Day 39 – GOAT Music!

A late night means that Thursday's blog is a little late being posted but I did write most of it on Thursday. The third of the orchestral pieces arrived today by email. The piece is entitled GOAT Music! and is by Jeremy Thurlow, composer and lecturer in music at Cambridge University. There are more rests than notes in the harp part but this is no bad thing as it gives us more time to work out where to put our fingers for the next entry. Discussing it with Anne at orchestra that evening I learned that the percussion parts are quite hard. GOAT stands for Grade-One-A-Thon but we did speculate whether the piece might be about the goat as an animal, maybe as an extra movement to Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals. The little snippets I tried today were not particularly goat-like but then again I don't know how I would represent a goat through music. Maybe I'll set that as a homework task for my key stage 2 pupils next week as most of them have imagination far out-reaching my own.

Onto the practise and today's session was dedicated to flautist and general organiser of Walden Winds, Sylvie. I met Sylvie and most of the rest of Walden Winds at a Benslow course a few years ago. With around 15 members the group is one of the most sociable ensembles I have come across. They have weekly rehearsals and give background performances for anyone that wants them. They also try to attend courses together and once had a day trip to Salzburg catching the first flight out from Stansted, returning on the last flight. My 25 minutes for Sylvie began with scales then went onto the new orchestral piece. I didn't spend too long on this as I will need to go through more carefully to put some fingerings in (or better still, get Rohan to do it as she's offered!) so I put that off until the weekend. I played my repertoire checking on little details. Rondo, fast becoming the bane of my harp life, still contains errors in places where I lose control of my fingers. I don't mind this sort of thing for a few days but I just can't crack it and have not managed a decent run through of it yet. And of course, the frustration just makes it worse. At orchestra we rehearsed Sibelius's Fifth Symphony. It is not particularly difficult but is large scale and contains lots of rests and entries that are easily missed. Adrian, the conductor warned us that we would need to be alert throughout but there were still plenty of blunders that players of our standard, and that of the violas, should not make. We are not performing this until May but Adrian wanted to do as much work on it in advance and after finishing with a run-through last night to give us a full view of the piece we will return to it after the March concert. I might do the same with Rondo. I've done enough work to know how it goes. Maybe I should plan a few days off then return to it after the weekend. I'd prefer to return to it after 2012 but that might have an impact on my exam!