Ramblings of a rural(ish) geek

It was a pretty good week for the bands. Tuesday night in Hamburg was very lightly attended (most of the audience was friends/family, but there were some locals there). The concert went reasonably well, but it was a bit loose, even by Livingston standards. It was not really hot, and there was a decent breeze.

Wednesday night's concert on Belle Isle was *much* better. The music selection was a little more demanding and the performance level was waaaay higher. There's much more listening across the band in Farmington (and honestly, the base level of musicianship is higher in Farmington. There are only a few people in the Livingston band who would play more than one concert with Farmington, because the expectations are so much higher). The weather was just about perfect for a concert in the park -- low 70s, some clouds, not humid -- the only problem I had was that as the sun went down, the clouds thinned and the sun went 'around' the trees so that I had sun directly in my eyes.

I went into work on Monday, and we got the last of the 800 AV ballots out in the mail. There will still be applications coming in and ballots going out, but the big push is done. Also on Monday we pulled a ballot box out of the basement so we'd have it in the office when ballots started coming back in. Which they did on Tuesday. The changes in MI voting law mean that we've had to make some decisions about recordkeeping, with nothing useful from the state.

This morning we got over 3.5" of rain. That's a lot of water. There were a few rumbles of distant thunder, but we mostly got a steady rain. I think I'll probably not go into the gardens today. (well, maybe the strawberry bed, because I can reach that without stepping into it.) But it's really humid, and I may punt. I shouldn't, because it's been way too long since I've done any weeding. OTOH, tomorrow is supposed to be cooler/drier, and the water will have soaked in and loosened the soil so that the weeds will come out better. We shall see.

But nothing really new to report.

Rehearsals on Monday and Tuesday. Both went about as expected. DC was back for Farmington, and we read a lot of stuff, with more new things to follow next week.

Tuesday's had bonus "what the heck?" as a page of music was chopped off at one side -- I went up at break and copied the notes/rests at the end of each line from the score. And then the librarian gave me an original to copy and bring back next week. (it's nice when you're trusted enough for that to happen -- JH is pretty picky about who he'll just hand music to.) I have now made copies of that page for the section. I should probably scan it for posterity, but that takes more effort. *I'll* know where the copies are for the next time we play it. (The people who usually copy music for the band have been understandably distracted, what with either having a 7week early preemie or being grandmum for the 7week preemie.)

It's been chilly/snowy/rainy for the last week, so I haven't gotten into the garden. Next week it's supposed to be in the 60s and *not* raining, so I have plans to go pull weeds/pick up branches. We'll see how that goes.

We've been filing things at work, and I have nearly run out of things to do. (If there's no election action, I don't go in -- we'll start spinning things up for the August election sometimes around Memorial Day.) My work computer has been being, erm, difficult. Nothing's not working, but every week I have to run Windows network troubleshooting in order to log in to the network, and random peripherals have to be unplugged and plugged back in again, sometimes into different ports. The IT Guy is aware of the difficulties, and is somewhat glad that it's my computer that's being difficult, as I will just "deal" with it until it becomes unusable, without panicking or carrying on. And I won't be in much for the next six weeks....

And it was Opening Day in Detroit. We had snowflakes here during the game - I didn't see any on the broadcast, so they may not have gotten any at the stadium, but still....

one to go. LCCB's March concert was called "Not of this World" -- Holst's "Mars", Star Wars *and* Star Trek, Harry Potter, concert band pieces called "Cosmos" and "Sunburst", movie music from The Wiz and The Incredibles.

Yesterday I swapped back to tenor sax for the May concert (entitled "In Living Color", it's movie/TV music from both sides of the B&W/Color divide). I will be the only Tsax player in the May concert - HB works for a florist, and the concert is the day before Mother's Day, PS will be in FL for three weeks in May. I will say that Tenor is physically easier to play than Bari. :) I still prefer playing Bari, though.

Tomorrow, I'm ushering at Hill Auditorium for the Orchestre de Paris. The show is sold out, so I will be busy.

Friday is the stage rehearsal for the FCB March concert. That one is called "Pure Michigan", and all the composers (or the arrangers) have ties to the state of Michigan. Jebra will have stories to tell at the concert on Sunday!

Today, I was going to rake leaves/pick up branches, but my back is bothering me, so I didn't. I did laundry and cleaned inside instead. They tell us that it will "cool off" next week, so it will be more in line with the kind of temperatures we (used to) expect in mid March. So, too chilly and damp to rake and weed.

