Fancy Band: Sectionals, with bottles
Thursday was the only day (aside from Monday) where I got to leave on time, and it's only because I had band. My boss is the type of person to leave at, like, 5:45 for something like this. Hi, I enjoy eating dinner first so that I have the energy to get through a 3-hour rehearsal, thanks, not to mention freshening up beforehand.
And yet this week, guess who basically left at 5:45. I did get to eat, and I did get to freshen up, but BBC came over and we had a bit of a yak fest about the recent happenings at work. He's as frustrated as I am over certain things and we both needed to vent, but at the same time, hi, I have somewhere to be. Which he's fully aware of and apologized to me for several times, then kept going. :P Even after I'd gone outside and gotten in my car and started it up, he still was talking to me; I guess my car sounds like a race car when I first turn it on now. Again, so long as it's not making knocking sounds like something's trying to get out from under the hood, it's cool.
This week's main topic: The bottles. Oh goodness. It started with Dr. K sending out his rehearsal notes and he mentioned that a flute player was clearly in the wrong octave and needed to fix that. Cue paranoid email sent on Monday to go, uh, I hope you understand the bottle thing is much harder than you'd think, and BTW are you talking about me, because I'm the only flute player with an isolated part (thank you, beginning bottle solo). I did not get a reply, and in looking at my email Thursday morning, Gmail was all, it's been 3 days; follow up? Yes, actually, I *would* like to follow up on this, so I sent a second email to go, perhaps you didn't see this, but here's more info. This email was calmer and I asked if maybe this was his first time performing this piece and he wasn't aware that parameters for the bottles would've been helpful. He did respond and said that yes, this was his first go-around with it, and he wasn't aware the bottles would be special, and we could take time that night to work on tuning. So, when I finally walked in the building, I stopped at his office on the way to thank him for his response. He said he wasn't ignoring me, but grad school was taking up his time (likely story :P )--and then he let me know something about my email address. He put my phone-specific email on his mailing list, not my regular Gmail account like I have in the paperwork I've filled out for band. It's based on my nickname and essentially looks like this: "The Nickname (thenickname-at-gmail.com)." When I set up the account, "The" was my first name and "Nickname" my last. Therefore, my emails just show up as being from "The," which kind of blends in and essentially looks like the first line of the email in the preview. Add to it that, according to him, 20 people respond to his emails and it just gets lost. Oh wow, didn't ever think of that. He told me the best thing to do would be to compose a new email and that would pop out at him better; I also ended up changing the first name/last name with that email. Okay. Glad to have that settled.
We were doing something different today--sectionals. There was talk of this last year, but at the time that involved driving to a different location entirely and would've been a pain in the rear for many involved, so nothing more happened. This year, the idea evolved and now the brass and percussion were to be in the regular band room, and the woodwinds were to schlep downstairs to the black box theater. I happened to know it's closer to the far set of stairs, so Dr. K's office ended up being on the way. I knew I was in the right place because I could hear a bottle blowing in the area. Alas, I'd barely sat down when our guest leader had started and I was still putting my flute together and getting settled when we started working. Rats. Oh well.
Our guest for sectionals was M, who'd joined us as a player the first year of Fancy Band and had been a guest conductor when Dr. K was out of town that year. M is a high school band director and I guess it was just too much for him, so he stepped back from playing, but still wanted to be involved in some way; this was a nice fit. Also, his wife is T in the oboe section. Anyway, I remember enjoying working with him the first time around, and we had a good time with him at this rehearsal as well. He brought along Chuck, his handy-dandy keyboard. (Heh, I totally remember Chuck from before.) Chuck played a prominent role, and was part of the reason why the saxophones were excused from the first part of sectionals--Chuck helped us tune our bottles. Only flutes and clarinets get this excitement.
