bari sax kid, either that or just before. Even just doing her scales, one note wouldn't come out, yet if she skipped up to the highest note in the scale, the clarinet still played. During her song, it was clear that it was the particular note giving her issues, and being a young player (4th/5th grade) she wasn't mature enough to know to just keep going on her music; she wanted to try and get the note out. I'm sure it was a frustrating experience for her, and it was really hard to judge because of the blanks in the music, which weren't really her fault. (I think her score worked out to be a first, but the lowest possible first, and I did what I could with what I heard.) At the end of her solo, I asked about her reeds first off, in case that was the issue; she was squeaking a bit on the bad note. (One earlier clarinetist had used a brand-spanking-new reed. This is not recommended--they have to be broken in a little.) Her mom said they had just gotten reeds, so there was that, but they'd also been at the repair table and the guy had been taking it apart and putting it back together. Hmm. When was the last time it was seen by a repairman? Today. ...I mean before that. The kid went, probably never. ...Yeah, you should send it in. Having worked in a repair shop, and gone out to solo contests back in the day, there is a huge difference between what a tech can do in his own shop versus the triage done at contest. Both of the girl's parents were there, and the dad was talking to me after everyone in that group had finished. I had asked to see the clarinet in case there was something totally obvious wrong with it, and when the girl handed it to me, the two main body parts were separated at the middle tenon. There was a crap ton of cork grease on it. Her lowest note on her one scale, F, was horribly out of tune to the rest of the horn, extremely sharp. It could be related to the bad note issue (I'm pretty sure it's the F/C key, and C was the bad note with the register key engaged), or it could be that the instrument was at least half a centimeter apart at the tenon because of all the grease. Like, these parts should be flush against each other. It is taking me no effort to pull everything apart. That's a problem. I think by talking to the dad, I was able to make him realize that the kid's clarinet should see someone and get fixed, and hopefully in the future if the player realizes there's a problem, they'll take it in somewhere prior to solo contest. I think I even wrote on her judge's sheet that she might be able to get a loaner instrument in case the repairs are enough to keep the horn in the shop for contest. It's so much better to have a horn that works that's not yours than to have a faulty horn.
--I at least have a much more amusing clarinet story. This is probably my favorite story of the day, contest-wise. I mentioned the above player had some issues in playing, but to her credit she went on as best she could and didn't really show her exasperation. One boy...did. So he's playing along, and he's about halfway through his solo, and he makes a mistake. Instead of going on, he stops and, really loudly, makes this "HUAAAAUUUUUGH!" sound. He continues, but a little bit later messes up again--and again there was the "HUAAAAARRGGH!" sound. Uh, I do not have "pause and sound like a dying moose" written on my judge's copy. Holy crap, especially after that second time, I about had to bite my cheeks to keep from laughing. Yeah, so he did not get a first, and he got comments saying, it's one thing to make a mistake; it's another to let your audience know you've made a mistake. Purely due to the sound effects, I enjoy describing what happens; everyone dissolves into giggles. I know I'm not transcribing the sound properly but I think you get the idea.
--My other special player was the trumpet player who also had issues when it came to making mistakes. Now, the clarinet moose boy was somewhere between 4th and 6th grade--young enough to not realize that, hey, I can make a mistake and simply move on. Trumpet girl, however, was in the 7th or 8th grade range. She apparently has never learned to just keep going. Just in her scales--and she had to play three of them--she would start over any time she messed up. And she messed up a lot. Unbeknownst to me, Mrs. S was done with her group and was across the hall with her door open; she kept a tally of how many times this girl restarted her chromatic scale: Nine. That was, in fact, my mental count as well. The thing with this girl is that she wouldn't pause; she would just go right back into it. Most kids will take a moment to think about the notes and collect themselves. For her, she'd go, da-da-da-da-da--da-da-da-da-da--da-da-da-da-da... Just over and over until I finally said, just keep going down. And then within her solo itself, every time she messed up in a measure, she'd replay the measure. Her entire time doing her solo was probably three times longer than most people. Oh my God. I know I wrote more than once to just. keep. going. The band's not going to wait for you to finish your music, dear. They're like two songs down the line.