- shipped K's parcel to Australia. I sent a bunch of the Christmas ornaments we collected over the years. Not the pottery or glass ones, though. I'm not entirely sure how she'll get those.

- LCCB Christmas concert tomorrow. I will be the only tenor sax playing, as PS is still recovering from a broken kneecap, and says that he's not really figured out how to play sax with the splint/brace on. I need to look at a section in Canadian Brass Christmas -- I've managed to not get lost in that section *once*. I need to not get lost at the concert.

- also tomorrow, songleading at church. On the first Sunday of Advent, with communion. I'll be scampering home from there, grabbing a quick lunch, then off to the concert. (and I still don't know what we're singing, other than O Come O Come Emmanuel for the candle lighting.)

- Last Monday's drive to/from FCB rehearsal was fraught. It's a drive that usually takes less than an hour, even with the current location and construction. It took over 100 minutes to get *to* rehearsal, and 75 minutes to get home. sigh. gotta love the first snowfall of the year. Next Monday's travel will be more complicated by construction, but at least it's not supposed to snow.

- the rill completely froze over during the cold snap. Water running under ice is a very neat effect. Most of the ice melted yesterday in the inch of (cold) rain that fell, but there's still some ice in the pond. It may or may not melt today.

(one of the three gigs last week was an indoor gig, so doesn't go on the summer record.)

Monday was FCB outreach. Concert went well, appreciative audience; many on their own balconies or even inside with open patio doors. It was a bit warm, but it wasn't humid, so it was pretty OK. The extra chair and stand I carry came in handy - the extra euph player that DC recruited didn't bring theirs....

Tuesday was LCCB in Howell. There was some concern that we wouldn't actually play, but the storms went through earlier in the afternoon, and had cleared the area by 5:30. There were some ominous clouds, and a few people got a few drops of rain on them, but it did not actually rain. There were a lot of people at the concert -- DM got to 100 and stopped counting.... That concert also went pretty well, by LCCB standards. I flailed a bit more at the marches than I usually do, but I blame that on tired music brain. (The TSax parts in marches are much different than BSax parts, and I'm still wrapping my brain around that.)

Thursday I worked a funeral meal at a church not my own. Which is both easier and harder than working SEMGS wakes, because I wasn't 'in charge'. (I used to be, until the chair of the memorial committee decided that I was cherry-picking because I declined hosting a funeral meal that she didn't want to host because "I work full-time". And what part of "I'm going to be out of town for a week without phone or email until the day before" makes you think that I can do it?) With bonus song leading, because Pastor saw me and said "Make sure you have all the music, I need strong singers." No Amazing Grace, thank Ghu. (He Leadeth Me, In the Garden, Hymn of Promise; and a bonus three-fold Amen at the end. A Capella, because the piano player didn't have music.) DS and I led the songs from the back of the congregation, because there was no way I was going to stand in front and lead unless specifically asked to do so. Strong voices from the back is just fine for a funeral. (DS is one of the other songleaders at church; the funeral was for the eldest child of the third.)

{edit for grammar}

Chineke! Orchestra, with violin soloist. Chineke! is a Black/POC orchestra from (mostly) the UK. They did a contemporary piece (quite nice) by Carlos Simon, S Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto in Gminor (op 20), and Florence Price's Symphony No 1 in Eminor. I like Price's symphonies, so I was glad to see that on the program. Somebody earlier in the season did a different Coleridge-Taylor (a teeensy bit of digging reveals that it was Sphinx Orchestra, which makes sense).

I got asked if I wanted to move up to either Usher Supervisor or Head Usher. Nope. I have enough other things going on that I do not want more duties. :)

I am going to try very hard to stay home today. I haven't been able to do that since last Saturday, and the cat is getting annoyed. (I probably won't be in 'the chair of laps' all day, or even inside -- there's branches to be picked up! -- but at least she'll know where I am.)

Turns out that one of the things that J will be doing today is installing a new water softener. Whee? The old one (which we got used when we moved in to this house in 1995) has died in a difficult-to-repair manner, and the new water softeners are so much nicer that he decided to replace the entire system. It's somewhat unclear exactly how long the softener has been not working, but at least a few weeks. Last week I asked J when he last checked the water softener because there was hard water buildup on the cat waterer, and the water in the kettle was making odd noises as it heated up. He went and poked at it, manually cycled it, and then checked it a couple of days later and it hadn't run. So he took the head off and took it apart, and found that the connector between the flow meter and the actual mechanism had shattered. (It's a completely mechanical system, running on mechanical switches and water pressure.)

