A new KSO season. Four pieces. Four forces shaping whatever lives beneath the third horn chair. It has been a while since I documented the universes. They never really stopped forming, of course. Rehearsals happened. Concerts happened. Water keys were emptied. Entire civilizations presumably rose, discovered agriculture, developed questionable systems of government, invented social media, immediately regretted it, and vanished … Read more
Creation, catastrophe, and a wall of horn sound This week’s gigs with the KSO put me in the third horn chair. A thankless position, really. Not principal. Not second. Not the flashy exposed heroics or the harmonic glue everyone politely ignores. Third horn lives in the interior, structural, supportive, occasionally ominous, frequently essential. It’s an inspiring place to sit. By … Read more
Horn player musings of creation – from the second performance. Warm-Up Warm-up is a strange place. Nothing officially counts, yet everything matters. Notes are tested, breath is measured, confidence negotiated quietly with physics. It is preparation, but also possibility. Looking down between my feet during warm-up, I saw it again. New universes. Not fully formed. Not confident. Small clusters and … Read more
Program notes for a universe formed during intermission – Performance night one. Observed shortly before intermission. Note the presence of the creator’s feet for scale, accountability, and mild judgment. At first glance, skeptics will say the image above is just a spill.Condensation. Gravity doing what gravity does. A little gross, maybe inconvenient, but ultimately meaningless. That theory collapses under even … Read more
Crazy thoughts? We all have them from time to time. But this weekend, I had a doozy. Sitting in rehearsal with The Symphony of the Mountains for our side-by-side concert of Movie Music with area high schoolers, I was playing along when—like all brass players must—I needed to empty my slides. (“spittious-accumulatious” for the uninitiated.) I looked down at the … Read more