Fancy Band: Tripping all over ourselves (plus a strip show)
(Fun fact: This post is a palindrome--number 7997.)
So. Let's get in the not-so-wayback machine to several days ago, Thursday, when last Fancy Band had rehearsal. To this point, we'd gotten the surveys about the trip, we'd reached the minimum threshold to go, and the night before we'd finally gotten details about it. I'd woken up early Thursday morning all hot and bothered, and bothered Dr. K, and Dr. K was less than thrilled with me. Around lunchtime, I ended up resending the email essentially, writing it more nicely and making sure the part of his email that I'd quoted was clearly visible so he could tell what I was responding to. He did not answer.
I knew it could be awkward getting to band, and dreaded the thought of running into him in the hallway. In the past, if something has come up between us, he's let it go by the time band comes up and he acts like he's happy to see me if I do see him coming down the hall from his office. This time, he was already in the band room and talking to W, with his back to the door (she sits right there), and I had to walk past him to get to my seat. I was feeling kind of weird and was kind of subdued/reserved/quiet and didn't really look at him much, preferring to look at the floor or my stand when I wasn't playing.
C was late, so M--the flute 3/piccolo player for this round--ended up sitting next to me, which is fine. When C showed up, she was a little confused and ended up on the end, separated from the other 2nd flutes. When we had some flute stuff come up that didn't involve M, I had to gesture to him to make sure C got the memo, which was a little awkward. (M has a lot more rests than we do, and even when he's not on picc, he doesn't necessarily have a flute part to play.) I will say it was kind of fun to peer at each other's parts. He's playing off an iPad, and I can tell he's in his 20s because the print is tinier than it would be on an 8.5"x11" piece of paper. He was having to blow up the size in order to write in notes. I saw that he also color-coded his music, lilac purple for one, kind of yellow/chartreuse for the other, so he'd always know what instrument he should have in his hands. That's a pretty good idea.
Dr. K started off rehearsal by talking about the trip. A few other people were late so they missed part of the explanation. This came about because such a trip was already in the works featuring several Ohio-based groups, including a wind band like us and a high school group. Whatever the third group was, they got invited to play at Midwest, the big music convention held in Chicago in December. This is what Dr. K has been trying to submit us to do. The third group could not do both, and they opted for doing Midwest instead, which put the other two groups in a lurch. Part of it is because it costs $100,000 to play Carnegie Hall. It doesn't matter who you are, that's the fee. There is also a vetting process, as you have to be of a certain caliber to be considered to play there.
The two groups tried to find someone else in their area, or just Ohio, to come along, but schools are run differently there than in Illinois. There's a whole funding process that sounds possibly long and drawn out, and programs have been cut or had their funding slashed, and it would be bad optics to slash something and then go, but we found money for Carnegie Hall! Yeah...no. So they had to expand their reach, and the wind band conductor, Dr. D, knew about us. He knows Dr. K and had come out and worked with us on a march back last season or so. Because we have a couple albums out, Dr. D knew that people could easily find us and listen to us and know that we fit the criteria, and Dr. K told us, it doesn't matter how we get to Carnegie Hall, so long as we get there, and that's why he jumped at the chance.
This trip had already been in the works, to the point where the original cut-off date to sign up was actually April 1st. It's been extended to April 22nd to allow us time to sign up, given that we found out about it on April 6th. Why that part of it wasn't relayed to us in the initial email, I don't know; that was part of my consternation over the whole thing. There was stuff he shared on Thursday that he could've shared to some degree on Saturday, especially involving the truncated timeframe. Just knowing that would've helped put my mind at ease. Why he didn't think that was important, I don't know.
Obviously, there were a lot of questions. One came from bassoon V, who is in college currently and about to graduate. She said, I hope that I will be getting a big girl job making big girl money by this time next year, but right now, I'm not, and I won't be able to make the payments as requested (20% installments over a number of months, so roughly $400 at a crack). This was exactly one of my fears for the college kids. I know trumpet E is saving up to buy himself a better C trumpet, and those are about $3500, so paying for this trip would take him roughly 60% of the cost of that trumpet, a price he wasn't expecting, and he still has another year of school to go. He has plans on going to grad school right after finishing undergrad, so it's going to be a while before he gets a full-time job. Flute B eagerly raised her hand while V was talking, said she had the same issue, and she'd gone to the travel agency website and used the chat box to talk with someone who ended up being really helpful. They will work with you to make up an individualized plan. Then, someone in the back said, I don't know who has used this travel group recently, but if you miss a payment or two, they're not going to come after you, so long as you're paid up by a certain point. Dr. K went, it's not like they'll repossess your house if you miss a mortgage payment or two! He also said that he doesn't want cost to be an issue keeping people from this experience. (I'm not sure he offered a solution, though. He also mentioned that he has gone to Carnegie before, but as a player, I think about 12 years ago, he said.)
