The GBB finished up our 25th season last night by performing at the annual Euphonium and Tuba Festival (IET). We’ve done this many times before, and IET’s creator is currently one of the applicants to replace Joe. He’s a superb musician and has done a great job over the last 25 years or so at getting his name out there and developing contacts in the brass world, which has Simone wondering if he’s looking at the GBB job as a chance for more self-promotion. I wonder that about several of our applicants, but it’s not a showstopper for me. We need somebody who’ll be able to bring the best out in the band – particularly in terms of dynamics. If they can do that, I don’t care if they’re in it for the band or for themselves, to be honest. As long as they’re committed to actually being there and following through on band commitments, I’m good. One of the applicants let us down a few years ago – bailing as our conductor for personal reasons about a month before we were to compete. Granted, it was a big deal for him. He was to receive the GA teacher of the year award of some such on the same weekend as the competition; but it had us scrambling to find an alternate conductor, and the guy we ended up with really didn’t understand the music. One of the adjudicators was the composer. As the piece was extremely personal to him (the music dealt with an unexpected stroke that he had which left him struggling to do anything, much less compose, for a few years), he was not happy with our lack of interpretation.
At any rate, that applicant will not get my vote.
In other news, yesterday was Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday, and my company gave us the day off.
I celebrated by attempting to electrocute myself. Actually, no, I didn’t do that. But I DID finally change out a 3-way light switch in our closet for a single-pole switch and removed the other 3-way from the kitchen. Have been meaning to do this for about 6 months, but I’m happily ignorant about anything involving electricity, and I didn’t want to do something that would burn the house down. Thank God for YouTube.’
So after I got that done, I put in a motion detector instead of a switch (in the closet) and began building some shelves that Sandie’s been asking for.