Those were the main special children. So, yeah, this was a learning experience for me as well, to try and be up on some of the solos the kids use so that I don't have to follow the music as much and I can simply hear when something's off (although, by the end of the day, that 4th grade solo from the other director, I had it down and basically didn't have to look at the music at all). I need to write faster and have my pencils ready to go--I wrote so much that I went through one pencil lead before the morning was over, and I didn't have time to get into my bag and pull it out and had to just deal with my mechanical pencil not quite working for a bit. (The first group was waiting for me when I got there, so I had to just go. And, remember, it was a big group.) And, well, encourage them to move along faster should they get stuck on their scales. You get two shots, that's it.
Ooh, right, my unique child! Most kids, when they have a song in 6/8 time, tend to try to play it in 2/4 or 4/4. I had the rare child, perhaps on trumpet, who attempted to play a 4/4 song with a lilt. The whole first part of the song felt like it was in 6/8, which got corrected by the time the person hit the next section. That was amusing. When I shared that with Mrs. S and Mr. C, neither had ever had that happen. Well, I guess I'm special.
I think that's it for now. Stay tuned for part two, in which there are family ties and, as my mother put it, I nearly get into a bar brawl. How's that for a teaser?
Did I mention I was away from my house for more hours than I'm normally awake on a typical Saturday? It was a very, very long day. I got up before 4:30 and left at 5:44, this after scraping my car for a few minutes. Even though I figured it would take me 1:15 to get there, the weathermen had predicted frozen fog, meaning road conditions could be slick. Yikes. That's just what I want when I have to drive to Indiana, especially since I started out in the dark. I have never, ever before taken the tollway in the dark. Luckily at that time it's not like there were a bunch of cars, so that part was okay, and traffic moved really well, so even though I was going a little on the slow side for me (in case I did hit a slick patch), I made it to the school by exactly 7 AM. I had to be there by 7:30. I nearly stopped--the route takes me past a UPS hub, and it was around there that I kinda had to, you know, go. And the closer I got, the more I thought about pulling over. We have oases over the tollway in places and I thought about pulling over, but it turned out the Southland Oasis is east of the quarry, and when you hit the quarry you know you're within maybe 5 miles of the border, and just past the oasis is the last exit in Illinois--the one I used to take when construction was so bad in the area. Well, if I'm that close, I might as well just keep going. I'd also estimated mileage correctly. I thought it was 70 miles from my house; the mileage was 69.9 when I parked. Nice.
This contest is a little different than Mr. C's. At his contests, our packets include his judging standards and what scales the kids should know, sorted by ages. If there are any score sheets, they're blank. Mr. M includes a list of names plus all their score sheets. I liked having the list of names because I could read off who was supposed to be there and set aside any no-show sheets. It was also cool to see names I recognized from camp. The bad thing was that, if you got behind (and I did), people would stack up outside the room and Mr. M would have to come in and pull sheets. At Mr. C's, because the kids all had their own judge's forms, it was easy to move them from room to room depending on who was open. Finally, the big difference was that spectators were allowed here. I guess that's nice that you can see your kid's hard work pay off, or be there if there are problems (and there were some), but it could be slightly awkward in some ways, like when someone's brother, I think, recorded a solo. Really...that wasn't worth recording. Trust me.
Some of the kids did more than one solo. In my very first group, I had six kids...but seven solos. And the girl who did both a flute and a piccolo solo really wasn't very good, so right there I had a lot of comments to write. (Later, Mr. C described a judge he knew who had a set of stamps he'd bring with him that hit upon common issues, like kids not holding notes for their full length. Holy cow, I should look into that. It would save me a lot of time.) I took so long with my first batch that I ended up a full half-hour behind. This is bad because I was supposed to have a fresh batch every half hour. Yikes. But after that it wasn't as bad, but what a way to start off.