The Washtenaw County portion of the partial recount of MI 22-3 was finished in one day. 28 teams counted 44 precincts worth of ballots in one day. Teams started being released at 4pm as they finished up a precinct because there were no more precincts to be counted. Ann Arbor voters have really embraced Absent Voting -- for every precinct there were two units of ballots to be counted, In Person and Absent, and other than the campus precincts the AV unit was usually double the In Person unit. The team I was on did four units, two In Person and two AV, 450/370/500/750. The process was easy, but required paying attention at all stages. Make sure the seal number on the ballot container matches the number that the poll workers put in the book when they finished on Election Night; count the ballots in the container to make sure that all the ballots are there; sort ballots into piles (Yes/No/Other); count the piles; put the ballots back in the container; reseal the container. There were theoretically challengers at the recount, but we only had one pair at our table ever, and one of them had no idea what she was looking at or what we were doing. "why is this seal number crossed out?" "because that's the seal that was on the ballot container when we got it. we put a new seal on the container after we counted the ballots and the new number is in the book. you watched us do it." The challengers were only authorized to challenge votes, not the recount procedure, although she really wanted to make it about the procedure.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone with ATT last week, trying to figure out why we couldn't make long distance phone calls. I talked to people at ATT local, at Ameritech, at ATT longdistance. The most annoying was the person at Ameritech who tried to tell me that the reason I couldn't call out is because we're still on copper lines. "why is this my fault?" I asked her. "I pay for telephone service, I expect it to work. If it doesn't work, I expect you to fix it." She didn't want to answer that question, and was very glad to shift me off to Ameritech repair, who slotted us in at their next available appointment. Tuesday. When I expected to be off counting ballots, and J had to be at work for meetings. "Can I change it?" "sure, how's Jan 2" "never mind. we'll make Tuesday work" Then the tech showed up (at 8:30), opened the tombstone, fiddled a connector, and viola! long distance telephone service. He was gone by 9am, which is about when J left for work. The tech is based out of Chelsea, and has given us the direct line to the local dispatcher, so the next time it happens we can skip the whole rigamarole and get it fixed the next business day. Apparently, the connector is somewhat susceptible to mice/snakes using it to climb inside the tombstone, and it literally takes longer to open and close the tombstone than to make the fix.

The FCB Christmas concert is Sunday. We'd reserved the stage at NFHS for a stage rehearsal on Friday night. GM found out yesterday that the choir had shifted their concert to Friday. Apparently, the choir director looked at the Music Department calendar to find an open date, rather than the Facilities Usage calendar. So now we have to compete with a basketball game and a choir concert for parking, and we don't have the stage for soundcheck. mutter. And DC wanted to rehearse in the bandroom last night, so we had to move chairs/stands/percussion from the stage into the bandroom and back again. whee?

I have begun looking at new saxophones. sigh. Not gonna be cheap, but J says "go for it". The biggest problem is that nobody has baris in stock. I'll be going out later this week to take the tenor into the shop, and I'll ask them. There's another music store about 10 miles further down the street, and I'll stop by there as well. I'd rather not buy online, but I may have to.

Sunday's LCCB concert went well. J said "well, that was a concert". ayup. The LCCB is pretty good, but after years of FCB and CHS concerts, it's also pretty apparent that it could be much better. I usually tell people that the LCCB is at the level of a good HS band. (I've heard some *excellent* HS bands, as well as very good and pretty good and decent. Probably a couple of really-not-very-good bands, too. 15 years of Band & Orchestra Festival will do that.) If I've gotta play Tenor in a band, this is the one to do it in -- it's really not my primary instrument anymore, and I'm flailing a lot more than I like. I'm also struggling with reeds - the soft reed is too soft, the hard reed is too hard -- so I need to buy a few in different strengths and see which combination of reed-mouthpiece-ligature works best.

Monday's FCB rehearsal was pretty intense -- you'd think we had a concert coming up, or something. After many emails, it was determined that the FCB could use the bandroom for rehearsal, as the kids were rehearsing on stage. We were low on percussion, though, since much of it was onstage. We may need to rejigger the layout for Sunday's concert because the stage at the Hawk is a different shape than the bandroom we rehearse in. fortunately, I think we can, because there are only three seats in the front row; so I can pull them in a couple of feet and still have sufficient spacing side-to-side. The third row is always our problem row -- too many seats for the space -- so we may be rearranging on the fly. whee? (I really don't like playing at the Hawk - the acoustics suck (they were only iffy before the band shell got removed...), the chairs are bad, there's not enough stands, and we have to move all the percussion in from somewhere because they have none there.)

