Most of you know that I play in a local community band.  Each year in February we attend a community band festival in a town about an hour away.  Community bands come from all over to perform for 3 adjudicators who give us feedback on our work.  For those of you that have been in a high school band, it’s like going to band festival.  Without the sight reading part thank goodness!  It’s exciting and fun and stressful all rolled into one music filled day.

And this Saturday is the day.  We’ve been working really hard on the UFO Concerto by Johan de Meij.  The piece is in 5 movements and we’re doing the first two.  You can listen to some of it here.  The first movement runs, on this particular recording, from 00.0 until 5 minutes and 9 seconds.  It’s really beautiful.  But what I really want you to hear is the second movement…starting at 5 minutes and 9 seconds and going until 10 minutes and 49 seconds.  It’s crazy and it’s taken awhile to grow on me.  But I found myself humming this at work on Tuesday.

Believe it or not.

What makes this Saturday even more stressful, other than this being a very difficult piece to play, is that the composer is one of the adjudicators!  And to top it all off, he’s the one that will be meeting with us after our performance to give us his perspective on how well we played.  Yes indeed.  I have never played anything knowing the composer was in the audience, much less knowing he’s going to critique us after!

So what I need from you guys is a whole lot of strong good luck, musical vibes headed over to Okemos Michigan at 9:00 a.m. this Saturday.   We’ve worked hard, but a little extra luck can’t hurt!

I’ll let you know how it goes.