The Music Thread

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

She ended up scoring a 1 at State on the solo, too.

And I finally got around to converting last year's and this year's solos to MPG format.

Last year's solo was Concert Etude by Alexander Goedicke, who, as it turns out, was a pianist, not a trumpet player, which explains why the "background" instrument is so aggressively-written. It's really more of a trumpet/piano duet. The piano part is so aggressive that we learned the hard way at district that I needed to test the piano's feel before diving into the song and if it was a piece of junk (as is the one I'm playing in this video), a lot of fast stuff needs to be left out because you can really butcher it if you don't have a good piano to work with. At State she asked if I wasn't gonna test the piano and I pointed to the "Yamaha" on the keyboard cover and said "Nah. It's a good one." Wish I had a recording of that, as it was our best performance of it by a substantial margin. I didn't have to leave anything out on the piano, and she nailed it pretty well. Surprisingly, she got a 2 rating, being dinged for "interpretation". She consciously decided not to play the song mechanically, as she's always heard it done. In her words "There's a real nice song hiding in this 'Study' and that's what I want to play."

This is a particularly aggressive song for a high school student to attempt. Especially a sophomore. Trumpet Performance majors often use this as a recital piece at least a couple of years into college.

Noteworthy in this video is how "into" her songs she gets in this setting. She never gets nervous before these kinds of performances. Only when she's playing in a room looking at a judge and wondering what he's writing down. She's very much "in touch" with the music she's playing and what's happening, including with her pianist, as is evidenced twice in this video when I lost the rhythm in one section and she instinctively turned toward me and gave the downbeats more emphasis so I could get back on track, and near the end of the song when the wheels suddenly fell off in an important measure (she'd already played a lot that night, including sitting in on Tuba with the junior-high band, and her chops were at the ragged edge) and she turned to me so I could use body language to show her the downbeat of the next measure.

I've also noticed that she (like I) kinda "dances" to the song she's playing, which you don't often see.

We've always communicated very well when we're performing.

Anyway, here's her solo from last year. Anyone who thinks they might want to watch either of these multiple times, please just do me a favor and right-click the links and save the files to your computer so we can save on bandwidth. At about 45 meg each, you don't want to wait on the internet if you want to watch one a second time.

http://adserv.stocksite.com/images/Darth_Soph_Solo.mpg

This year's solo was Willow Echoes by Frank Simon. I didn't think much of this song the first time we ran through it because the piano part is a lot easier than last year's, and to this day I find the ragtime piano interludes really weird. They feel like they belong in another song.

Unlike last year's solo, she absolutely nailed this one at concert time. Though, as you'll see, it's FAR more difficult for the trumpet player. The hardest part for me is just keeping up, even with my relatively simple parts. Her performance being much earlier in the program definitely helped her.

Again, in this one, she's dancing to the song. I love how at the end of the opening cadenza, her body movements are in perfect synch with what's coming out of the horn.

Again we see communication happening between us. I lost my place (I don't know what I was thinking at the moment, but it had nothing to do with what I was supposed to be doing) and didn't play for a measure or two while I tried to find my place on the chart. She turned toward me to make sure I hadn't fallen off the bench or something.

A couple of funny things in this one. You'll note she gets a solid round of applause at the end of the second section when (at least to us), the song obviously wasn't over. I'd actually warned her the day of the performance that this might happen, and in this section in particular, because by Boogerville standards, it's a real face-scorching section. I told her if it happened, to just enjoy it, and know she's gonna flatten them against the back wall of the building on the last section, which she has always nailed.

The second funny thing is that when we rehearsed it that day at lunch, within 4 measures or so of the end of the song, finishing up the most blistering section of it, she paused for a VERY long time in a place where I'm accustomed to her simply taking a big breath for the high C she has to hold out at the end. During rehearsal, I started cracking up because she took a swig from her ever-present water bottle and chided me for my laughing and said "Wait for it....".

The idea had occurred to her while she was playing it and we decided to incorporate it into her performance. I thought the big pause was even more obviously not the end of the song, but it fooled the audience. I even played it up by keeping my arms poised ready to slam back down onto the piano, but we still tricked them. You can see the band director (my page-turner) snickering as he realizes what she did.

Anyway, I really love this performance. What a difference a year makes! She's got plenty of high notes in this song and though she can't play as high as I can, she's got the sweetest-sounding upper register I've ever heard from a trumpet-player, bar none! Some of it might be because of her playing Mellophone in drum and bugle corps (in case I hadn't mentioned earlier, I'm the 1st Soprano player and horn section leader for a local senior corps that's in start-up mode and she's the only kid and only Mellophone player in it). I've been trying to find a copy of Chuck Mangione's "Feel So Good" to hopefully get her interested in taking up Flugelhorn. She's got the tone and control for it.

Without further ado, here's the solo we played this past Tuesday.

http://adserv.stocksite.com/images/Darth_Junior_Solo.mpg