This is a contest with an interesting mix of players. You have Mr. M's students from several area schools. We'll say they're 48% of the players. Then you have another area director's students, who are another 48% of the players. This director's standards are not quite the same as Mr. M's, and you can tell--older kids don't know scales that, in my opinion, they should have learned years earlier, or else the (younger) kids don't know the names of their scales ("I play the one in my book"--yes, but what do you call it? Does it have a name?). Or the drummers would be told to perform a certain rudiment and they'd play another instead (my example was the 5-stroke roll that got played as a 9-stroke roll). And that director happens to arrange most of the solos his kids play, so that it seems like all the 4th graders play the exact same song. You hear it a LOT. Like, Mr. C joked that he was keeping a tally sheet of how many times it got played amongst his soloists. Then, there are two more groups of performers who take up the final 4%--some are 4th graders from a director who teaches in parochial schools of a different denomination, where those students are too young to perform in Indiana's general grade school solo contest. This gets them experience. And the rest are from a local community band, where their students can go up into high school. I did not get any of those, I don't believe, judging by the playing ages I saw on my judge's sheets, but the two community band kids I saw played at a higher level than many of the kids I saw, which was nice to see. I think this is also the group that has some unusual instrumentation--Mrs. S got a bass guitar player. She was like, how do I judge tone on this? Yeah, I think you skip that part. My oddest instruments? I had one French horn player and one bells player. Everything else was pretty standard, and really, those are common horns but there's just not a lot of them.
So many of the kids blended together that I can't recall all of them, but there are a fair amount who were memorable.
--There was a set of twins at camp last year whom we all struggled to tell apart for the first few days. They walked into my room and were excited to see me--Did you go to camp? they asked. They were easier to tell apart now because their hair is different, not just in style but color (one is blonder). At the end, one of them wanted to give me a hug. Sweet, but inappropriate--especially with an audience. I told her I appreciated the sentiment, but no. The sax player went second and outplayed her trumpeter sister.
--My last group also made me think of camp, as I was supposed to have a bari sax player who's been to camp for a number of years; looks like he graduates this year. I thought, aw, I'll have to let his counselor know he was one of my soloists. Except he was a no-show. Out of my last six kids, half weren't there, so I finished way earlier than everyone. The thing was that there was still a bari sax player in that group. Wow, you were not who I was expecting. And the thing about this kid was that he refused to use a neck strap. With the smaller woodwinds, they're fine to play by themselves; the right thumb is the balance point to help hold the horn. Saxes, however, are heavy enough that you use the strap to support it and keep it in the right playing position. What this guy was doing was putting the the sax on his foot and contorting himself to play, essentially kinking his neck in the process. By doing that, he was restricting his airflow and the low notes weren't coming out. Hello, it's a bari sax. The low notes are the point. I'd asked him before he started if he had a strap and he said he didn't need one. Once finished, I again asked, do you have a neck strap? He said, oh, I don't like using it. I told him, flat out, use it. I don't think this was one of Mr. M's players, because he's a sax man, and I cannot imagine he'd encourage such poor playing posture. It was incredible. I've never known a sax player to flat-out refuse the use of a strap. Really, it's not for decoration.
--Also late in the day was a little clarinet player who was also having trouble with her notes. She may have been in the same group with the bari sax kid, either that or just before. Even just doing her scales, one note wouldn't come out, yet if she skipped up to the highest note in the scale, the clarinet still played. During her song, it was clear that it was the particular note giving her issues, and being a young player (4th/5th grade) she wasn't mature enough to know to just keep going on her music; she wanted to try and get the note out. I'm sure it was a frustrating experience for her, and it was really hard to judge because of the blanks in the music, which weren't really her fault. (I think her score worked out to be a first, but the lowest possible first, and I did what I could with what I heard.) At the end of her solo, I asked about her reeds first off, in case that was the issue; she was squeaking a bit on the bad note. (One earlier clarinetist had used a brand-spanking-new reed. This is not recommended--they have to be broken in a little.) Her mom said they had just gotten reeds, so there was that, but they'd also been at the repair table and the guy had been taking it apart and putting it back together. Hmm. When was the last time it was seen by a repairman? Today. ...I mean before that. The kid went, probably never. ...Yeah, you should send it in. Having worked in a repair shop, and gone out to solo contests back in the day, there is a huge difference between what a tech can do in his own shop versus the triage done at contest. Both of the girl's parents were there, and the dad was talking to me after everyone in that group had finished. I had asked to see the clarinet in case there was something totally obvious wrong with it, and when the girl handed it to me, the two main body parts were separated at the middle tenon. There was a crap ton of cork grease on it. Her lowest note on her one scale, F, was horribly out of tune to the rest of the horn, extremely sharp. It could be related to the bad note issue (I'm pretty sure it's the F/C key, and C was the bad note with the register key engaged), or it could be that the instrument was at least half a centimeter apart at the tenon because of all the grease. Like, these parts should be flush against each other. It is taking me no effort to pull everything apart. That's a problem. I think by talking to the dad, I was able to make him realize that the kid's clarinet should see someone and get fixed, and hopefully in the future if the player realizes there's a problem, they'll take it in somewhere prior to solo contest. I think I even wrote on her judge's sheet that she might be able to get a loaner instrument in case the repairs are enough to keep the horn in the shop for contest. It's so much better to have a horn that works that's not yours than to have a faulty horn.