I asked a question related to roommates, because there was pricing for single occupancy and double occupancy, and I'm single, I don't have a spouse, so what am I signing up for? How would I get a roommate? Dr. K said that's all done through the website, where the agency will keep track of the people who sign up for double occupancy, and I guess they'll assign us a roommate or we can see who the people are who could be paired up. Also, he'd mentioned going up to 3 or 4 per room; that's something we'd have to discuss with the agency, and everyone involved would have to group up and talk to them, but the price would go down for those people. He also said they'd aimed high with airline pricing, so that while we don't know what flight is being taken at this time, that cost should not go up and it could be less than quoted, which is nice.
The tubas had a legitimate question: How are our instruments getting there? Dr. K put the kibosh on my initial thought, which was to rent a truck, but he didn't want that liability on the band should something happen, especially since he mentioned hiring a driver. All I was thinking of was when Regular Band went to San Antonio and AD2 and her husband drove a Ryder-style truck carrying all the large equipment. Yes, they did have to leave a couple days early to make it down there in time while the rest of us flew, but they did this voluntarily. I don't know who paid for the truck but we certainly didn't hire a driver, though driving in San Antonio is likely worlds different than driving in Manhattan and I wouldn't recommend that except in dire circumstances, but then again if you've ever tried traveling with a tuba, you know it's not easy. Like, I kind of feel like one of the tuba players was like, I'm out, once Dr. K said the band would not be renting a truck. Now, anyone is apparently free to drive themselves there, so perhaps people with larger instruments could carpool or something, but this is one of the things that would need to be worked out. At least with percussion, we do not have to bring anything except for maybe some specialized instruments, but a lot of the stuff should already be there.
(Related to traveling, there was a line in one of Wednesday's emails that stuck out to me, where Dr. K said, you'd be flying on this day and that day, and because he said "you" and not "we," that suggested to me that he wasn't going to be flying with us at the very least. On Friday, we found out why.)
Tenor sax K asked about fundraising, like she figured there would be something like that involved to help cover costs. Understandable. Dr. K took her question to mean individual fundraising, I guess like you'd do in high school (bringing back memories of hoagie and cheese & sausage sales...shudder...I did way too much fundraising as a Catholic school student to want to participate in any of that in high school), and said it would be too hard to track individual sales, but perhaps if the band did do any fundraisers it would be to offset bringing the big instruments there. Um...did we not attempt to do a few restaurant fundraisers in the past year? How hard would it be to try to raise some funds to bring down the Carnegie Hall rental cost? Even if it's just a few bucks per person, we'll take whatever we can get. He did make a new logo but didn't make new decals, so that's a possibility. Maybe a merch store on the website?
At some point I made a comment about the trip, I forget what exactly, and I feel like I made a mention of wishing I'd had more info about it from the get-go, and Dr. K got kind of cross with me, saying all the other feedback he'd gotten about the trip was positive and implying I'm the only one who wasn't immediately excited about it. ...Yeah. He's definitely not thrilled with me. Great. (What can I say, I'm older than the majority of the band and I think pragmatically. I want to be able to make an informed decision. I can't when I'm not given enough info. But I've gone over that already.) There was also a point where Dr. K mentioned additional rehearsals to stay ready for the performance, since it's after the season ends, and should we stay on Thursdays for that? I heard other people say yes, but I gave a vehement no--both Regular Band and the summer band a lot of people from Fancy Band play in are both on Thursdays in the summer, so Dr. K acknowledged he'd have to work something out. I've since realized we'd only have one or two Thursdays in June before the concert so we could rehearse into May on Thursdays if necessary. At the time, I did suggest the possibility of Sundays.
Eventually we got around to the music, and Dr. K said, if you noticed the weird dude sitting in the back, that's Dr. T, the chorus conductor. Dr. K would be running the back half of Carmina, which we hadn't done last week, and then Dr. T would take over and run the front half so we could get used to his styles and tempos. Fair enough. We have this rehearsal and next week's rehearsal with the band alone, and then the following one would be the last rehearsal of the year, as well as the dress rehearsal with the choir.
