Home, Hair and Horns

Well, I'm officially 13 days away from heading home for a visit. I can't stress enough that I really want to go home for a while. Not that I don't like what I'm doing here. I, in fact, love going to school at UVIC, and I've picked up quite a few new tricks that I hope to one day employ with my own students, and I'm in the best musical shape of my life. However, being older than everyone around me kinda separates me from the rest of the music school, and being new doesn't help either. I get along great with people, but the end of the day comes, and I head home and start over again. It has become a very repetitive routine. It has become a very repetitive routine. It has become a... well... anyways, I do the same thing every day. So it'll be a nice time to not only get to go home and see Megan (whom I miss very much), but to break up this schedule of mine a bit.

I also can't wait to get a haircut. Seriously. I had my hair cut in Victoria once, and that is never happening again, I swear. It was back in September, I think, and I wasn't going back to Lethbridge until November, so I went and found a place near my apartment that wasn't a "Supercuts" or something. Then I went in and told the lady I wanted about an inch and a half cut off, and the sides clippered, and so forth. Turns out, she thought that I wanted only an inch and a half of hair on my head. This made me look like I had just started growing my hair back after I shaved my head! It was terrible. It wasn't until about December that my hair was able to be cut the way it normally is. So, because of this incident, I am not getting my hair cut in Victoria, but back in Lethbridge when I visit. This serves two purposes. The first is that I have to visit more often, or run the risk of looking like an uncaged yeti. The second is that I actually have a good hair cut, done by someone who has a reasonable understanding of the english language, and does what I ask them to do.

Who'd have thought that hair was so complicated?

I've started to frustrate a few people in the group that I'm playing with right now, I think. I've got a row of saxophones in front of me, and I'm drawing glares, much like I did with the viola player from last semester. (Long story with that one... Take one Wagner Overture, add a fff bass trombone/tuba section, put a 1st/2nd year viola player in front of my bell = viola player who squirms in his seat, desparately trying to put in earplugs at the right moment.) Anyways, in terms of volume, this current `bone section isn't as present as they could be in various passages, so I'm not backing down, and making them play up to my dynamic. Not that I'm always right on things like that, but I'm pretty sure I'm right, so we're playing louder. Anyways, now I've got a row of saxes staring at me, especially in some marches. Have people not figured out that trombones are there to be loud? I mean, I can play quiet when I need to... that's when no one is staring at me, right? Just playing what's on the page! I even get people looking into practice room windows when I am practicing. Am I too loud in the room too? Just odd, that's what I think.

I've been working on an Eric Ewazen piece for the concerto competition here in Victoria. I've almost got the whole thing down, except for a few passages. But that's coming along very well, as far as I can tell. Gene's been great to work with. He is very much like Ken, but different as well. It is hard to describe, but I've gained quite a few tools for teaching myself, which I can also use in the future. Anyways, Eric Ewazen.com has a clip of the piece I'm working on right now. I'm hoping to get a string quintet together to perform the work, but we'll see what happens with that. For now, I'll keep trying to back my assigned accompanist into a corner so that we can rehearse at least once this year...

Also, visit The Peterson Project and watch this video. I get a kick out of all of Steve's trombone videos, sometimes they can be accurate (sometimes not...). Would I be too much of a geek to say that he uses the same mouthpiece as I do?