--I at least have a much more amusing clarinet story. This is probably my favorite story of the day, contest-wise. I mentioned the above player had some issues in playing, but to her credit she went on as best she could and didn't really show her exasperation. One boy...did. So he's playing along, and he's about halfway through his solo, and he makes a mistake. Instead of going on, he stops and, really loudly, makes this "HUAAAAUUUUUGH!" sound. He continues, but a little bit later messes up again--and again there was the "HUAAAAARRGGH!" sound. Uh, I do not have "pause and sound like a dying moose" written on my judge's copy. Holy crap, especially after that second time, I about had to bite my cheeks to keep from laughing. Yeah, so he did not get a first, and he got comments saying, it's one thing to make a mistake; it's another to let your audience know you've made a mistake. Purely due to the sound effects, I enjoy describing what happens; everyone dissolves into giggles. I know I'm not transcribing the sound properly but I think you get the idea.
--My other special player was the trumpet player who also had issues when it came to making mistakes. Now, the clarinet moose boy was somewhere between 4th and 6th grade--young enough to not realize that, hey, I can make a mistake and simply move on. Trumpet girl, however, was in the 7th or 8th grade range. She apparently has never learned to just keep going. Just in her scales--and she had to play three of them--she would start over any time she messed up. And she messed up a lot. Unbeknownst to me, Mrs. S was done with her group and was across the hall with her door open; she kept a tally of how many times this girl restarted her chromatic scale: Nine. That was, in fact, my mental count as well. The thing with this girl is that she wouldn't pause; she would just go right back into it. Most kids will take a moment to think about the notes and collect themselves. For her, she'd go, da-da-da-da-da--da-da-da-da-da--da-da-da-da-da... Just over and over until I finally said, just keep going down. And then within her solo itself, every time she messed up in a measure, she'd replay the measure. Her entire time doing her solo was probably three times longer than most people. Oh my God. I know I wrote more than once to just. keep. going. The band's not going to wait for you to finish your music, dear. They're like two songs down the line.
Those were the main special children. So, yeah, this was a learning experience for me as well, to try and be up on some of the solos the kids use so that I don't have to follow the music as much and I can simply hear when something's off (although, by the end of the day, that 4th grade solo from the other director, I had it down and basically didn't have to look at the music at all). I need to write faster and have my pencils ready to go--I wrote so much that I went through one pencil lead before the morning was over, and I didn't have time to get into my bag and pull it out and had to just deal with my mechanical pencil not quite working for a bit. (The first group was waiting for me when I got there, so I had to just go. And, remember, it was a big group.) And, well, encourage them to move along faster should they get stuck on their scales. You get two shots, that's it.
Ooh, right, my unique child! Most kids, when they have a song in 6/8 time, tend to try to play it in 2/4 or 4/4. I had the rare child, perhaps on trumpet, who attempted to play a 4/4 song with a lilt. The whole first part of the song felt like it was in 6/8, which got corrected by the time the person hit the next section. That was amusing. When I shared that with Mrs. S and Mr. C, neither had ever had that happen. Well, I guess I'm special.
I think that's it for now. Stay tuned for part two, in which there are family ties and, as my mother put it, I nearly get into a bar brawl. How's that for a teaser?