We started with movement 12, the one that begins with the crazy high bassoon solo. Just as bassoon K suspected, bassoon V had a hard time with it. I guess she has a funky bassoon and the high notes that come out of it are weird, so she said she'd do what she could with it this week and would come back and be better next time. Dr. K suggested potentially giving the solo to another instrument, but the likely one would be English horn, and that player is not participating for this performance. Also, the end of the solo then jumps down to the bottom of the range, so it would be hard to have a different instrument be able to do some of that, I suppose. Anyway, Dr. K did skip some of the movements, and one or two were choir/vocals only (well, I think one included percussion), but so much of rehearsal was taken up by discussion and Dr. K wanted to be sure Dr. T got his allotted time, so by 7:30 he'd turned over the reins. (I think we talked for a good 20 minutes about the trip.)
Once Dr. T took over, Dr. K grabbed a chair and sat down next to the door, by the other end of the first and second rows. He was still sort of in my sight line but I didn't look over at him for the most part. Dr. T apologized that he was a little under the weather...oh goody, since he was only a few feet away and basically in my air space, which I thought of at one point when I had random postnasal drip and had to cough. He also started off with a sweater over a shirt, and at one point at least halfway through his portion, he peeled off the sweater. He then said his choir takes bets on at what point during rehearsal that the sweater will come off, and that upsets him, because they never let him in on the action, so that they're making money off him and he'd like to make that money, and perhaps the band could talk some sense into them. (Or get in on the action.)
We got a surprise; Dr. T told us he was going to have Dr. K conduct some movements. I know there's at least one band-only movement. Aha, now we know that he will at least be involved, so that's good. It's always interesting to see how someone else works, especially given that he's a choir director. He has different gestures. Also, given how bombastic a piece this is, and that he'll have to conduct us on the ground and the choir up in the loft, he has to make grander movements in order to be seen by everybody. Better, he was singing along as he was conducting--but not because he felt we needed it, like Dr. K; it was because that must be what he does when he actually conducts. Meanwhile, I'm having a lot of flashbacks with this piece, so that while I don't recall the lyrics, I do know the melodies, and I am totally singing along as well. What can I say, I have a lot of rests, and some of it helps me count. I'll have to not do that during the concert, though.
Dr. T had some colorful ways of describing things. He kept wanting us to be angrier, more vehement with some of our playing. Later in the piece, he was talking about I think blood and sex and violence, and that description made me go, it's like Game of Thrones! He went, pretty much! He was fond of telling our low brass to give him more, which is a dangerous thing to ask, heh. He wanted us to drown out the choir in the first movement, the most famous one, to try to get them to sing louder. Movement 3 got interesting. He was ready to go right on and I went, wait, page turn! He said, okay, I like the flutes, I'll let you have your page turn...but not the oboes. No! We like the oboes! I said. (I actually said, we like oboe M, which I realize is rude to oboe T; we like her too.) The flutes do start off (with the oboe and mallet percussion) with this rather difficult lick, like triplet 32nd notes, and if it were me, I'd cut us down to only a couple on the part because it sounds kind of messy. But Dr. T liked it, saying, it's like getting stabbed with icicles! I leaned over in my chair so I could see Dr. K and said, for the record, he was looking directly at me when he said that. I thought he'd appreciate that. Yeah, Dr. T was looking at me a lot when he spoke. I wonder if he remembers me from the holiday concert. I did also bring something up later in that same movement regarding his conducting, to make sure our quarter notes lined up with his tempo (half note gets the beat right there, I believe), and he was perfectly happy to do so.
A little later, I think with movement 7, Dr. K had long told us that for certain holds which the flutes have but others are resting and need to know when to come in after that, the holds are sort of arbitrary. They're written out to specific lengths but they're not being counted that way. With Dr. T there, we learned why: For some of the holds, the sopranos are belting out a really high note, and he's only holding it for as long as they sound good, basically. He doesn't want to overtax them. I saw what note I'm playing and figured they're holding the same one, so I asked, are they singing a high B? Yes, he confirmed. Yeah, okay, that makes sense to not make them hold that out for 8 full beats or whatever. (This is also why I'm rehearsing with the recording, because I'm getting to hear those transition points and learn what comes after my part there. The counting is super funky in this piece and knowing those aural cues is so helpful. Also, it means I'm not constantly changing tempos on my metronome.) Oh! And this was a nice revelation: Dr. T's tempos are slower since he is taking the vocalists into account. They may also have 16th notes in places, but they are singing through them and have to enunciate and such, so to accommodate that, he's not going as fast. There was also a point in one movement that Dr. K had run through earlier in the evening where Dr. T went, I know you did it that way, but I'm going to do it differently for vocalist purposes. The flutes go up to a high C at the apex, and the sopranos are hitting that as well, so however quickly we can get through that for them, the better. That's not a note you really want to draw out. There's one movement where the flutes have these running 8th notes that come across more like 16th notes in the recording and it felt like he took those a lot slower than I was expecting, which made it completely manageable. I know I mentioned something to M about that. M is perfectly capable of playing this at whatever tempos are thrown at him, but given how exposed his part can be, I'm sure he's fine with slower.
