praying for sunny days

this will be quick.  i have class starting in 20 minutes.

i’ve been in banff for 2 weeks now, though it seems like it’s been a lot longer.  we’ve gone on plenty of hikes, jumped in glacial lakes, played a lot, and had tons of fun.  the bassoon studio gets along so well.  we pretty much don’t go anywhere unless everyone else is with us (with the exception of today…a few people are going up on a multiple-hour-long hike that i will not be taking in).

we had a bassoon band concert last tuesday, which was quite a fun treat.  then we went on a studio trip (with the oboes, though we did not socialize with them the entire day) to lake maraine and lake louise, finishing off the trip with plunges in lake agnes (at the top of a trail by lake louise) and lake louise.  it was cold, but tons of fun.  and the oboes basked in the glory of us calling them wusses for not coming in with us.

i’ll post pictures later today, hopefully.  there are tons on facebook.  if you can get there, my main photo page is here.  gotta run.  class soon.

These videos are of the bassoon section at Texas Music Festival this summer, which is held at UH.  We played Peter Shickele’s “Blue Set No. 2″ (which I will also perform on my Spring recital next year).  The first video is the first movement, entitled “Bassooner or Later”. The second is “Portlandia in Cerulean”, and the third is “Gang of Wolves”. Enjoy!

so i’ll be in banff for 7 weeks now.  it’s pretty much going to be amazing, i won’t lie.  and since i’ll be away for so long, i will greatly appreciate letters and packages.  and to help you out, here’s my address where i’ll be staying:

Robyn Watson
C/O The Banff Centre
Music & Sound Program
107 Tunnel Mountain Drive, Box 1020
Banff, Alberta, Canada, T1L 1H5

i’ll be there from june 30-august 18.  

application fee: $50 (though fully refunded)
round-trip plane ticket to new orleans: $200 (including a $60 flight-change fee)
cab ride from the airport: $17 (including tip and fuel surcharge…for a 1.6 mile trip)
time waiting in a hot holding room (total): 4 hours
time warming up/waiting in a practice room (total): 2 hours 15 minutes
number of auditionees in the beginning: 32 
number of auditionees in the 2nd round: 10
excerpts played: 7, plus a concerto exposition
time waiting for a cab to come get me so i could eat: going on 9 hours (i.e. it never came)
lunch that the workers were nice enough to get me (since the stupid cab didn’t come): $5
cab ride back to the airport: $7 (but shh.  he broke the rules)
getting into the semi-finals at my first professional audition: priceless 

yeah…i had a really long day today.  got up at 7:30 this morning to catch a flight to new orleans to partake in the louisiana philharmonic orchestra’s 2nd bassoon audition.  i decided to do it for the experience, not expecting to get much more than just that out of it.  i ended up getting to the 2nd round.  i played the best mozart concerto that i’ve every played in my life today.  and was really satisfied overall with everything else (obviously i did something right…).  i’m already back home and really tired, but really happy with the way everything went.  i didn’t get nervous (just a little crazy, though, hearing others in the warm-up rooms around me, but i just took really deep breaths and played arpeggios to get my mind off of them), and had a great reed (thanks, cheryl!), and played like a real bassoon player (because that is what i am…a REAL bassoon player.  not someone who just thinks they can play…i CAN play!).  so yea!

i knew it would be a fairly busy summer, as far as bassooning goes.  i had been accepted to (and accepted the offer for) the texas music festival, which is here at UH.  that lasts for a month (may 30-june 28), and includes 6 concerts (2 of the 4 are played twice), not including chamber music performances.  then mom and i were planning on going to the IDRS (international double reed society) convention in provo, UT, which is in the middle of july, for 5 days.  then we’re both playing in the pit for bach to broadway at church.