One of the things I'd put in my emails to Dr. K had to do with tuning said bottles. If someone's in the wrong octave, why don't we figure out who it is? I mean, I don't want to bottle-shame anyone, but at the same time this is something he wants us to fix. Hilariously, it turned out the entire flute section was paranoid he was talking about them. W was even like, I think it's me. I said, I thought it was me. M then jumped in, it's all of us. And, yes, we were all an octave too low. Guest conductor M had started with tuning the clarinets, then moved to the flutes, and yep, we all had to re-tune, which was highly annoying--especially because the more water there is in your bottle, the harder it is to make a sound. Poor B, on piccolo, had the highest note of all of us; she barely had any room left in her bottle after reaching her pitch (coincidentally, also a B). And it was funny to watch us try to get closer in tune with our pitches, because we'd add a little water from the drinking water bottles we had, then it would be too much, and we'd have to sip a little water out of them, and then we'd have too little, and we had to have spent at least 10 solid minutes if not longer just working with the bottles. Dr. K's whole thing was to get us pretty well in tune with each other on this, which was another reason to actually tune us. On the plus side, we sounded MUCH better after all that. Also, the clarinets were totally thrilled to see us struggle with our bottles and attempting to play them. It was like vindication for them--see, the flutes are having a hard time, too! Oh, yes. This is not easy in the least.
(So I ended up emailing Dr. K again this morning. I'm taking this bottle thing super seriously. There are no parameters on what bottles work best, and Dr. K had sent out some ideas to help us, but that was all theory and no practice, basically. I went out and bought Perrier yesterday and blowing across that bottle was a night and day difference from the bottle I've been using, in part I think because the lip is much bigger on my old bottle, which is also physically larger. I basically wrote a dissertation on the bottles for him and he replied, this is fantastic! I'll send this to all the woodwinds! ...But apparently not today, which is fine; it's a holiday weekend. Then later, while practicing, I thought to look up a couple recordings of this piece to see if my bottle matched what was done there. The recordings have the pitches an octave down! So I sent another email--how tied are you to them being in the exact octave the composer put them in? I haven't gotten a response to that one yet.)
Back to sectionals. Guest M did a great job with us and was pretty funny in looking over this music for the first time. The two pieces we worked on with him both have massive tonguing sections, one with 16th notes and lots of accidentals that goes pretty fast, and the other with 32nd notes. He was funny--that's all tongued?!? He's a clarinet player, so he feels that pain. And he also questioned some of the writing in the passacaglia, which has like 12 different clarinet parts; that just seems unnecessary. And, like, clarinet 6 ends up with a solo it seems.
We were downstairs for close to two hours, and a little before 8 we went back up to rejoin the rest of the band. The flutes discovered there were no chairs in the front row...uh...but we were told a chair rack was right outside and we just had to go grab one. Going in and out of the band room was how I noticed the doors have stoppers at the bottom again. Nice! They'd all come off before and you couldn't hold the doors open unless someone physically stood there. I eagerly folded one down with my foot...only to see the door slide forward. Sigh. Well, the thought was good. We also discovered earplugs on our stands. This was from trombone R, who'd made a comment about protecting our hearing last week. Dr. K likes to turn on the metronome to help keep the beat, but it's set at like 100 decibels to be heard over the band, and if you're close to the monitor it's really loud. R had said something about it and also emailed some sort of hearing guide to Dr. K, which got passed along to the band though I haven't read it yet. That was really kind of him to supply everyone with earplugs. At one point I reached for them, which I'd slipped into my flute bag, then realized we'd shifted over a chair and my stuff wasn't easily accessible. Oh well.
We started the full rehearsal with the passacaglia, and about 8:30 Dr. K said we'd go back to the beginning and run that part too. I then asked, are we going to play anything else tonight? (We'd just spent all that time downstairs on the bottle piece; it seemed like we should play that too.) After a moment, Dr. K went, yeah, okay, we'll move on. Having the sectional and being able to work certain parts slowly to get the technique down better really made a difference, plus we got to play our re-tuned bottles for Dr. K and he seemed really impressed with how much better they sounded. Thank you. We did work hard.
I ended up hanging out for a while after band. It started when one of the clarinet players, I think R the section leader, came up to W and me to talk about bottles. Hers was actually a soy sauce bottle. She reiterated how hard it is to play and I think she was asking for tips. (This would be part of the reason for my dissertation. I was measuring the opening and lip of my bottles to compare them, since the Perrier bottle was so much easier to use.) I then walked down the hall to Dr. K's office to let him know what had happened with the bottles in sectionals, and on the way back I started talking to the college students. Trombone D was funny, talking about how they are playing for a high school pep band this weekend after being asked by the band's director, a Jen, to join in. D was talking about how they know a lot of Jens--me, their former vocal teacher (who was my college classmate), and now this one. Later I'd go, so, I hear you're cheating on me with another Jen; that caused D's friends to dissolve into laughter. I mean, it was the most popular name for over a decade; there's a lot of us out there of a certain age. It's bound to happen.
