SassyBlonde

Aaaah, the first day of rehearsal.

This is when the rubber kinda meets the road: you get to see everybody sweat through their first encounter with the group dynamic and watch the newbies try to figure out all of the weird nuances that they've only heard about through myth and legend. You also get to hear the same old hacks do the same old things in the same places, different songs.

For my part, this program is pretty much a cake walk: I just have to play with a good tone and stay relatively in tune (I say relatively, because apparently there are many consensuses on where the pitch should be, and none of them good) and most importantly keep from laughing out loud when Frankenberry leans over and makes jokes during the really cheesy bits. I think I only have one piece where I have to hustle a little, and it's one of the biggest cliches of all time, so it's more a question of not laughing while I'm trying to do it in F# Major.

In all seriousness, the music I'm playing with this group is really one of my favorite things I get to do being a professional musician: there's just such a wonderful feeling when you play music with no agenda except that it's beautiful, beautifully written and orchestrated, and only has the purpose of making people happy. Not to mention that I feel extremely privileged to play this man's music, as all of the performance and distribution rights to his arrangements are still owned by his family and NO ONE gets to use them except us under very special circumstances (AND we're playing off of copies and originals from parts handwritten by him and his arrangers. How COOL is THAT?)

That being said, it was exhausting, and I'm on my way out the door for beer and good food, after a power nap.