this morning, however, i got an e-mail saying i’d been accepted to the banff summer masterclass for bassoon, which is held at the banff centre in canada.  one of the teachers there is someone who i would really like a chance to study with, and have been contemplating pursuing an artists diploma with once i finish with my master’s degree, so to have a chance to work with him now is really awesome.  this program runs june 30-july 18.  i have to be there the 29th, so i am leaving houston the day after TMF ends.  

mom has told her sisters, who have indicated that they’d like to come “visit me” in banff, and auntie ellen has told us to just not deal with IDRS and we’ll have a “reunion” in canada.  ha.  

now i have even more to practice, but it’s good.  the folks who are in charge of the masterclass want me to let them know what rep i want to perform while there, and my teacher and i have decided on 2 standards (mozart concerto and saint-saens sonata) and a fun one (mignone concertino, which the teacher i am wanting to study with has recorded).  and i am taking an audition for a symphony in 2-1/2 weeks.  and for TMF, i am preparing the mignone for their concerto competition, which means i have a month to memorize it.  

so much going on, but i really really love it.  really really.

this morning was interesting, to say the very least.

i was babysitting my parents’ next door neighbors’ kids last night. they had long been asleep, so i was watching TV and texting some friends. our texting “match” ended just before the parents got home (or so i thought). i got home, checked my e-mail a bit, and got in bed at about 11:45. i went to sleep at about 12:30, expecting to get up at 6:30 (this semester, i don’t have the luxury of having a handicap parking pass, so i have to fight everyone else for the open parking spots. i have decided to leave my apartment every tuesday and thursday at 7 in order to get a spot and have time to practice. or write blog entries).

i was sound asleep and my phone started making a noise that sounded just like my alarm. so i opened my eyes, turned it off, dismissed it (so it wouldn’t bother me again), and got up. as i was doing that, i noticed that i had a new text from one of my friends whom i had been texting with last night, and it had a time stamp of 11:47. i didn’t think much of it.

i did all my usual morning things - brush teeth, shower, get dressed, etc. and was all ready to go. i opened my door and took my phone out of my jeans pocket to see how much time i had left before i had to leave. the clock on my phone said 2:15. i didn’t believe it. after all, my alarm had gone off, and i thought i had even put it on snooze, therefore having it go off again. i turned on my TV to check the time on it, and sure enough, it was 2:15. i grumbled and then went back to sleep (of course putting my PJ’s back on).

i realized when i got to school that apparently my alarm sound and my text message sound are the same, which is why i thought my alarm had gone off when the text came in (the network was apparently having difficulties, since it didn’t get the text to me until almost 3 hours after my friend sent it). i will be changing my text sound so this doesn’t happen again. the funniest thing about this whole thing (at least in my opinion) is that i was more awake when my “alarm” went off at 2:15 than when it did at 6:30. i pretty much hopped out of bed the first time, and wanted to go back to sleep the second. strange.

obviously my “resolution” to update more often hasn’t exactly happened (though 2 times in 1 month is pretty good for me, right?).  since school started back up, i’ve been swamped.  the quintet is playing in one of the 2 january operas this weekend, which had rehearsals starting the day before school started back up on the 14th.  since then, we’ve had 6 rehearsals (2 just orchestra, 2 with the singers sitting behind us, and 2 dress rehearsals), and 1 performance, with 2 more performances this weekend (saturday and sunday).  i’m really really looking forward to sunday night when it’ll be over (not that i haven’t thoroughly enjoyed playing in the “psychological thriller” that is The Turn of the Screw (videos of the TV adaptation, if you so wish to watch it, can be found here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, and part 12.  i didn’t warn you how long it was, did i?).

on top of the opera, the quintet is giving a recital on the 2nd of february, so we’ve added rehearsals almost every single day to work on all of our music.  a total of nearly 30 hours extra.  it’s a lot, but it was (is) needed.   add to all that, the fact that both the school orchestra and clear lake symphony have started back up, it means i’m very short on sleep right now.

