So: Our Espagna series of concerts is done and dusted, Bolero is behind me and I can let my embouchure relax again (the benefits of being an amateur). Enjoyed a ride down to the old bridge in Heidelberg yesterday to see the submarine on its way to Sinsheim, followed by a frozen yoghurt affrogato with my wife at Yolicious.

I’m currently in training to play that beast of a trombone solo in Ravel’s Bolero with the Musikfreunde orchestra. It’s not all that long, but it’s very high, and it occurs three times in the piece, plus the even higher bit right at the end. It’s a challenge even for professionals, and pretty daunting for us amateurs.

Our conductor had the decency to ask me if he could add it to this season’s programme, meaning I had time to think and to take up the gauntlet. Since then, I’ve been building up my upper register, practising more frequently than I have in a long time, focussing first on building up my embouchure, and now beginning to get a grip on the music itself.

As Dion Tucker, the jazz trombonist with his YouTube channel, The Chops Shop mentioned in one of his videos, musicians are athletes of the small muscles - and there’s a certain satisfaction in feeling the embouchure muscles firming up and becoming more stable as I continue practising and rehearsing.

Last Friday we played our thankfully final Musikfreunde concert of the season, and on Saturday evening I sang in my first Bachchor concert in an age.

This rapid turnaround between disparate concerts highlighted the contrast in musical depth between the predominantly folk-music based Hungarian-Romanian programme of the Musikfreunde concerts and the deep, varied, admittedly occasionally borderline excessively romantic, though more often incredibly powerful and moving A Sea Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams, that blowy bellow containing depths and multitudes

At the end of the Sea Symphony concert I felt a warm sense of satisfaction that stemmed from both the largely successful performance and from the music itself, which was in sharp contrast to my distinct lack of any feeling beyond relief that the Musikfreunde concerts were over (even after the first one).

I have to admit that another contrast was apparent: the sheer gulf in quality between the Musikfreunde and the Heidelberg Stadtsorchester was amazing to experience, with their dynamic range from tense pianissimi to overwhelming fortissimi complementing their poise. What really got me, however, was the controlled power of the beautiful, short brass chorale in the 2nd movement, at Section “O” . Its fleetingness was part of its charm (I’m not a great fan of brass bands overall), as was its somehow very British form of pomp and solemn grandeur.

Indeed, the second movement - On The Beach At Night Alone - is my favourite, with its powerfully warm, threatening, quiet introduction matching the contemplation of death, leading to that triumphal recognition of eternity, the universal and salvation.

I am looking forward to the summer break from live music, to give my overloaded ears a rest, hopefully to let the tinnitus recede at least a little - and to get back into my small electronic music and 3D printing projects. More on those soon, I hope…

Last night was the second and final of our Heidelberg concerts, like the night before in the Johannes-Brahms-Saal in the Musikschule. It was at least significantly cooler (though still hot enough to sweat copiously whilst playing), and the air blowers kept running, but I had some concentration and energy issues.

These were no doubt associated with me going directly from a three-hour choir rehearsal to the setup rehearsal and then concert, with only a Bretzel and a few vegetables to keep me going. Healthy eating, perhaps, for someone enjoying a leisurely day in a sun lounger, but for playing… insufficient. I was glad of the availability of “Hungarian” biscuits to get my sugar levels up during the interval.

I mentioned yesterday how I didn’t really get on too well with this semester’s programme. There’s one piece - OK, I’ll name it, the Rhapsodie Romaine by Georges Enescu - that grates more the more I play it, and another - all right, it’s the Verbunkos Suite by Rezsö Kókai - that I don’t play in, but find dull, pointless and repetitive beyond belief to listen to. There are no doubt some aspects of it that make it theoretically interesting, such as a general build up of orchestration as a story becomes more complex… but the piece doesn’t work for me.

It’s this sort of thing that makes me pity and respect the professional concert musician all the more: surviving the repetition of concert after concert playing the same thing, whilst maintaining the control and pride to keep the standards high (no doubt tinged by fear of losing the gig (aka, job)).

My last trombone teacher did say how he envied me being able to play the instrument as a hobby: I could cycle up and down levels of playing as required, whereas he needs to maintain a high standard almost permanently, whatever the temperatures.

Last night I took part in the first of two concerts with the [Musikfreunde Heidelberg](Programme – Musikfreunde Heidelberg (musikfreunde-heidelberg.de)) in the Johannes-Brahms-Saal of the Musikschule in Heidelberg. Our conductor has long maintained a cycle of focussing on a conductor in the winter semester (last winter was Rachmaninov), and a country or a region in the summer: this summer’s theme is Hungarica!, which includes Hungary and Romania, with composers like Bartók, Kolály, Farkas - and lots of dances.

