Day 42 - A day of single reeds

For the budding and enthusiastic amateur the Play Day is a popular event and is a chance to become fully immersed in your instrument, try new challenges and meet and work with illustrious, experienced professionals who know what they're talking about and can pass on all the tricks of the trade. I would love to do something like this on the harp but for today I had to be content with being the illustrious pro that everyone flocks to see. No, wait a minute, that wasn't me, that was James Rae that everyone flocked to see today! I was helping out at today's course which was organised by Trevor Barlow with James Rae as Guest Tutor. Jim is very well known to clarinet, sax and wind players as a wonderful composer and arranger. His jazzy  and popular tunes have kept many pupils enthused and entertained and his more serious works are performed by advanced students and professionals alike. The day was a roaring success but with Trevor's organisation and Jim's warm and inspiring manner these days usually are. I knew it would be a long day as there was a meal booked afterwards so I got up early, finished yesterday's blog and did 10 minutes on the harp before leaving at 8.30am. This session was for John, a great sax playing friend from college, former house mate and another of my inspirations as he is the one who unknowingly gave me the idea for the blog. John also teaches so gets the long summer holiday. Of course like all teachers we do work very hard in those six weeks reviewing our year's work and planning our next but John managed to take time off last summer to walk a good chunk of the South West coast path from Land's End to his family home in Bridport, Dorset. Carrying just his tent, iPhone and a spare pair of socks he started a blog and each evening posted the events of the day which included people he had met, places he had passed (with outlandish names such as Mousehole and Golden Cap) and any interesting and unexpected happenings. There was the Good (seeing dolphins), the Bad (the army of spiders descending from the top of the tent at sunrise) and the Ugly (the photo of that blister - eeuw!) and as time went on some fairly personal reflections. Spending the day on your own with your thoughts for company needs an outlet and the blog was at times revealing. I got quite hooked and enjoyed logging in every day or so to see how far John had got, or to find out if he had got into a skirmish with some German tourists or landed upside down in a ditch (which is what I was secretly hoping but I won't tell him that!). As my own thoughts about the approaching Grade-1-a-thon developed I realised the diary I had been planning to keep anyway would be better on the computer and available for others to read if they wanted. In the first of John's sessions I looked at passages in the GOAT Music! piece and carried on getting a feel for the music. It is very pentatonic (5 note scale) which is awkward because it means you have to miss out strings rather than move to the next. It will need a little bit of playing every day. I then went back to the O Sanctissima which is really nice and almost easily memorable in its structure. This could be an alternative to Rondo but this late on it might be a bit of a risk. I'll give it a few more days and compare it with Rondo in the week. I did a hurried performance of Azaleas in Houston and set off for Cambridge. 13 hours later I managed another 20 minutes for John. I had planned 10 but really got into it. It started with O Sanctissima, moved onto GOAT Music (I've got the first line sorted now) and finished with a run through of The Ball and Azaleas. I'll have a bit more time tomorrow so will go through everything in an orderly way, especially as the Wreck-cital is on Tuesday. Only two weeks to go now.