Trombone R happened to be nearby for a few minutes and in talking about names, R mentioned how people like to chant his name. It just so happens that a certain Notre Dame football movie from about 30 years ago has his name as the title, except our R has a spelling variation; his name ends with an I. So when people chant the film title he goes, that's not my name; it's with an I! Therefore, he's now R-with-an-I. Don't forget that.
I mainly was speaking with trombone D and trumpet E, who are in different instrument techniques classes. D was showing me the school-issued flute and clarinet they'd gotten, and eagerly put together the flute, though the scale they have to play isn't coming easily. E then grabbed the flute (conveniently, he's currently in woodwind techniques and the first section is flutes) and showed me his Bb scale from memory. Very nice. Meanwhile, it's been a couple years since D took that class so that's why the scale needs a bit of work, but I did show D the three different ways to play Bb. Impress your friends! There was then a bit of talk about class schedules. Oboe T is teaching the woodwind class and it sounds like she taught something last year as well, but the schedule had to be adjusted since she cannot teach on Thursday nights thanks to band; whatever class was only held on Tuesday nights, not both. I was also told how in previous years, the NCC students who were in band (think flutes L the younger and D) ended up missing parts of two things. They had to leave their one class an hour early to come to Fancy Band, and they had to miss that first hour of Fancy Band because of that other class. Trombone D is having to miss Wednesday night marching band rehearsal because of a mandatory education class that is only on that night. That's bad since D is one of the two drum majors, and it sounds like D is the one that takes control of the situation, so that's not so good that they can't be there all the time. It sounds like things aren't going as smoothly as in the past since Dr. K handed off the reins to his assistant. Hmm.
A couple last things with trombone D--when rehearsal ended, D was talking about how difficult their part was at the end of the bottle song, lots of triplets and accidentals and things. I picked up my music to show them and said, yeah, we have the same thing! D went, but you have keys! I said, hey, that's totally on you; you could've chosen euphonium! Then later we somehow got on the topic of nail polish. D tends to wear it but didn't have any on this time around. Part of why D wears it is to hide the fact that they have dirty fingernails, heh. Well, that's one way to do it. I mentioned how I can't wear nail polish because it honestly feels like it weighs me down when I play. It legitimately bothers me to feel the polish on my nails. D and E were like, I can see that. That was one of the things I first noticed on D, that they wore polish, and I was kind of impressed since I simply hate having it on my fingernails. Toes, no problem.
And yet this week, guess who basically left at 5:45. I did get to eat, and I did get to freshen up, but BBC came over and we had a bit of a yak fest about the recent happenings at work. He's as frustrated as I am over certain things and we both needed to vent, but at the same time, hi, I have somewhere to be. Which he's fully aware of and apologized to me for several times, then kept going. :P Even after I'd gone outside and gotten in my car and started it up, he still was talking to me; I guess my car sounds like a race car when I first turn it on now. Again, so long as it's not making knocking sounds like something's trying to get out from under the hood, it's cool.
This week's main topic: The bottles. Oh goodness. It started with Dr. K sending out his rehearsal notes and he mentioned that a flute player was clearly in the wrong octave and needed to fix that. Cue paranoid email sent on Monday to go, uh, I hope you understand the bottle thing is much harder than you'd think, and BTW are you talking about me, because I'm the only flute player with an isolated part (thank you, beginning bottle solo). I did not get a reply, and in looking at my email Thursday morning, Gmail was all, it's been 3 days; follow up? Yes, actually, I *would* like to follow up on this, so I sent a second email to go, perhaps you didn't see this, but here's more info. This email was calmer and I asked if maybe this was his first time performing this piece and he wasn't aware that parameters for the bottles would've been helpful. He did respond and said that yes, this was his first go-around with it, and he wasn't aware the bottles would be special, and we could take time that night to work on tuning. So, when I finally walked in the building, I stopped at his office on the way to thank him for his response. He said he wasn't ignoring me, but grad school was taking up his time (likely story :P )--and then he let me know something about my email address. He put my phone-specific email on his mailing list, not my regular Gmail account like I have in the paperwork I've filled out for band. It's based on my nickname and essentially looks like this: "The Nickname (thenickname-at-gmail.com)." When I set up the account, "The" was my first name and "Nickname" my last. Therefore, my emails just show up as being from "The," which kind of blends in and essentially looks like the first line of the email in the preview. Add to it that, according to him, 20 people respond to his emails and it just gets lost. Oh wow, didn't ever think of that. He told me the best thing to do would be to compose a new email and that would pop out at him better; I also ended up changing the first name/last name with that email. Okay. Glad to have that settled.
