Since some of us decided we couldn’t just let our wonderful batch blog die away and fade into obscurity, I’ll do a quick update.
So band practice resumed, which is a mildly important and uplifting thing to happen…who am I kidding AWESOME BAND PRACTICE STARTED AGAIN YAAAAYYYYY–ahem.
Last Wednesday was refamiliarising-yourself-with-your-instrument day, a.k.a. when-the-trumpet-section-gets-to-slack day (you did not just read that). We practiced our prospective SYF piece, Blessed Promising Future, to prepare for combined practice with Mr Oura on Saturday.
And we still turned out wholly unprepared on Saturday :\ in all fairness a major cause of this was the confusion over how the bars spliced and fit between the full version and the condensed concert one.
This Wednesday was a veritable bag o’ fun =D we managed to go through BPF (reads like BPA…nevermind) a little more shun chang-ish, and we tried our alternative (pw hint hint) SYF piece, A Weekend in New York by Philip Sparke. So now we’ll be practicing both songs to see which one we’d be sticking with!
Some commentary on both of the songs. At first I felt Blessed Promising Future was totally incomprehensible and guai lan, but having played it more I’ve grown to like it very much, especially the epic climax near the ending (: Weekend sounded hard at first, what with all the jazz and swing beats, but a slightly deeper analysis reveals that the piece is rather simple once the rhythm is settled. Both are nice pieces but I personally prefer Blessed Promising Future (topic for discussion!)
Well, that’s all from me for now. All the best to batchmates for the oral presentation, and all the J2s for their ‘A’ Levels!
yifan
P.S.: oh, and please please please be bothered to post stuff, alright? it’s no fun when 3 people do it :\