Last nights LCCB rehearsal (a sight reading run-through of the Christmas concert) was, um, interesting. I left a couple of pages of music on the printer, so had to sit that one out. He handed out Russian Christmas Music this year. I didn't remember ever playing it on Tenor Sax, but I must have, because I got *all* the entrances. OK, so it was significantly slower than either the FCB or Adult Band Camp played it, but the Tenor part is very different than the Bari part. A trumpet player behind me says that we played it at All-State band in 1981, which is the only place that I would have played it -- I know we didn't play it in college, and there's no way we would have played it in HS. I need to find the AllState record.... The Bari player beside me has never played RCM, and he really doesn't like it. To be fair, it is a hard piece, and there's lots of meter and tempo changes, and BS doesn't like the way the director does them. (RCM was composed by Alfred Reed in about two weeks to be played at a joint Army Bands concert, and could easily be called Orthodox Christmas Music -- it's all Eastern Orthodox Church music.)

I've gotten into the gardens a few times in the last few days, and did manage to get a couple of the smaller gardens mostly cleared out. I still need to pull the phlox in the NW garden, but the ground is so dry that things are breaking off at the surface. It started raining last night after I got home from rehearsal, so I may not get back out there until sometime Friday. Today I need to work on a costume for Sunday, and run errands. There is an election leads meeting at the Rod & Gun club this afternoon (they're the emergency polling place), but I told them that I probably wouldn't be there -- I didn't find out until yesterday, and I have other plans for the afternoon....

so the sax soloist we're working with for the May concert at Hill had a short list of pieces he wanted to play, and the band prez was tasked with finding the wind symphony parts.

His first choice was a no-go, as the rumors of a wind symphony arrangement of the concerto are just that, rumors. Prez poked at the composer's website and found that it's 'on the list' of things to be worked on in the future.

His second choice is at least written! there's recorded proof of it. Tracking a copy of it down, otoh, was an exercise in perseverance. It's not in print anywhere. The usual sources don't have a copy we can borrow in their libraries. Prez and maestro and various band directors of their acquaintance sent out APBs to their musical friends for it, and eventually; one got back to them and said "I think that DS in Fla has it. Here's their contact info, tell them I sent you." DS in Fla did have it, they thought, but needed to check their files. Yes, DS did have it. In partial manuscript form - some of the parts had been typeset, but most were still manuscript. DS wasn't willing to send their originals to some unknown band, so Mongoled them up to a director-known-to-them in MI, who scanned them (to jpg, not PDF, for reasons that I do not know) and sent the scans to Prez.

The parts that were manuscript look like a scan of a Xerox of a ditto. The typeset parts look like a scan of a Xerox. The bari sax part is missing the final three pages (a note says "when the bari sax part runs out, play the alto clarinet part"). The first trumpet part was poorly scanned, and is missing the bottom line on the first page. (The first trumpet player is a bit of a primadonna and tried to claim that their entire part was unreadable -- it's no worse than anyone else's, other than the missing line...) I spent a morning putting the notes into MuseScore, and an afternoon transcribing all the tempo/dynamic/articulation info.

Such fun!

That went surprisingly well.

The concert was good, the set-up was not more onerous than necessary, the teardown went well. I bailed on the final leg of gear transport, but I was _very_ clear when they 'hired' me in June that I would *not* do the initial loadin or the final loadout of the equipment trucks -- I'd help with the unloading and loading at the site, but it was someone else's job to get the trucks loaded/unloaded.

Set up went much better than Friday's. We got the percussion moved onstage before we started setting chairs, so that helped; and I had better numbers for setup. I was able to move the trombones back a bit so that they weren't having to aim their slides between the chairs in front of them. DC was tickled that he got a new stand for the concert. :)

I flailed a bit at Nitro - missed a couple of entrances, so I just skipped those phrases entirely. I finally figured out how to count Against the Rain, so that was a relief (it opens with a saxophone choir, and each of the four parts moved at different times...). I *think* we'll be doing it again, at Hill in May (guest conductor, iirc) -- unless that's Wade 'n Water. I'll find out, right?

J played the concert recording this AM, and I realised (again!) how good the FCB is. Many of the things we played on Sunday are things that most community bands wouldn't even *try*! (I did the Sousa march last summer with LCCB, but it was significantly slower.... I will say it was much easier to play at the slower tempo, but not as effective.)