... gloomy and ecclesiastical? I dunno.
Background information: I have played the clarinet for 14 years (!!) and currently I'm in the NUI Galway Chamber Orchestra, also known as "Orchestra Society" or "orchestra soc."
So orchestra soc had our second concert yesterday. We put on a concert with two choirs, playing a bunch of Mozart, as well as a (choir-less) Schubert symphony. Normally, we rehearse once a week for an hour and a half. This week, in order to get things together with the choirs, we also rehearsed for 2.5 hours on Saturday and 3 hours on Sunday, before the (hour-and-a-half) concert Sunday night. The stamina in my facial muscles is not what it once was, and so by the end of the 3 hour rehearsal on Sunday afternoon I was really sore. --Sidebar-- Something that non-musicians might not know is that playing an instrument, especially a wind instrument, is painful! It can be a fairly strenuous activity. Anyway, all the extra long rehearsals did a number on me, and I had a hard time holding my embouchure by the end. And I bit through my lip callus, too,* so I had to resort to the old trick of putting a bit of wax paper over my lower teeth. That was fine for the concert-- although holding a bit of paper in my mouth makes me salivate a lot more, which causes its own set of issues-- but today it's still really raw, and drinking hot coffee kind of hurt.
But aside from all that! The concert was in the medieval church in town, which was really cool... except we didn't get to rehearse there until Sunday afternoon, and that place has weird acoustics. (It's really hard to hear the people around you, but out in the audience it sounds great.) Getting used to that was hard, and so our rehearsal on Sunday afternoon was brutal. Hugh, the conductor, was getting pretty pissed by the end. But, somehow, we brought it together for the concert! The performance went really well... the pieces with the choirs were simply gorgeous. I didn't play in a couple of the movements, so I got to just sit back, close my eyes, and listen to some glorious Mozart being played in a medieval church. Beautiful.
Our Schubert symphony, sans choirs, went quite well too. We've performed it once before, and this concert was at least four times better than the last one. The oboes were in tune, the flutes didn't make me want to kill someone (which counts a "good"), and I nailed all my solo bits. Yay.
Next weekend we are going to Cork, about threeish hours away, for our final performance. We're going down Friday, performing Saturday afternoon, and returning Sunday. It should be a fun time!
In conclusion, it has been a very musically exciting weekend, which has left me feeling rather regenerated. Music really is part of my soul. The downside, of course, is my carpal tunnel syndrome has been flaring up like crazy, and today I am wearing my wrist brace which I normally only wear to sleep. I can type surprisingly well with it, though I can't really handwrite effectively. Anyway I should stop rambling about music now, because I had actually planned on getting some work done today...
*Something else non-musicians might not know: playing a wind instrument is kind of gross.
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