After rehearsal, I found myself talking to NBH and M, and once we cleared out the chairs and were standing to the side, big clarinet T came over and was sort of hovering, so I greeted him and asked how he was doing. He was showing me pictures of this t-shirt that said "No Takis" on it, because his kids love Takis, and it was something like, no Taki when teacher Taki on it. The band was especially chatty this week (gee, I wonder why) and Dr. K had called us out on it, so I told T, Dr. K needs that, and I think T went down the hall to show him the picture. I did talk to the three of them about some of my concerns regarding the trip, and I appreciated them listening; nobody was critical of my point of view. They seemed to get it.
I will say that part of me thought about walking down the hall, as it looked like Dr. K was still there when I finally left the band room, but I chose not to. I don't know, I was feeling weird and nervous and ultimately had intestinal issues that night, which was fun; I love it when my stomach churns over something that's happened between us. I just...didn't feel like getting into it that night. And then my world got shaken to its core less than 24 hours later. It's funny, because I was thinking about him getting an assistant, because it seems like a lot for one person to handle; especially this past week with Regular Band and AD2 being out of commission, it was great that we had ADB to take over the whole thing, and if we didn't have him, rehearsal would've had to have been canceled. I think about stuff like that, so to get his email saying starting today, clarinet A would now be assistant director A and would be handling the majority of rehearsals next season, that wasn't all that surprising in a way. I mean, the reason behind it was, but having a second person can only be a good thing. That was something I realized this weekend as well, that Regular Band had a changing of the guard last year, and overall it's going well. It's not like anyone went, the director isn't here anymore, so I'm leaving! Life went on. People can always leave if they feel like it. So I've at least mellowed on that portion of the situation, and I know that when we worked with director A during the first season--she guest-conducted the band when Dr. K was out of town--she had some really good thoughts on what we were doing, which was hard since it was our first rehearsal with that piece so we had no idea what Dr. K even wanted. Given his peccadillos, I almost wonder if she'll be better than him, to be honest. So I have some curiosity about that. Though, I will say, with everything that transpired in that past week, my initial reaction after getting Friday's email was to say I no longer had faith in Dr. K's ability to lead the band, and therefore I wanted to resign. But again, director A may restore that faith. This is why I need to tell people, my initial reaction is not my final reaction. I do need to let things settle and mellow before I come to a final conclusion. I also want to get through the next rehearsal as well and get a feeling for things from the others. At the very least, this is an exciting opportunity for A. Good for her.
By the way, his email mentioned that some of us may have seen something on Facebook about his job changing, and I thought perhaps he'd made a post and I'd tried searching for that on my own with no luck. My mom put on her Nancy Drew hat and went looking Saturday morning. It turned out it wasn't an actual post, just that he'd changed his job description to "Future band director at such-and-such university, starting August 1st, 2024." In trying to find that on Facebook, I stumbled onto a website he has for himself, that I believe he started to promote his compositions, and on it there's a video from earlier this calendar year. I remembered him saying he wanted to update some of his personal conducting materials, and it was only then that I realized, he was updating his resume. I felt so stupid. This had been in the works for several months. And he'd visited another university earlier this year under the guise of guest conducting, and came in to us unprepared following that stint, and now I wonder if that was really an audition of sorts and it didn't work out or the other place made him a better offer.
I did reach out to him today. I'd sent him a couple texts on Friday and never got a response, so this morning I reached out and told him I loved him, he's one of my favorite people, and while intellectually I know he's doing what he feels is right for himself, emotionally I'm devastated. I really want to see him and talk to him and give him a hug, but it doesn't seem like he wants that from me. I get it. I upset him. And now I know he had even more on his plate that he was concerned with, as based on his Facebook post, it clocked him as being in Florida on Friday. He must have updated his profile and emailed us after signing his paperwork and such. He wasn't even in town. So...yeah. I have no idea where he even is. I guess I'll have to wait and see what Thursday brings. I don't have a lot of confidence that I'll hear from him before then, unless he's waiting for me to call, and that likely won't happen.
