Learning opportunity
Yesterday I played for La Professeure’ college friend’s son at his NYSMAA exam, playing the Arutiunian trumpet concerto. We were going to play it last year but he was sick.
This year, we didn’t rehearse the week of. I later found out it was because he had been playing too much - between jazz band, band, this, and a Les Miz production his school was doing - that his lips had been overworked. We ran into his band teacher at the exam venue (it was held in his highschool) and she told me she’d suggested he should postpone the exam.
Anyway, he had no high notes and no fast notes, so that was disappointing. But like the band teacher said, it was a learning opportunity, so now he knows his physical limits and can plan his trumpet commitments better next time.
So, I thought this would be the end of my busy season, but the amateur group’s orchestra’s concertmistress asked me to record music that she had written for a short film. I had never heard of the film maker but Google says she has done various short documentaries about New York that aired on public television. So I’ll assume it’s for that. I don’t have the music yet but she said it’s going to be easy. And I will get paid for it too, so there’s something to look forward to. And, I’m invited to perform at our Japanese Pianist’s wedding: accompanying Ave Maria in a low key and playing in an Irish band too, neither of that I’d done before.
There is no rest for the wicked.
- S
The Gilded Age
Last Saturday we went to a party at the retired mezzo who designed our amateur musician group’s website. We met with her neighbours and gardening friends, and caught up with many musician friends too. But there were also a fair few who weren’t invited, and she lamented their falling out.
Then on Sunday, we went to Morgan library for La Professeure’s birthday, where we had afternoon tea. I think this is the first time we had afternoon tea on land. The Mozarteum had an exhibit there on Mozart artifacts too, so it was nice to see, but the centerpiece was his childhood violin and harpsichord. So that was cool.
I realized, midway through our tea, that we were in JP Morgan’s mansion, drinking afternoon tea, gossiping about our friends, and figuring out how to squeeze our entry into the social calendar.
We were living The Gilded Age.
- N
What do you do anyway?
I have people asking me about my work all the time and never have an easy way to answer. It was easier to answer when I could tell people my system put data on your mobile Maps (I can tell the story about how my team get paged when La Guardia airport disappeared from our maps), but working on databases, “maintain read-your-writes guarantees across multiple regions” isn’t as comprehensible.
I have pretty much given up explaining beyond “we store your data”.
- D
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