Open A's

So my not-so-great week continues. Two more days and it’ll be over! Hopefully next week will be better. But still, my evenings are raising the bar, but as of yesterday, the conference at my church is over. We used to have it all week long, but for some reason we went to three days. Anyways, our last orchestra performance last night went REALLY well. I wore black pants for two nights, and I always forget that wearing black, and handling my bow is never a good thing. No matter how careful I am, I end up getting rosin stripes all over them! But no worries. I disobeyed our, I suppose you could call him our, ‘section’ leader for the violins. Kinda odd because he’d only been there for two practices. Hmm…Anyways, he said that he didn’t want us to play any open strings on a few parts. No big deal, but on one part, we have to play an A and then up to an C or D or something. So, all on the A string right. Well, he wanted us to play 4th position on the D string to get the A, and then switch to the A string for the rest of the measure. Not so easy to do and be in tune. Maybe it’s just me though. My 4th finger on the D string never sounds right to me. I tried it, but then went back to my open A, because I KNEW it was in tune. It’s harder to play 4th on another string, if you’re already on that string. Okay, that made no sense I’m sure. So---It’s hard to play A on the D, or E on the A, if you’re already on the A or E string respectively. Clear as mud, right?

Oh yeah, so the offering from Tuesday night. That night was our NEGRO spirituals night (I emphasize “negro” because someone changed the program from “negro” to “old.” How PC of them! They really AREN’T that old, and they really are NEGRO spirituals, so why the change?? Not sure). Anyways, the majority of the score was acapella for the choir. The orchestra totaled up our rests, and we had altogether 185 measures of silence. Well, before we started playing, they announced that they were going to take up a loose-change offering to help pay for the Bibles we made. A good idea, because we raised over 4,000 dollars. But if you can imagine, they wheeled these big trash containers down the main aisles, and dumped all the change from the plates into them. All of this being done during our song. Not a great addition. Might as well give everyone a tambourine and tell them to have it. The song started with an acapella solo, and he began to sing, and then CRASH! Change in a bucket. Silence, then CRASH! More change. It was slightly distracting! Luckily, the change thing didn’t take too long, so we could finish the song without the addition of loose change. Our choir was amazing that night! I was very impressed!

All in all, the conference was really awesome. The speakers were really good, the Bibles got done, and orchestra/choir was fun and did a good job.