March 30, 2007

• Musical Fulfillment

  EDIT ADD:
  Hilarious. You know when someone makes a derogatory comment about something right to your face, not knowing it was about you? Well this girl was talking about a music course she wanted to take…etc (I won’t bore you with the details, and they ARE boring) and she starts totally slamming music majors in general. Well, she finally said something about how their schedule is so busy and I looked at her and said, “I know. I was a music major.”
  HAHA.
  I don’t think I’ve ever done that before to someone’s face…although, it’s possible someone has done that to me…I probably blocked it out…
  

  ---

  I miss school.

  Working is great and all (enter sarcastic grin here), but
  the skills I learned during my first year of grad school integrated into common
  day application in my arranging and orchestration work. I can’t wait to get
  back to school in the fall and take courses like Music Composition for Television and Film or Advanced Film Scoring, Songwriting and Music Production. I’m on a
  break right now because of the immense undertaking it is to be the arranger,
  orchestrator, and musical director of the Concordia GALA of Stars 2007. Not
  only am I working on it every evening until I fall asleep in front of the
  computer (with time out to watch Lost and The Office) and the entire weekend
  (when I get most of my work done when not interrupted with a million prior
  commitments), but I am also directing the musical rehearsals for the singers
  and orchestra over the next 7 weeks.

  Needless to say, there’s no way I could be going to school
  right now, but I do miss it.

  On a related note, the callback auditions I led on Wednesday
  night for the GALA really fired me up. It is one thing to spend 100 hours in
  front of a computer screen, (call it 200 or more once the orchestration is
  done—we’re talking over 1,000 bars in Act I alone) working tirelessly to WRITE
  music. It is another thing to take the music you’ve poured your creative energy
  into and listen to 20 very talented college students bring it to LIFE. Man—when
  I taught them 8 bars of “You Can’t Stop
  the Beat” and worked with them for about 5 minutes on it, that thing exploded!
  The song came alive! It really fired me up and gave me the inspiration to
  continue orchestrating, and to do it better. I’m not sure how, it just did. It
  was like all of those hours working were validated in that instant. Just like
  that. After that was all done, we picked an amazing cast and the first
  rehearsal is this Saturday. I’m looking forward to this event more than ever.

  There are other instances where things like that have
  happened—and for the most part I can count them on one hand. One such
  experience occurred on Tuesday night during the worship team rehearsal at
  Midway. There are some really talented singers in that group, and for a moment
  I lost myself during The Power of the
  Cross—this doesn’t happen very much. Usually I’m thinking, evaluating—my
  wheels are spinning at a hundred miles an hour, but they are spinning about
  musical details—generally a good quality in a director. However, in that
  moment, I worshipped. My mind connected with what mouth was singing, and it was
  good.

  Another amazing musical experience also happened at Midway.
  It was the last Christmas concert we performed in December of 2005. Things went
  so amazingly that I was literally babbling between songs to the audience,
  instead of saying the more poignant things I had planned. I just couldn’t
  remember them; I was too distracted by the power of the choir and orchestra.
  The music moved me—it was surreal. That was the best musical event I’ve
  directed to date.

  Side note: I’m looking forward to Musicalifornia this year.
  I don’t usually say that because of the nightmare it is to arrange childcare
  for it. In the past we had spent so much time driving back and forth from home
  to the conference shuttling the kids from one babysitter to another that the
  conference was too stressful to actually be worth anything.
  This year my parents are coming down to stay with the kids
  for the entire three days we’ll be in San
  Diego. We have a hotel room for two nights, and I
  can’t wait…

   

   

  • 1:58 pm
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