the biggest thing (to me, personally) that’s going on right now is auditions for summer music festivals.  it means that i have to immerse myself in orchestral excerpts for hours during my practice time every day.  i had my first audition this past wednesday.  my next one is sunday morning (what do you get when you ask for an afternoon audition time?  11:50 AM).  then i have a nearly 2- week-long break before the next one on february 8, and the final one on the 11th.  i’m submitting one taped audition, which i recorded most of yesterday, and spent time (too much time) last night cleaning it up a bit.   this is all really good for me, though.  i finally really truly feel like a performance major (not that i didn’t last semester, but it wasn’t all going on at one time last semester).  i’m enjoying it (even though it is quite taxing in many ways…sleep, being the main one), and am still kind of in awe of myself…i didn’t think i had any sort of work ethic, as far as progressing on the bassoon goes, and now my tuesday, thursday, and friday mornings are spent in the practice room starting at 7:30 (hey…the need for a parking spot trumps the need for sleep, in my opinion).  i feel like i’m “getting it” now…i’m understanding what it takes and what i need to do, and i’m adjusting accordingly.  it’s frustrating at times (it’s not the most exciting thing to be sitting in an orchestra pit at 11 at night going over the same passages over and over again), but the end result is something to be proud of. 

i decided that i didn’t want to continue to pay a whole lot for my website.  so i switched from paying $10/mo to paying $5/mo.  in the craziness of the switch, i thought i might have lost my entire blog (cause i couldn’t for the life of me get it to work).  but thanks to the hard work of my friend geof, all has been restored (save a few images, but i can get over that - it was my fault those didn’t transfer).  so welcome to my new, cheaper blog.  lol.  maybe my new year’s resolution will be to update this more often.  ha.

right now they’re saying it’s a 1.1 mile visibility outside.that is most definitely NOT true. theresa (my roommate, for those who don’t know) ran out of gas at midnight. in the middle of nowhere (practically…on my way out to find her, i passed a “cow crossing” sign). in the middle of a “dense fog advisory” warning. i stopped at a gas station and bought a gas can and filled it with gas, then made my way through unlit streets that i’d never driven on before in an area of town that would be freaky without the fog and the “12:30″ on my clock. i finally found her and thankfully there was a nice guy who pulled over to help cause we could for the life of us figure out how to get the gas OUT of the can. probably could have had it not been in the middle of the night and in scary fog on an unlit street.our drive back along beltway 8 (the only familiar road i saw) was filled with visibility of maybe…MAYBE…15 feet. there was a car in front of us that stopped at a green light (maybe he was dyslexic?), and then a few miles down the road, i saw what i thought was a stop light, except it never got closer, and i realized it was a car, so i just passed it. and i figured out that street lights make fog worse…you usually seem to have a sort of bubble of “clear” around your car, but when there’s a street light, it illuminates the fog that is on top of you and makes it even harder to see. blah.so we got home safely, and theresa needs to go straight to a gas station when she leaves in the morning. that sure was an adventure…

ok. so i know i’m a slacker. you don’t have to remind me. but in reality, i haven’t been slacking. i’ve been practicing, studying (or pretending to study), and just being really busy in general. so since i just got a recording of the first orchestra concert of the season (from a month ago, but it took that long to get my hands on a CD of it), i thought i’d post a little bit for you to get a listen for what i’ve been up to.

we played Scheherazade, by Nicholai Rimsky-Korsakov. it has a ton of woodwind solos, especially in the 2nd movement (it’s a 4-movement symphony, basically). so here you go. this is what i’ve been doing since leaving las vegas…practicing - some days 4 hours - and, during the first month of school, perfecting these 2 solos. and for your reference, if you don’t know what the bassoon sounds like, the first solo is about 40-ish seconds in, and the 2nd is about 7 minutes in (it’s an 11-minute-long movement, just so you know). enjoy!

oh, and before i get to it, you’ll have to turn your speakers up ’cause the recording’s kinda quiet…either that or you’ll have to get real comfortable with your computer. your choice.