CYO the piece

So the circle piece is progressing along. We gained a new member- Cathy the clarinetist. Instead of weird pet stories, this time I made all the kids tell me about a weird medical deformity or a stupid human trick they could do. Why did I come up with this? I'm not really sure. But! Jenny (violin) can play the piano behind her back, which sounds kinda cool but not that weird until you find out that she can play it behind her back with her hands facing down because she is so amazingly (freakishly) double jointed. I was well impressed. Pretty much all of them are bizarrely double jointed- I felt left out.

This time we worked mostly in small groups- I put the wind players together to make some more circles and the strings together to make some backgrounds/chords. I think it went pretty well and will bring the recordings that I made with me back to Seattle come Christmas time. The challenge at this point is to make sure that the final piece ends up sounding like real music and not like random vignettes strung together without any real point. Or musical coherency. I think it will work because a bunch of the material that we've made will be brought back at the end (big red circle and heavy brown line) but we haven't actually played that part yet and we don't meet up again until February.

In spite of my concerns about the piece, it was way way too much fun and I really enjoy working with teenagers. I think 11+ is really my kind of age. The time went so quickly; we had two hour and a half sessions this time instead of four forty-five minute sessions and while that was useful in terms of getting in to the flow of things, it also disappeared instantly.