Jeanneabeck’s Weblog

I got a bit carried away Tuesday to the point where I didn’t even talk about my orchestra concert.  Yesterday was the final day of a four day music festival in Iida City.  The Nagoya Philharmoic Orchestra came to this event and I believe some of the more talented Iida Symphony members got to play with them at their concert and helped out at the orchestra clinics that were held during the week.  The final day consisted of our performance as well as some smaller ensemble performances by select members.

Being mildly uninformed but mostly just lazy,  I opted to just take part in the final concert.  Set up happened around 9am and rehearsal started at 10am, similar to our last concert but very different from any group I ever played with in the States.  Practicing immediately before a concert?! It makes too much sense for us to do.  Anyway, after practicing through all the songs for an hour or two we broke for lunch and so  they could prepare the stage for the first emsembles.   The concert went well.  In addition to playing two longer pieces we’d be working on for a while, Light Calvary by Franz von Suppe and Carnival by Dvořák, we played three other short pieces to teach the audience, which was made up a lot of kids and moms, about different types of emotion shown in music. 

I always feel extra eyes on me when I come on stage.  Being the only foreigner in the orchestra makes me stand out, but I don’t mind as much as I did at my first concert.  Maybe I’m internationalizing Iida by having joined the orchestra, maybe not.  If anything I’m taking part in a decent activity that makes me feel part of the community so that in itself is enough for me.   

Being a smaller concert, there were no eating/drinking parties afterwards and I was able to return home around 2:30 to otherwise waste my time playing video games with my hubby.

Here’s Light Calvary and Carnival if you’d like to hear them.  One exciting thing about Light Calvary is that once you hear it, you’ll hear again as it’s sometimes used in cartoons and tv shows.  A little after we started practicing Light Calvary Ryan and I were watching episodes of “Angry Beavers,” an older cartoon from Nickelodeon, and heard this song.   I got really excited, Ryan just thought I was being crazy like usual.  Yeah, being away from the US has made Ryan and me pine for random tv shows.  We also downloaded the whole Ed, Edd and Eddy series.  (7,000 miles away my mom is rolling her eyes)