From New England, to New Zealand, to the Riverina, the musical work never stops. And the enjoyment of it all doesn’t either. Having arrived home last night after completing 13 hours of travel, I think I am more than ready to complete a long awaited blog update.
NZ Tour
The New Zealand tour with the University of Newcastle Wind Orchestra was an incredible experience, and a pleasure to be involved with an ensemble performing at a professional level. While many of the old guard had left, it was great to see some past members still performing and to meet and make new friendships with those emerging through the ranks either in their late secondary or early tertiary studies.
At the Aurora Music Festival, the UNWO was awarded the gold medal for its round of performances by the panel. Prior to the performances, the UNWO and St Lukes Grammar School ensembles had workshops with the conductor of the Arizona State University Wind Symphony, Gary Hill. The workshops Gary lead were a pleasure to watch (and be a part of) from a teaching perspective, and certainly provided me with a few new skills and perspectives on teaching and learning.
Apart from the wind orchestra music, we also had the opportunity to perform “The Klezmer Suite” arranged and composed by Alexis Ciesla with a clarinet choir formed from the ensemble. This suite has its challenges, and these were all overcome in the space of an hour! Fingers crossed this group can remain together and continue performing clarinet choir music.
Many thanks to Cookie for giving Emelia and myself the opportunity to travel and view the sights of New Zealand.
New England/Riverina Band Camps
Prior to New Zealand, the New England Band Camp was held. And a couple of days ago the Riverina Band Camp concluded. Both of these camps were quite an experience and really blew me away by the talent that these regions have, how far they have come from, and the new talent beginning to emerge.
This year, the shoelace ligature has played a massive role and influence on single reed players as students and teachers are intrigued by the improvement it makes. The majority of people who have tested this are very pleased by its enhancement, while everyone who has taken part in testing the shoelace have noticed a great difference and some sort of improvement to tone and control in the different ranges of their instruments. This coming week will see the NSW Senior Ensemble (Years 9-12) taking part, and there certainly will be students travelling down using this new technique (with a lot of fingers pointing back to me). In the near future I will detail an entry explaining why I use the shoelace ligature and why I find it to be better than certain ligatures that you would pay over $100 for!
The repertoire for both camps was more challenging, including the advanced band. Both camps handled the repertoire incredibly well, but it left a question to be asked after the Riverina camp; how come, with both camps at similar levels of ability, the Riverina kids absolutely chewed through the standard repertoire moving into the advanced band repertoire and the New England kids didn’t? I’ll be quick to point out that both clarinet sections I worked with were fantastic from the solo chair down to 4ths and bass, and that both ensembles were similar in ability all round. It was absolutely bizarre.
The tour video was finally shown to the Riverina kids, and there was a very good response all round. It took me right up to the final evening that I left on for Tamworth, to format the video so it could be re-converted for DVD. There are still a couple of sections I would edit, or get the audio to line up with the video, but everyone enjoyed the various sights and sounds presented and took encouragement from the concert performances and the various words of Di Hall (whilst she was driving).
That's my update for now. Soon I will be posting more in relation to the shoelace ligature and a few of my compositions in the works.
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