We were doing something different today--sectionals. There was talk of this last year, but at the time that involved driving to a different location entirely and would've been a pain in the rear for many involved, so nothing more happened. This year, the idea evolved and now the brass and percussion were to be in the regular band room, and the woodwinds were to schlep downstairs to the black box theater. I happened to know it's closer to the far set of stairs, so Dr. K's office ended up being on the way. I knew I was in the right place because I could hear a bottle blowing in the area. Alas, I'd barely sat down when our guest leader had started and I was still putting my flute together and getting settled when we started working. Rats. Oh well.
Our guest for sectionals was M, who'd joined us as a player the first year of Fancy Band and had been a guest conductor when Dr. K was out of town that year. M is a high school band director and I guess it was just too much for him, so he stepped back from playing, but still wanted to be involved in some way; this was a nice fit. Also, his wife is T in the oboe section. Anyway, I remember enjoying working with him the first time around, and we had a good time with him at this rehearsal as well. He brought along Chuck, his handy-dandy keyboard. (Heh, I totally remember Chuck from before.) Chuck played a prominent role, and was part of the reason why the saxophones were excused from the first part of sectionals--Chuck helped us tune our bottles. Only flutes and clarinets get this excitement.
One of the things I'd put in my emails to Dr. K had to do with tuning said bottles. If someone's in the wrong octave, why don't we figure out who it is? I mean, I don't want to bottle-shame anyone, but at the same time this is something he wants us to fix. Hilariously, it turned out the entire flute section was paranoid he was talking about them. W was even like, I think it's me. I said, I thought it was me. M then jumped in, it's all of us. And, yes, we were all an octave too low. Guest conductor M had started with tuning the clarinets, then moved to the flutes, and yep, we all had to re-tune, which was highly annoying--especially because the more water there is in your bottle, the harder it is to make a sound. Poor B, on piccolo, had the highest note of all of us; she barely had any room left in her bottle after reaching her pitch (coincidentally, also a B). And it was funny to watch us try to get closer in tune with our pitches, because we'd add a little water from the drinking water bottles we had, then it would be too much, and we'd have to sip a little water out of them, and then we'd have too little, and we had to have spent at least 10 solid minutes if not longer just working with the bottles. Dr. K's whole thing was to get us pretty well in tune with each other on this, which was another reason to actually tune us. On the plus side, we sounded MUCH better after all that. Also, the clarinets were totally thrilled to see us struggle with our bottles and attempting to play them. It was like vindication for them--see, the flutes are having a hard time, too! Oh, yes. This is not easy in the least.
(So I ended up emailing Dr. K again this morning. I'm taking this bottle thing super seriously. There are no parameters on what bottles work best, and Dr. K had sent out some ideas to help us, but that was all theory and no practice, basically. I went out and bought Perrier yesterday and blowing across that bottle was a night and day difference from the bottle I've been using, in part I think because the lip is much bigger on my old bottle, which is also physically larger. I basically wrote a dissertation on the bottles for him and he replied, this is fantastic! I'll send this to all the woodwinds! ...But apparently not today, which is fine; it's a holiday weekend. Then later, while practicing, I thought to look up a couple recordings of this piece to see if my bottle matched what was done there. The recordings have the pitches an octave down! So I sent another email--how tied are you to them being in the exact octave the composer put them in? I haven't gotten a response to that one yet.)
Back to sectionals. Guest M did a great job with us and was pretty funny in looking over this music for the first time. The two pieces we worked on with him both have massive tonguing sections, one with 16th notes and lots of accidentals that goes pretty fast, and the other with 32nd notes. He was funny--that's all tongued?!? He's a clarinet player, so he feels that pain. And he also questioned some of the writing in the passacaglia, which has like 12 different clarinet parts; that just seems unnecessary. And, like, clarinet 6 ends up with a solo it seems.
