October 11, 2011

A Good Kind of Busy

It's been a beautiful morning...especially lovely to see the reflections of clouds in the water...

...along with the sunlight.


I ran through a quick warmup before our 7:45 am excerpt class (Prof. Geyer loves those early times) in which I played the 2nd trumpet part of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony. Tchaik 4 is one of those pieces that tends to follow me around. I've performed it (as well as Tchaik 5) multiple times while never having been given the opportunity to play any of his others, even though they are no less standard. Well...we did go over Tchaik 6 in excerpt class last year...so I guess that's something!

This afternoon I'll be taking part in my first ever video conference. Rob does these all the time--touching base with the rest of his group members at Caltech at least once a week--but for me it will be a new experience. At the first meeting of my ethnomusicology class we were each given a copy of the first draft of a new book being written by Tim Rice, the director of UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music and an eminent scholar in the field. He sent us a list of questions to keep in mind as we read and asked us to share any additional comments we felt might help him improve the text. Today we're meeting with him over a live video feed that someone much smarter than myself has set up for us in a library classroom. He's already read each of our responses and will be communicating with us further about them--hopefully our input will prove insightful. It's scintillating to consider that something I say could influence the final publication!

And now I'm off to a lesson...whew! Busy day!

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