So. Let's get in the not-so-wayback machine to several days ago, Thursday, when last Fancy Band had rehearsal. To this point, we'd gotten the surveys about the trip, we'd reached the minimum threshold to go, and the night before we'd finally gotten details about it. I'd woken up early Thursday morning all hot and bothered, and bothered Dr. K, and Dr. K was less than thrilled with me. Around lunchtime, I ended up resending the email essentially, writing it more nicely and making sure the part of his email that I'd quoted was clearly visible so he could tell what I was responding to. He did not answer.
I knew it could be awkward getting to band, and dreaded the thought of running into him in the hallway. In the past, if something has come up between us, he's let it go by the time band comes up and he acts like he's happy to see me if I do see him coming down the hall from his office. This time, he was already in the band room and talking to W, with his back to the door (she sits right there), and I had to walk past him to get to my seat. I was feeling kind of weird and was kind of subdued/reserved/quiet and didn't really look at him much, preferring to look at the floor or my stand when I wasn't playing.
C was late, so M--the flute 3/piccolo player for this round--ended up sitting next to me, which is fine. When C showed up, she was a little confused and ended up on the end, separated from the other 2nd flutes. When we had some flute stuff come up that didn't involve M, I had to gesture to him to make sure C got the memo, which was a little awkward. (M has a lot more rests than we do, and even when he's not on picc, he doesn't necessarily have a flute part to play.) I will say it was kind of fun to peer at each other's parts. He's playing off an iPad, and I can tell he's in his 20s because the print is tinier than it would be on an 8.5"x11" piece of paper. He was having to blow up the size in order to write in notes. I saw that he also color-coded his music, lilac purple for one, kind of yellow/chartreuse for the other, so he'd always know what instrument he should have in his hands. That's a pretty good idea.
Dr. K started off rehearsal by talking about the trip. A few other people were late so they missed part of the explanation. This came about because such a trip was already in the works featuring several Ohio-based groups, including a wind band like us and a high school group. Whatever the third group was, they got invited to play at Midwest, the big music convention held in Chicago in December. This is what Dr. K has been trying to submit us to do. The third group could not do both, and they opted for doing Midwest instead, which put the other two groups in a lurch. Part of it is because it costs $100,000 to play Carnegie Hall. It doesn't matter who you are, that's the fee. There is also a vetting process, as you have to be of a certain caliber to be considered to play there.
The two groups tried to find someone else in their area, or just Ohio, to come along, but schools are run differently there than in Illinois. There's a whole funding process that sounds possibly long and drawn out, and programs have been cut or had their funding slashed, and it would be bad optics to slash something and then go, but we found money for Carnegie Hall! Yeah...no. So they had to expand their reach, and the wind band conductor, Dr. D, knew about us. He knows Dr. K and had come out and worked with us on a march back last season or so. Because we have a couple albums out, Dr. D knew that people could easily find us and listen to us and know that we fit the criteria, and Dr. K told us, it doesn't matter how we get to Carnegie Hall, so long as we get there, and that's why he jumped at the chance.
This trip had already been in the works, to the point where the original cut-off date to sign up was actually April 1st. It's been extended to April 22nd to allow us time to sign up, given that we found out about it on April 6th. Why that part of it wasn't relayed to us in the initial email, I don't know; that was part of my consternation over the whole thing. There was stuff he shared on Thursday that he could've shared to some degree on Saturday, especially involving the truncated timeframe. Just knowing that would've helped put my mind at ease. Why he didn't think that was important, I don't know.
Obviously, there were a lot of questions. One came from bassoon V, who is in college currently and about to graduate. She said, I hope that I will be getting a big girl job making big girl money by this time next year, but right now, I'm not, and I won't be able to make the payments as requested (20% installments over a number of months, so roughly $400 at a crack). This was exactly one of my fears for the college kids. I know trumpet E is saving up to buy himself a better C trumpet, and those are about $3500, so paying for this trip would take him roughly 60% of the cost of that trumpet, a price he wasn't expecting, and he still has another year of school to go. He has plans on going to grad school right after finishing undergrad, so it's going to be a while before he gets a full-time job. Flute B eagerly raised her hand while V was talking, said she had the same issue, and she'd gone to the travel agency website and used the chat box to talk with someone who ended up being really helpful. They will work with you to make up an individualized plan. Then, someone in the back said, I don't know who has used this travel group recently, but if you miss a payment or two, they're not going to come after you, so long as you're paid up by a certain point. Dr. K went, it's not like they'll repossess your house if you miss a mortgage payment or two! He also said that he doesn't want cost to be an issue keeping people from this experience. (I'm not sure he offered a solution, though. He also mentioned that he has gone to Carnegie before, but as a player, I think about 12 years ago, he said.)
