My Summer Vacation, So Far

My summer vacation started off with a wonderful musical opportunity, performing with the Hurricane Saxophone Quartet in Evanston at the Custer Street Fair. The group is usually an all-woman ensemble, but two of the members were unavailable, and I got the call to sub in. We dubbed ourselves the "His and Hurricane" quartet for the day, as we played a noontime concert under the Metra tracks, following a group of Native American musicians and dancers.

There was a very nice crowd enjoying our set of ragtime and jazz. It was great for me to have to practice several times in preparation and to get my reading chops and endurance in gear. As a band director, it's too easy to get away from performing and lose that perspective, so it was especially good for me to do. Plus, all four of us are Northwestern University music alums from the mid to late 80s, so it was a fun reunion.

Last week, my family and I took a mini vacation to New Buffalo, Michigan for some relaxing family time among the dunes. Our condo had a third-floor patio looking out over the marina. As I like to do on family trips (much to the embarrassment of my kids), I spent some time on the patio playing a xaphoon. This is a fun instrument I picked up a few years ago, invented by a man in Maui who calls it a bamboo saxophone.

Mine is the cheaper version made of plastic, but it still works great. It's really a clarinet-type of instrument because it has a cylindrical bore and overblows at the 12th. A sax has a conical bore and overblows at the octave. In other words, a clarinet has a register key that makes whatever note you are fingering jump up 12 notes, e.g. from a C to a G, whereas a sax has a true octave key. Anyway, it uses a tenor sax reed and fairly standard woodwind fingerings. It's probably closest to the forerunner of the clarinet, the chalumeau. You can check it out here.

In other news, I just finished writing up a project we did in Symphonic Band for inclusion in a book about teaching composition. It's the Cajun Folk Songs melody project we did this spring when everyone in the band wrote a melody on the dorian scale. The book is being edited by Maud Hickey, a music ed professor at Northwestern, and a good friend and colleague. I'll have more details when I find out about the publication date. Later this summer, I'll be a guest lecturer in Dr. Hickey's summer school class, "Teaching Composition in the Schools."

Finally, I'm going to get started today with marching band music for the fall. The homecoming theme is "The Good Old Days," so I'm looking at some of the TV shows the students will remember from their youth, like "Sesame Street" and "Arthur." Feel free to send any suggestions along!

Keep practicing--remember, no summer chops!