We were downstairs for close to two hours, and a little before 8 we went back up to rejoin the rest of the band. The flutes discovered there were no chairs in the front row...uh...but we were told a chair rack was right outside and we just had to go grab one. Going in and out of the band room was how I noticed the doors have stoppers at the bottom again. Nice! They'd all come off before and you couldn't hold the doors open unless someone physically stood there. I eagerly folded one down with my foot...only to see the door slide forward. Sigh. Well, the thought was good. We also discovered earplugs on our stands. This was from trombone R, who'd made a comment about protecting our hearing last week. Dr. K likes to turn on the metronome to help keep the beat, but it's set at like 100 decibels to be heard over the band, and if you're close to the monitor it's really loud. R had said something about it and also emailed some sort of hearing guide to Dr. K, which got passed along to the band though I haven't read it yet. That was really kind of him to supply everyone with earplugs. At one point I reached for them, which I'd slipped into my flute bag, then realized we'd shifted over a chair and my stuff wasn't easily accessible. Oh well.
We started the full rehearsal with the passacaglia, and about 8:30 Dr. K said we'd go back to the beginning and run that part too. I then asked, are we going to play anything else tonight? (We'd just spent all that time downstairs on the bottle piece; it seemed like we should play that too.) After a moment, Dr. K went, yeah, okay, we'll move on. Having the sectional and being able to work certain parts slowly to get the technique down better really made a difference, plus we got to play our re-tuned bottles for Dr. K and he seemed really impressed with how much better they sounded. Thank you. We did work hard.
I ended up hanging out for a while after band. It started when one of the clarinet players, I think R the section leader, came up to W and me to talk about bottles. Hers was actually a soy sauce bottle. She reiterated how hard it is to play and I think she was asking for tips. (This would be part of the reason for my dissertation. I was measuring the opening and lip of my bottles to compare them, since the Perrier bottle was so much easier to use.) I then walked down the hall to Dr. K's office to let him know what had happened with the bottles in sectionals, and on the way back I started talking to the college students. Trombone D was funny, talking about how they are playing for a high school pep band this weekend after being asked by the band's director, a Jen, to join in. D was talking about how they know a lot of Jens--me, their former vocal teacher (who was my college classmate), and now this one. Later I'd go, so, I hear you're cheating on me with another Jen; that caused D's friends to dissolve into laughter. I mean, it was the most popular name for over a decade; there's a lot of us out there of a certain age. It's bound to happen.
Trombone R happened to be nearby for a few minutes and in talking about names, R mentioned how people like to chant his name. It just so happens that a certain Notre Dame football movie from about 30 years ago has his name as the title, except our R has a spelling variation; his name ends with an I. So when people chant the film title he goes, that's not my name; it's with an I! Therefore, he's now R-with-an-I. Don't forget that.
I mainly was speaking with trombone D and trumpet E, who are in different instrument techniques classes. D was showing me the school-issued flute and clarinet they'd gotten, and eagerly put together the flute, though the scale they have to play isn't coming easily. E then grabbed the flute (conveniently, he's currently in woodwind techniques and the first section is flutes) and showed me his Bb scale from memory. Very nice. Meanwhile, it's been a couple years since D took that class so that's why the scale needs a bit of work, but I did show D the three different ways to play Bb. Impress your friends! There was then a bit of talk about class schedules. Oboe T is teaching the woodwind class and it sounds like she taught something last year as well, but the schedule had to be adjusted since she cannot teach on Thursday nights thanks to band; whatever class was only held on Tuesday nights, not both. I was also told how in previous years, the NCC students who were in band (think flutes L the younger and D) ended up missing parts of two things. They had to leave their one class an hour early to come to Fancy Band, and they had to miss that first hour of Fancy Band because of that other class. Trombone D is having to miss Wednesday night marching band rehearsal because of a mandatory education class that is only on that night. That's bad since D is one of the two drum majors, and it sounds like D is the one that takes control of the situation, so that's not so good that they can't be there all the time. It sounds like things aren't going as smoothly as in the past since Dr. K handed off the reins to his assistant. Hmm.
A couple last things with trombone D--when rehearsal ended, D was talking about how difficult their part was at the end of the bottle song, lots of triplets and accidentals and things. I picked up my music to show them and said, yeah, we have the same thing! D went, but you have keys! I said, hey, that's totally on you; you could've chosen euphonium! Then later we somehow got on the topic of nail polish. D tends to wear it but didn't have any on this time around. Part of why D wears it is to hide the fact that they have dirty fingernails, heh. Well, that's one way to do it. I mentioned how I can't wear nail polish because it honestly feels like it weighs me down when I play. It legitimately bothers me to feel the polish on my nails. D and E were like, I can see that. That was one of the things I first noticed on D, that they wore polish, and I was kind of impressed since I simply hate having it on my fingernails. Toes, no problem.