I asked a question related to roommates, because there was pricing for single occupancy and double occupancy, and I'm single, I don't have a spouse, so what am I signing up for? How would I get a roommate? Dr. K said that's all done through the website, where the agency will keep track of the people who sign up for double occupancy, and I guess they'll assign us a roommate or we can see who the people are who could be paired up. Also, he'd mentioned going up to 3 or 4 per room; that's something we'd have to discuss with the agency, and everyone involved would have to group up and talk to them, but the price would go down for those people. He also said they'd aimed high with airline pricing, so that while we don't know what flight is being taken at this time, that cost should not go up and it could be less than quoted, which is nice.
The tubas had a legitimate question: How are our instruments getting there? Dr. K put the kibosh on my initial thought, which was to rent a truck, but he didn't want that liability on the band should something happen, especially since he mentioned hiring a driver. All I was thinking of was when Regular Band went to San Antonio and AD2 and her husband drove a Ryder-style truck carrying all the large equipment. Yes, they did have to leave a couple days early to make it down there in time while the rest of us flew, but they did this voluntarily. I don't know who paid for the truck but we certainly didn't hire a driver, though driving in San Antonio is likely worlds different than driving in Manhattan and I wouldn't recommend that except in dire circumstances, but then again if you've ever tried traveling with a tuba, you know it's not easy. Like, I kind of feel like one of the tuba players was like, I'm out, once Dr. K said the band would not be renting a truck. Now, anyone is apparently free to drive themselves there, so perhaps people with larger instruments could carpool or something, but this is one of the things that would need to be worked out. At least with percussion, we do not have to bring anything except for maybe some specialized instruments, but a lot of the stuff should already be there.
(Related to traveling, there was a line in one of Wednesday's emails that stuck out to me, where Dr. K said, you'd be flying on this day and that day, and because he said "you" and not "we," that suggested to me that he wasn't going to be flying with us at the very least. On Friday, we found out why.)
Tenor sax K asked about fundraising, like she figured there would be something like that involved to help cover costs. Understandable. Dr. K took her question to mean individual fundraising, I guess like you'd do in high school (bringing back memories of hoagie and cheese & sausage sales...shudder...I did way too much fundraising as a Catholic school student to want to participate in any of that in high school), and said it would be too hard to track individual sales, but perhaps if the band did do any fundraisers it would be to offset bringing the big instruments there. Um...did we not attempt to do a few restaurant fundraisers in the past year? How hard would it be to try to raise some funds to bring down the Carnegie Hall rental cost? Even if it's just a few bucks per person, we'll take whatever we can get. He did make a new logo but didn't make new decals, so that's a possibility. Maybe a merch store on the website?
At some point I made a comment about the trip, I forget what exactly, and I feel like I made a mention of wishing I'd had more info about it from the get-go, and Dr. K got kind of cross with me, saying all the other feedback he'd gotten about the trip was positive and implying I'm the only one who wasn't immediately excited about it. ...Yeah. He's definitely not thrilled with me. Great. (What can I say, I'm older than the majority of the band and I think pragmatically. I want to be able to make an informed decision. I can't when I'm not given enough info. But I've gone over that already.) There was also a point where Dr. K mentioned additional rehearsals to stay ready for the performance, since it's after the season ends, and should we stay on Thursdays for that? I heard other people say yes, but I gave a vehement no--both Regular Band and the summer band a lot of people from Fancy Band play in are both on Thursdays in the summer, so Dr. K acknowledged he'd have to work something out. I've since realized we'd only have one or two Thursdays in June before the concert so we could rehearse into May on Thursdays if necessary. At the time, I did suggest the possibility of Sundays.
Eventually we got around to the music, and Dr. K said, if you noticed the weird dude sitting in the back, that's Dr. T, the chorus conductor. Dr. K would be running the back half of Carmina, which we hadn't done last week, and then Dr. T would take over and run the front half so we could get used to his styles and tempos. Fair enough. We have this rehearsal and next week's rehearsal with the band alone, and then the following one would be the last rehearsal of the year, as well as the dress rehearsal with the choir.
