If I Were a Real English horn Player

If I had an English horn job, I would get a lot more reading done.

I like playing the thing fine, and I even don’t mind schlepping it around since I got my BAM Ultralight case a few years ago. I don’t love making the reeds, but once made they last a really long time and I could get used to that.

What I will never grow to like is the sitting around. There’s always a pretty solo for the English horn somewhere, but waiting for my piece and then waiting for my entrance gets old pretty fast. But on the upside, I’ve finished two New Yorkers today, and the stack of unread reads in my room is shrinking nicely this week.

If I did this regularly, there's no telling how caught up I might be with my life.

AND, we have another concert tomorrow.

This week for me is the Illinois Philharmonic, in a concert of Bernstein and Prokofiev, which I love, and Glazunov, which I read during. Fun program. Beautiful music. Details HERE.

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Idle Thought

I should be practicing right now. Putting in the hours to prepare for my audition on Monday. But this morning before I left home to teach I chose to use my time making a chicken salad that we could eat for the rest of this busy week, and now after my Notre Dame student I am cheerfully enjoying my lunch at the local coffee house, Zoe snoozing beside me in her car seat. Sometimes it's healthier to use your time taking care of yourself instead of your reeds. Or at least I hope so...

How Do You WISH You Could Describe Your Reeds?

In Reed Club last Monday, we took a moment before we started scraping to set some intentions. We each said one word - an adjective to describe what we WANTED our reeds to be. An aspirational adjective. Efficient was a word that came up, and Consistent . Dark and Mysterious . Mellow . Predictable . Trustworthy . Honest . BIGGER . Reed affirmations actually felt helpful - both in the moment and in the results we found as we worked. I don't know why that surprises me - I set intentions at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the month, at the beginning of a run, in the morning before I work. I love a good affirmation. I love WORDS. But I'd sort of forgotten about the possibility of applying one to the mundane work of reed-making. You don't have to know exactly how to GET to that result. But having clarity in your mind about what that result is? Helps you to stop going down unhelpful rabbit holes. Reminds you to seek something beyond competent, beyond

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

We took a vacation this summer. This is not news to anyone in my life - anyone who knows me or especially Steve on Facebook followed along with all of our pictures. We took our travel trailer out to Arizona - via St Louis, Tulsa, Amarillo, Roswell, Santa Fe - and then stayed a week in Clarksdale and Flagstaff and visited some ancient pueblo ruins, Sedona, Jerome, the Lowell Observatory, the Grand Canyon. We swam in swimming pools, lakes, and icy mountain streams. We hiked. Eventually we came home again, via Albuquerque, Amarillo, Tulsa, and St Louis. (our inventiveness had somewhat worn out). After a week at home we took another trip, and drove to Vermont via western NY and the Adirondack Park (stayed an extra day to hike a mountain), lived four days in East Franklin VT, and came home via Catskill and eastern Ohio. This vacation felt different from all of our previous ones. In the 21 years we’ve been married, I can name only one - maybe two trips we ever took t

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