Practising

Today I practised for a solid 45 minutes, warm-up included. I then blogged for another half an hour. After finishing this post I will be working on my orchestration assignment. I practised all of my exam requirements and I am improving!! I really worked on my chromatic scales and I am confident in my ability to play them at a normal tempo. I need to practise more of the rhythm part of the exam, seeing as I sometimes struggle with pitch when concentrating on rhythm. I plan on practising a little bit more before I go to bed. As I am preparing for my exam, I am discovering, it is not too difficult once you play it through. The requirements appear scary, but it is all practise. There is nothing too specific I need to work on, I just need to play through it over, and over and over and I will be okay!

Band Questions

1. Throughout band I have noticed the musicality of my playing developing. After learning the correct fingering for the Bb french horn as opposed to the F French horn, I have discovered that notes above high C are not difficult! This improvment on range has in turn improved my musicality. I am more comfortable with my instrument, and I do not focus as much on the higher pitches as I do on the piece itself. I have most definately improved my confidence level, which really allows me to open up and really feel our repetoire.

2. The one struggle I really had this year was commitment, however this is an ongoing struggle. I am a very busy person, but I throroughly enjoy band, thus my involvment in band is desirable. I noticed that my practising was not at the calibre it should be. I do however have a french horn at home and once beginning instrumental class I have been practising a lot more, and noticing an improvement in my playing.

3. My musical highlight was most definately playing rumble on the high plains. (at every concert). The first time our band played it through witht he percussion it was magical, and I did not know that we had that many talented percussionists in our band. I was very excited everytime we had the opportunity to play this piece because it was impressive (even when chimes are missed :P). Overall Rumble on the High Plains was my favourite piece and a musical highlight of mine.

4. I was very impressed with the band`s ability to sight read. I really do believe our band accels in sight reading and we were very intuitive at nationals to the dynamics, phrases and overall musicality of the piece. Unfortunately our success is almost our downfall. The band struggles with practising (myself included) which in turn improves our sight reading at some expense. I firmly believe if the band practised maybe 10 more minutes a week it would make significant improvements to all of our repertoire.

Practising for Thursday May 28th

This is just a quick blog post for Thursday May 28th, I practised for approximately 20 minutes (warm-up icluded) for my band test. I had to play two exerpts from Chillers and Thrillers, one the first 10 bars of the piece and the second was from bar 191 to the end of the piece. Both sections were the "Imperial March (aka Darth vader's theme)". I was attempting to focus mainly on rhythm, because I notice at times I have difficulty with quick and short rhythms, and my playing becomes a jumled mess. I was also aware of the sfz on some notes and the accented (>) markings below certain repeated notes. I really emphasized the accented notes, in order to create diversity with repeated notes, and the strength that this song requires. The end section also had some difficult dynamics, such as sfz, fp cresc. to a ff. I worked on getting up to ff but not over blowing and sacrificing my pitch. By the end of my practising I concluded that yes, I am sacrificing some dynamic level for pitch, but that is better than vice versa!