We started with movement 12, the one that begins with the crazy high bassoon solo. Just as bassoon K suspected, bassoon V had a hard time with it. I guess she has a funky bassoon and the high notes that come out of it are weird, so she said she'd do what she could with it this week and would come back and be better next time. Dr. K suggested potentially giving the solo to another instrument, but the likely one would be English horn, and that player is not participating for this performance. Also, the end of the solo then jumps down to the bottom of the range, so it would be hard to have a different instrument be able to do some of that, I suppose. Anyway, Dr. K did skip some of the movements, and one or two were choir/vocals only (well, I think one included percussion), but so much of rehearsal was taken up by discussion and Dr. K wanted to be sure Dr. T got his allotted time, so by 7:30 he'd turned over the reins. (I think we talked for a good 20 minutes about the trip.)
Once Dr. T took over, Dr. K grabbed a chair and sat down next to the door, by the other end of the first and second rows. He was still sort of in my sight line but I didn't look over at him for the most part. Dr. T apologized that he was a little under the weather...oh goody, since he was only a few feet away and basically in my air space, which I thought of at one point when I had random postnasal drip and had to cough. He also started off with a sweater over a shirt, and at one point at least halfway through his portion, he peeled off the sweater. He then said his choir takes bets on at what point during rehearsal that the sweater will come off, and that upsets him, because they never let him in on the action, so that they're making money off him and he'd like to make that money, and perhaps the band could talk some sense into them. (Or get in on the action.)
We got a surprise; Dr. T told us he was going to have Dr. K conduct some movements. I know there's at least one band-only movement. Aha, now we know that he will at least be involved, so that's good. It's always interesting to see how someone else works, especially given that he's a choir director. He has different gestures. Also, given how bombastic a piece this is, and that he'll have to conduct us on the ground and the choir up in the loft, he has to make grander movements in order to be seen by everybody. Better, he was singing along as he was conducting--but not because he felt we needed it, like Dr. K; it was because that must be what he does when he actually conducts. Meanwhile, I'm having a lot of flashbacks with this piece, so that while I don't recall the lyrics, I do know the melodies, and I am totally singing along as well. What can I say, I have a lot of rests, and some of it helps me count. I'll have to not do that during the concert, though.
Dr. T had some colorful ways of describing things. He kept wanting us to be angrier, more vehement with some of our playing. Later in the piece, he was talking about I think blood and sex and violence, and that description made me go, it's like Game of Thrones! He went, pretty much! He was fond of telling our low brass to give him more, which is a dangerous thing to ask, heh. He wanted us to drown out the choir in the first movement, the most famous one, to try to get them to sing louder. Movement 3 got interesting. He was ready to go right on and I went, wait, page turn! He said, okay, I like the flutes, I'll let you have your page turn...but not the oboes. No! We like the oboes! I said. (I actually said, we like oboe M, which I realize is rude to oboe T; we like her too.) The flutes do start off (with the oboe and mallet percussion) with this rather difficult lick, like triplet 32nd notes, and if it were me, I'd cut us down to only a couple on the part because it sounds kind of messy. But Dr. T liked it, saying, it's like getting stabbed with icicles! I leaned over in my chair so I could see Dr. K and said, for the record, he was looking directly at me when he said that. I thought he'd appreciate that. Yeah, Dr. T was looking at me a lot when he spoke. I wonder if he remembers me from the holiday concert. I did also bring something up later in that same movement regarding his conducting, to make sure our quarter notes lined up with his tempo (half note gets the beat right there, I believe), and he was perfectly happy to do so.
A little later, I think with movement 7, Dr. K had long told us that for certain holds which the flutes have but others are resting and need to know when to come in after that, the holds are sort of arbitrary. They're written out to specific lengths but they're not being counted that way. With Dr. T there, we learned why: For some of the holds, the sopranos are belting out a really high note, and he's only holding it for as long as they sound good, basically. He doesn't want to overtax them. I saw what note I'm playing and figured they're holding the same one, so I asked, are they singing a high B? Yes, he confirmed. Yeah, okay, that makes sense to not make them hold that out for 8 full beats or whatever. (This is also why I'm rehearsing with the recording, because I'm getting to hear those transition points and learn what comes after my part there. The counting is super funky in this piece and knowing those aural cues is so helpful. Also, it means I'm not constantly changing tempos on my metronome.) Oh! And this was a nice revelation: Dr. T's tempos are slower since he is taking the vocalists into account. They may also have 16th notes in places, but they are singing through them and have to enunciate and such, so to accommodate that, he's not going as fast. There was also a point in one movement that Dr. K had run through earlier in the evening where Dr. T went, I know you did it that way, but I'm going to do it differently for vocalist purposes. The flutes go up to a high C at the apex, and the sopranos are hitting that as well, so however quickly we can get through that for them, the better. That's not a note you really want to draw out. There's one movement where the flutes have these running 8th notes that come across more like 16th notes in the recording and it felt like he took those a lot slower than I was expecting, which made it completely manageable. I know I mentioned something to M about that. M is perfectly capable of playing this at whatever tempos are thrown at him, but given how exposed his part can be, I'm sure he's fine with slower.