Whilst some of the music (Bartók’s Romanian Dances, with their genuinely cool baselines, especially) is genuinely appealing, I admit I do find a lot of the music rather tiresome, especially with all the repeats! Yes, those are perfect for dances, but for listening and playing, it’s a bit much, and gets a bit samey.

In the overheated concert hall last night (the passive air cooling system broke down, and apparently the technician measured temperatures of 48 °C in the hall), it was sapping. At least the cycle home in the edges of a thunderstorm was refreshing.

Hopefully tonight’s concert will be more bearable: we have another outing next weekend in Bad Rappenau, but I’m at the point now where I’ll be happy to have the concerts behind me, so I can return to my own music as Halledr, at my own pace…

… yes, with repeats.

This blog looks to be in grave danger of becoming an orphan; no writer to care for it, only the occasional glance in from human readers and data mining bots as they continue moving swiftly on to other digital destinations, only Google’s server farm keeping it from sinking into the digital abyss. A blogging pause has happened here before, of course, as noted in my Blogging State Of the Union post from October 2012.  I’ve again not posted here for several months, obviously because nothing of interest has happened to me in that time.

Perhaps that’s right. The day-to-day has been pretty overwhelming and I’ve found that whilst trying to keep my engineering blog a little more lively, there’s simply not been the headroom, or quiet time, or energy to work on this here blog. But what about the content? Has that been lacking, too? Thankfully, I think not.

What have I been up to since Shanghai? Well, I played in another symphony orchestra concert (Gershwin, Shostakovitch and Rachmaninov’s 3rd Symphony). I remixed a Jamiroquai track for their 20th anniversary remix competition, we were served notice and had to find a new house to live in, I started jogging again… and again…, I worked, and took part in general family life.

Over the Easter holidays, I enjoyed visits to the Steim Automuseum and to the Deutsche Phonographisches Museum - which I will describe in another post - and I worked.

So, lots of excuses not to keep this blog ticking over: many of those excuses could easily have been made into entries in this online diary of mine, building up my insignificant history, for as long as the Blogger servers and HTML continue…

…anyway, enough mulling and pondering, enough slumping into sofas, and onwards with the writing!

It’s the end of another series of concerts with the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra; one I was very close to skipping entirely. At the end of the previous concert, I’d had enough of orchestra for a while, and overall I was feeling uncomfortably stretched. Orchestra had become another stress raiser rather than reliever and I needed to give myself some breathing space for other things in life (like composing, biking and “just” family, for example). In the end (of the beginning of term), a lack of alternative trombonists meant that I stuck with MFH for this programme, too.

Through house searches, potential job offers, overloaded drudgery at work and general family life, I managed to attend most rehearsals - and the three concerts this semester made it all worthwhile.

We played in the Neubausaal in Schwäbisch Hall, then at a school concert in the Gymnasium in Neckargemünd and finally in our standard main venue, the Stadthalle in Heidelberg. There was something about the programme, especially the Ravel and the Grieg that reminded me of the joy to be found in music.

The Grieg in particular is too easy to dismiss as one of the standards these days (and, judging by the audience in the Stadthalle on Saturday evening, it can still pull the crowds). However, it’s still simply wonderful music to be part of and, at the hands of a decent pianist, as we had in Randolf Stöck, it has everything: lyricism and a positive dynamism that are hard to match. Ravel’s La Valse is witty and very difficult to pull off for an amateur orchestra - I think we did a decent job of it.

It was also rewarding for me personally to get to a relatively decent playing quality again. I didn’t feel too outgunned by the hired hand, a trombone student from the Mannheim Musikhochschule, who helped out on bass. As always, the psychology of performing is tricky to master: everybody’s pumped up and tends to play on the edge in terms of volume, losing control in the process. I certainly fall into that trap, but I am at least becoming more aware of it. As always, though, “negative” corrections are difficult: if only one person plays more quietly, he’ll still be swamped by the mass, whereas if one plays more loudly, he’ll stand out and can pull the orchestra along with him. It’s something our principal conductor, René Schuh tries to remind us of each time - we still forget.

So, we’ll see if I end up taking a break for the winter semester instead (it’s more conducive to evenings in, anyway). There’s plenty of time to decide upon that, however, with rehearsals starting again in October. In the meantime, hopefully I’ll get some duet or trio playing in, to keep the trombone chops in half-way respectable working order…