I'm in a mood today...

for rocking out on the bassoon!  I haven't played at all since my ABOMINABLE audition with the AU orchestra in fall of 2010.  And I'm still playing as terribly as I did then.  Well, worse.  My lips couldn't handle more than 20 minutes of playing today.  It's okay, it's like my French language skills that sneak away from me from time to time and won't come back until I give a lot more TLC.  

So, I'm soaking my reed and hoping to play for another 20 minutes before picking it up for the night and then, I'll need to keep doing this on a pretty much daily basis if I am interested in trying out for the UCSC orchestra...which I just might be interested in.  Sure, there is always the community band that will take me if I fail to register notes in tenor clef, but those of you who would make that suggestion have clearly never played in a community band.  That merits its own blog post, so I won't go into that right now.  I do have stories of the Vienna, VA community band that I played in FOR A YEAR!

At any rate, the piece that I would like to audition with is the solo from Mozart's Concerto for Bassoon.  It might be too ambitious of a range.  But listen to how beautiful this is....and then, think about how horribly wrong this wide range of music could go when you aren't practiced (and then, have pity for me, because that is what I sounded like in public during my audition in 2010 and made me avoid the entire Katzen building for over a year).