After rehearsal, I found myself talking to NBH and M, and once we cleared out the chairs and were standing to the side, big clarinet T came over and was sort of hovering, so I greeted him and asked how he was doing. He was showing me pictures of this t-shirt that said "No Takis" on it, because his kids love Takis, and it was something like, no Taki when teacher Taki on it. The band was especially chatty this week (gee, I wonder why) and Dr. K had called us out on it, so I told T, Dr. K needs that, and I think T went down the hall to show him the picture. I did talk to the three of them about some of my concerns regarding the trip, and I appreciated them listening; nobody was critical of my point of view. They seemed to get it.
I will say that part of me thought about walking down the hall, as it looked like Dr. K was still there when I finally left the band room, but I chose not to. I don't know, I was feeling weird and nervous and ultimately had intestinal issues that night, which was fun; I love it when my stomach churns over something that's happened between us. I just...didn't feel like getting into it that night. And then my world got shaken to its core less than 24 hours later. It's funny, because I was thinking about him getting an assistant, because it seems like a lot for one person to handle; especially this past week with Regular Band and AD2 being out of commission, it was great that we had ADB to take over the whole thing, and if we didn't have him, rehearsal would've had to have been canceled. I think about stuff like that, so to get his email saying starting today, clarinet A would now be assistant director A and would be handling the majority of rehearsals next season, that wasn't all that surprising in a way. I mean, the reason behind it was, but having a second person can only be a good thing. That was something I realized this weekend as well, that Regular Band had a changing of the guard last year, and overall it's going well. It's not like anyone went, the director isn't here anymore, so I'm leaving! Life went on. People can always leave if they feel like it. So I've at least mellowed on that portion of the situation, and I know that when we worked with director A during the first season--she guest-conducted the band when Dr. K was out of town--she had some really good thoughts on what we were doing, which was hard since it was our first rehearsal with that piece so we had no idea what Dr. K even wanted. Given his peccadillos, I almost wonder if she'll be better than him, to be honest. So I have some curiosity about that. Though, I will say, with everything that transpired in that past week, my initial reaction after getting Friday's email was to say I no longer had faith in Dr. K's ability to lead the band, and therefore I wanted to resign. But again, director A may restore that faith. This is why I need to tell people, my initial reaction is not my final reaction. I do need to let things settle and mellow before I come to a final conclusion. I also want to get through the next rehearsal as well and get a feeling for things from the others. At the very least, this is an exciting opportunity for A. Good for her.
By the way, his email mentioned that some of us may have seen something on Facebook about his job changing, and I thought perhaps he'd made a post and I'd tried searching for that on my own with no luck. My mom put on her Nancy Drew hat and went looking Saturday morning. It turned out it wasn't an actual post, just that he'd changed his job description to "Future band director at such-and-such university, starting August 1st, 2024." In trying to find that on Facebook, I stumbled onto a website he has for himself, that I believe he started to promote his compositions, and on it there's a video from earlier this calendar year. I remembered him saying he wanted to update some of his personal conducting materials, and it was only then that I realized, he was updating his resume. I felt so stupid. This had been in the works for several months. And he'd visited another university earlier this year under the guise of guest conducting, and came in to us unprepared following that stint, and now I wonder if that was really an audition of sorts and it didn't work out or the other place made him a better offer.
I did reach out to him today. I'd sent him a couple texts on Friday and never got a response, so this morning I reached out and told him I loved him, he's one of my favorite people, and while intellectually I know he's doing what he feels is right for himself, emotionally I'm devastated. I really want to see him and talk to him and give him a hug, but it doesn't seem like he wants that from me. I get it. I upset him. And now I know he had even more on his plate that he was concerned with, as based on his Facebook post, it clocked him as being in Florida on Friday. He must have updated his profile and emailed us after signing his paperwork and such. He wasn't even in town. So...yeah. I have no idea where he even is. I guess I'll have to wait and see what Thursday brings. I don't have a lot of confidence that I'll hear from him before then, unless he's waiting for me to call, and that likely won't happen.